Suffering as Teacher Pt 2- Life Never Smacks You When You’re Looking

In previous posts, I have written about difficult periods in my life. I write to explore my emotional roads less traveled in hopes of healing, finding understanding, and resolve. In one post I somewhat glossed over one experience in particular. A time when I was homeless. I probably did that because when I was writing the piece, that experience wasn’t what was at the top in my mind. That wasn’t the story of my life that was hottest for me at that time. I understand how authors like bell hooks, David Sedaris, and others can write several memoirs. Life looked at and told in one way on one day, may uncover a moment that could within itself tell another life. This is what happened to me yesterday.

Sunday July 25th, was the hottest day this summer in Raleigh. Over 100 degrees with a heat index of at least 112. It was record breaking. The highest point in two weeks of ever-increasing temperatures and rising, smothering humidity. On this morning I was already dazed and grumpy from the heat. I was also raw from three months of self imposed reflection and vulnerability. My eat, pray, love home experiment was coming to an end. I had not traveled beyond my mind in the past three months, instead I chose to look within and work on myself. It was painful. It was ugly. I didn’t always behave. But, I surely have a roadmap for yet another road less traveled for me.

I think it was because of this rawness that I was emotionally open and unprepared for what was about to happen on this morning. A family member awoke and rightfully so, expressed concern for those who would not have the choice to turn their A/C to a comfortable setting, or open their fridge for water. From her heart she wanted to buy bottles of water, immerse them in ice, and during the peak of the days heat, walk around parks in downtown Raleigh handing them out to the homeless. One park in the plan as mentioned was Moore Square. The other I didn’t know its name but it quickly became clear to me that I was familiar with it. I know it sits across the way from rows of police cars. I know this because it was because of the police cars that my mother chose it for perceived safety for us to sleep in all day during our own hot summer. The summer after I had turned seventeen. The summer my parents divorced. The summer that we were homeless. Like falling in a vortex, this realization took me deep into memory.

By the time we arrived in Raleigh that summer, we had been on the streets for about a month. It began when my parents’ marriage ended. My father had found a new woman and was moving in with her. He stopped sharing in the finances of our family and we lost our apartment. My mother turned in her keys, but left the door unlocked and we hid out in the empty apartment for about a week. No electricity. A few dollars to sneak out and buy food at night. Our belongings scattered around us. Eventually the cleaning crew came to refurbish the apartment and we were discovered. We had no means of storing our things and so, everything that I owned, every physical memory of my life to that point was left behind and sat outside for the trash man to carry away. With just the clothes on our backs we walked away. Stayed with my soon to be ex-boyfriend for a day or two, and then we were alone again.

From this beginning in Spartanburg SC, we walked and then hitchhiked to Charlotte NC where my mother had a relative. We stayed there for a few days. We both got jobs at fast food restaurants. I worked at Bojangles. We wanted the chance to get on our feet and hoped that we could stay with this relative long enough to do that. Like I said, we only stayed a few days. Things were never good for my mother and her relatives, which is perhaps another story, but in the end we were out on the streets again. It’s hard to hold a job when you have no place to get clean. No money to get to work. Exhausted from sleeping in dirt with one eye open for dangers. We both lost our jobs. For two more weeks we slept where ever we could and waited for that weeks pay to be given to us. With that small amount of money we walked and hitched our way to Greensboro, Chapel Hill, and then wound up broke in that park in Raleigh.

We knew how to work but we didn’t know how to ask for help. At that time we didn’t know of any services that would have helped us. This was a new life to be learned. My mother just thought that we should keep moving and try to stay safe. Moore Square seemed to be full of drunks and groups of single men. The park across from the police cars seemed safe, and so we sat on a bench all day. That night we lay down in the grass and tried to sleep. Sometime early that morning, perhaps around 2 am or so, a police officer came over and woke us. We explained our situation and he asked us to get in his car while he called to find us shelter. We sat in the back and waited while one place after the other was called. Each was unable to take us because they had no room. He got out, opened the rear door, and told us he was sorry but there was nothing he could do. Then he drove off.

Well at least now we knew where to go for help and come morning we walked to the Salvation Army near Moore Square. We learned three things there. One, you can’t stay there during the day. You have to wander around in town and return at 6 for the nights stay. Two, you can’t stay more than 3 days in a row. Three, it’s shelter but it’s not safe. People fight, spit, curse, and abuse each other. Oh yeah. I forgot number four. If you leave at anytime during the night for any reason, including that people fight, spit, curse, and abuse each other, you can’t come back in.

After the 3rd day of dodging or being part of the violence there in order to save ourselves, and after 3 days of vomiting after every too hot when it should have been cool, or unsanitary meal with flies floating in it, we left. Walked and hitched our way to interstate 95 and headed north to Richmond. I don’t know why my mother chose Richmond but off we went.

I know now that it only takes 4 hours by car to get to Richmond, but of course it took us the better part of a full day to make our way there hitching in and out of cars and on foot. The heat was incredible. As dusk approached we knew it was getting unsafe for us to be on the highway. When the trucker pulled over and offered us a ride all the way to Richmond I know that my mother made a difficult choice on the dangers of the two- the road or this man. We climbed in the truck. I saw the way he looked at me. So did my mother. She sat in the middle. An hour or so later when it was fully dark, he pulled over at a truck stop and he and my mother got out. I saw them talking. A few moments later my mother came for me with a hot take out dinner in one hand and a key to a hotel room from the lodge next door in the other. She hugged me and said she would see me in the morning. The next day he dropped us off in downtown Richmond.

It goes without saying but I will anyway, that this night was a psychological breakdown for us. My mother was changed after this night. I sat in the darkness, alone in my room, thinking of what she was going through. These are the moments that you look back on and know exactly when the pain became so great that its seed bloomed in full. The moment when its roots begin to wrap around your heart and start to squeeze in ways you could never have imagined in your prior life and are not sure looking back, that you’ve recovered from even today.

When we arrived in Richmond the first thing we did was find the welfare office and before the day was done we had a key for a room at the downtown welfare hotel. It was an old 20-story building and we had a room on the 20th floor. It was hot and loud in the building. People screamed and fought day and night. During our day we walked and looked for work and would return in the afternoon. The elevator didn’t work and we had to walk up and down the stairs through and by dangers, but once we got to our room we could lock the door and be somewhat safe. We had food stamps now and so we weren’t hungry anymore. We were given toiletry items and each night we would strip out of the only clothes we had, those on our backs, and wash them by hand with a bar of Ivory soap. They would hang in the window at night and be dry, slightly wrinkled, but ready for the next days job hunt.

By the end of the summer we had found no work. School was about to begin and social services required that I register and enroll. This was a tough one and we delayed action way into the school year. Because of our address at the welfare hotel I would have to go to the roughest school in the district. More violence waited. Social services gave my mother the choice of enrolling me or I would have to be placed into foster care. With that choice weighing on us, we walked down to this school and stood looking at its imposing and graffiti laden brick façade. As soon as we entered and tried to get to the enrollment office the class change bell rang. It was a full on assault. We left. On the way back to the welfare hotel we passed a military recruitment office and an Army officer handed a flyer to me. For some reason we went inside. For some reason we stopped not at the Army desk but at the Coast Guard office. That night in our room my mother told me that she could sign me into military service as a minor. I would be safe she said. I would have a job and a chance for a future. “What about you?” I asked. She said she would be okay and told me that it was the most important thing in her life to make sure that I was safe. Within a week I had taken my GED, physical, and was ready to be sent away.

Without a doubt, the two hardest moments in my life come to mind. The moment in 2005 that I learned my mother had died from cancer, and the moment that the military bus drove away and I watched my mothers figure disappear from my sight. Both moments haunt me and in each I wonder what pain she endured in those moments. For me, each moment created a ball of pain soon to be covered with thick hardness. For each I screamed inside, “Where’s my mother?”

When I was 17, the moment I arrived in training camp I was yanked off the bus and the constant screaming commenced. With each aggression aimed at me, for each yell, for each push up, for each punch, for each assault, I silently screamed back at the void, “Where’s my mother?” That weak voice grew stronger but also darker. I became hard, enraged, and unable to feel anything until many weeks later when the Chaplin called for me. There he gave me a letter from my mother, and explained to me that she was on a bus to my boot camp location and that she would be okay. I read her letter. Broken words, loneliness, and sentences of pain radiated up from the page. I could not stop myself from imagining what she had been through all this time. I wept without end for the first time in weeks. My mother was here.

Funny thing about blogs. Sometimes they can just be like a journal where your emotions flow freely and even if no one in the world reads it, your words are released. Your emotions seem tended to in that post.

Funny thing about life. It can come crashing in on you with just the simplest trigger. In this case, it was the suggestion of a visit to a park to help people who are just like me in more ways than many might realize or even know about me today. I am a woman who grew from a girl not unlike many others who was protected by her mother at all cost. I am a woman who survived and yes…thrives. But in that moment, a haze took over my spirit. A running vision clouded my eyes as I walked through that park. I was transported backwards in time and all that I have told you now, came spilling backwards on top of me. I was not ready. I was not willing.

My teacher of suffering visits me often, and most times I obey. I obey in a way that is often not recognized. We are taught so often to quickly deal with what pain flows through our bodies. The shock of trauma is said to taint us in ways and we are taught to push this “feeling” out of us as quickly as possible. Yet without the full experiencing of the pain there is no healing. The coverup only uncovers later. So let me feel. Let me be there. Let me experience sorrow. I’ve experienced rage and hardness and it most often appears from the process of too quickly covering (without resolve) for the comfort of others.

Through the pain and hardness there is softness to be found. Buddhist nun Pema Chodron wrote, “When we touch the center of sorrow, when we sit with discomfort without trying to fix it, when we stay present to the pain of disapproval or betrayal and let it soften us, these are the times that we connect with bodhichitta (meaning: compassion, responsibility, and enlightenment).”

And so, another road appears. A road less traveled, but one that is becoming more and more familiar to me. Life never smacks you when you’re looking for the hit. That would be no fun. It always comes at you when you least expect it. Suffering is inevitable. Suffering is our teacher.

Tags: Buddhism, Inspiration