Mothering without a net

Our house by the beach is a car. We are homeless.

By Michelle Kennedy

Aug. 28, 2001 | The click of the door handle is entirely too loud as I pull it to peer in and check on my three sleeping children. They are all breathing. In fact, they look peaceful, sleeping there in the back of the station wagon, under the yellowy light of a street lamp.

I smooth the curls on my daughter's face and gently close the door. Walking through the back door of the kitchen, I look back once and then, all right just once more. I smile at the cooks -- they'll keep an eye out the door for me -- as I rush through the kitchen and grab the food for my customers from under the warmers.

My last table leaves after 11 p.m.. I thought they would never finish. Oh, to have that kind of time to linger over a meal. It's been so long since I've enjoyed that kind of freedom. I carefully place the wine glasses in the bus tub next to the dessert plates and haul it all down the stairs. My mother would tell me to make more than one trip, but I'd always rather make one, long, painful trip than two or three.

I tip out the bartender and head for the small parking lot behind the restaurant, where, I am told, my children are still blissfully asleep. Again, I open the door, ever so carefully, and collapse into the front seat.

"Hi, Mom." Startled, I whip around to find Matthew, the eldest, who is 5, blinking his eyes awake. "How was work?" he asks.

"It was fine," I reply. "Very busy. It's late, though, you should go back to sleep. We'll talk in the morning."

"OK." Within seconds he is out again.

Living in the car doesn't seem to faze him. Oh sure, he asks why we have to keep sleeping in the car, but my answer -- plain and simple -- that I don't have the money yet to get us an apartment, seems to suffice, and he doesn't whine about not having a television. Well, we do have a television, actually. It was a graduation present from years before and it's tucked in front of the passenger seat. I tried to sell it, but it wasn't worth much, so I decided to keep it. A last vestige of middle-class life. I was a middle-class housewife once upon a time.

Unfortunately, being middle-class only suited me and the children. My soon to be former husband wanted to live in the woods. I was game for a while. I had grown up on a farm, so the outdoors was not foreign to me. But our ideas of living in the outdoors soon clashed -- hard.

"I found an awesome cabin," he said to me over the phone one day. "Pack up the kids and come up. It's a nice town; you'll love it."

I stayed behind to store some of our unnecessary, much hated "material belongings" in my mother's house. Then, always ready for an adventure, we headed up north. Very north. The far north of Maine. A place where the majority of accepted currency was Canadian.

Pulling up to the cabin in the middle of the night, I felt my stomach drop to my knees. The cabin was a tarpapered, uninsulated shack with a small wood stove. There was no electricity or running water.

My husband has lost his mind, I thought to myself. Ever cheerful, though, I unloaded the kids and we began our adventure. I should have known that it was to be one of many.

Tonight I wince as I start up the car (I need a new muffler); I don't want the kids to wake up. My plan is to stay down at the beach tonight. The police know me -- I wait on them all the time -- and they let me park here as long as I leave early. On the weekends we stay in the campground, where there's a playground and a shower included in the deal. We also cook out and roast marshmallows (a truly cheap source of entertainment at 79 cents a bag).

I pull up alongside the beach so I can look at the water. I always wanted a house on the water, I joke to myself, and now I have one -- my bedroom overlooks a lovely beach.

Cramped in the fetal position in the front seat, while the kids are stretched out in the back, I look out the windshield and yell at God in my head. But what's He going to do? There are far bigger problems in this world than our living in a car. We are healthy, we are strong. So I yell silently at my ex-husband instead, without expecting a lot of help there either. I fall asleep with my head on the steering wheel, waking up a few hours later to read by placing my head on my jacket in the passenger seat, the gear shift jammed into my stomach.

Although we are living in my old Suburu wagon, I feel reasonably fortunate. My daughter is well, after a horrible attack by an untamed husky -- just one relatively small part of the "Up North Experiment," as I have come to call it.

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