Changing the Conversation

"It's not only children who grow. Parents do too. As much as we watch to see what our children do with their lives, they are watching us to see what we do with ours. I can't tell my children to reach for the sun. All I can do is reach for it, myself."  ~Joyce Maynard

As I enter my seventeenth year in recovery, the “buzzards” I set loose during the time I was in the grip of addiction, trauma, mental health challenges, poverty, and homelessness continue to come home to roost. One of my greatest accomplishments in spite of myself during this period was fathering four children. Just about any man can produce a child with a willing partner, but being a father requires far more, and it may take years to learn how to be the best parent possible.

It is very difficult to live on the edge, the periphery of being housed while others make life and death decisions based on available dollars—focusing primarily on money rather than safety and quality of life. An exclusive group of federal legislators allocate funds for services and supports to end homelessness. Being dependent on housing subsidies subject to periodic budget cuts while the elite holders of the purse strings are economically secure is very hard to digest and tolerate.

To kick-off Homelessness Awareness Month, we are posting this blog by Ellen Bassuk, MD that originally appeared on Huffington Post on October 8, 2015 at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ellen-l-bassuk/not-one-child-not-one-nig_b_8258580.html.

How can it be in a country as affluent as the United States that 2.5 million children are homeless each year? Although the numbers are climbing, family homelessness is absent from our nation's agenda.

I am a survivor of domestic violence and all of its consequences and side effects: emotional instability, housing instability, risk to health and safety…all of it. I am a survivor, and this is my story.