The Girl's Guide to Homelessness

by Brianna Karp

  Easy for him to say. Did he feel like pushing a cantaloupe out of his nostril any time soon? I didn’t want to believe that I’d become my mom, either. But I was scared. I just needed him to understand why I was scared and let me wait until I was ready. Until we were ready. Once we had a home together and got married and spent a couple of years building a life, maybe then. I wasn’t averse to having a child with him. I loved the idea of eventually being the mother of his children. Or maybe we could even adopt a child—there were so many who needed homes.

  “I don’t think I’d ever want to adopt.”

  “For heaven’s sake, why not?”

  “I’m afraid I could never love an adopted child as much as my own, and that wouldn’t be fair to it.”

  “What?! That’s ridiculous! You’re the most loving person I know. Of course you could!”

  He protested that he was just being honest; that he was even afraid about this baby on the way. What if he couldn’t bond with it? What if he couldn’t love it because it wasn’t mine? What if he wasn’t able to make any kind of connection with it at all?

  My stomach tightened and I felt a pang on his behalf.

  Of course he’d love it, I reassured him. It was a natural fear to have, but they say fathers fall in love with their babies the moment they hold them. That may seem like a strange assertion coming from someone with a father like mine, but I truly believed that Matt would hold that baby and look into its eyes and he’d adore it instantly. He’d feel completely idiotic that he could ever have thought otherwise. I’d had friends with loving, kind parents, so I knew that they existed—in fact, that was one of the reasons I’d begun to realize in my teens that my home life wasn’t normal and that not all children were as miserable as me. I wasn’t crazy to feel like so much about my family was all wrong. I knew Matt would never be a sick, twisted father like Bob. He had the greatest capacity for love and generosity of anybody I’d ever met, so of course he’d be a fantastic father. There wasn’t a doubt in my mind.

  “You’ll adore that baby more than you could ever love me, even.” I forced a laugh, though I was only half-joking.

  “Not possible. I love you more than I’ve ever loved anything in the world, and more than I ever could love anything in the world. One day, you will be the center of our children’s universe. We’re going to wake up in our beautiful old Victorian house with four kids climbing all over us, clamoring for us to come down and open the Christmas presents! Our kids are going to look at you like you’re perfect. They’ll all love you as much as I love you.”

  “I believe you.” I whispered. It would be exactly that way, one day. But, for now, we needed to focus on the immediate—the child who was already coming. I knew that maybe he was hoping to fill the void that he’d feel while the baby was in Scotland with Lori. But getting me pregnant right now with another child as filler wasn’t the answer. And both of us knew it.

  We nicknamed the upcoming kid “Sproglet,” since we’d have no idea of the gender until it was born (in the UK, nurses are not allowed to let you know the gender during ultrasounds; you can go to a private practitioner and pay a ton for a private gender scan, but few people could afford it and the NHS wouldn’t tell you for legal reasons). Occasionally, I’d try to initiate more discussions about preparations we should make for Sproglet’s arrival, but I was stonewalled.

  “Please, sweetie! I know you’re trying to help, but I just want to talk about anything but the baby! I don’t want to think about it. I already know I’m going to have to think about it soon enough when I go back for the ultrasound. Please can we talk about something else?”

  Hurt, but trying to hide it, I assured him that I understood and quickly changed the subject. And I did understand why it was all stressing him out so much. There were no easy answers, and he just needed a break from thinking about it for a while.

  I took him to a sports bar that evening—Matt was going nuts from not being able to see his beloved “football” (soccer, to me). There was an important game that evening (the World Cup Qualifiers, I believe), and I didn’t want him to miss it. The bartender gave us a funny look when we asked him to put the soccer game on one of the TVs. Matt had outfitted me in one of his prized soccer jerseys and I recognized what an incredible honor he felt it was for his girlfriend to wear it. Not surprisingly, there weren’t any other British soccer fans there, so it was just the two of us, cheering at the screen and downing pizza and drinks. Matt’s team lost, and when I saw how frustrated he was, I was frustrated, too. I wished his team had won, if only to make him feel better. On the way home, P!nk’s “So What” came on the radio and I cranked it up to 11, head banging as I screamed out the words, and drumming the steering wheel in time with the beat. I looked over and turned red, realizing that Matt was cocking his head to the side, watching me quizzically and grinning.

  “What’s the matter?” I was embarrassed.

  “Nothing. I’ve just never known anybody so absolutely perfect. Don’t feel self-conscious. Go ahead and sing. I just want to watch you. You’re the most adorable thing I’ve ever seen.”

  Two nights before Matt’s flight back to the UK, he published an article on HomelessTales.com called Twitter’s Transatlantic Homeless Love Match. He’d been secretly writing it as a surprise for me. It was the first time I’d gotten to read about our story from his point of view, so it was particularly sweet and heartwarming.

  Matt was very well known in the social media world. He’d spent nearly a year building up contacts with the most influential people in the business, and was very active in promoting the work of others, especially on Digg. If you could make the front page of Digg, your website’s article would get masses and masses of traffic. It was all supposed to be based on a user voting system, but Matt explained that 90 percent of the stuff that hit the front page of Digg came from about only 2 percent of actual Digg users, the top tier—including himself and all his social media friends. He’d already had a few Homeless Tales articles hit the front page.

  “It’s all in who you know,” he explained. “Sometimes I need to work all day promoting, and you also need to know the type of content, and just what attention-grabbing headline will catch readers’ eyes.”

  He thought that the article about us stood a good chance of making front page, if he spent a few hours on it. We drove to an all-night local coffee shop that charged $1 for Wi-Fi, and camped out as he busily contacted all his social media friends and got them to spread the word. I loved to watch him work. It seems like it would be such a dull thing, sitting at the computer for hours at a time, but he got very intense and focused on what he was doing, which I found supersexy. Again and again I refilled our coffee cups and snuggled with him on the shop’s old purple velvet Victorian couch, leaning my head against his shoulder, getting excited every time he refreshed the Digg page and saw the votes first creeping up, then rocketing up.

  Around 3:00 a.m., we launched ourselves off the couch and began jumping up and down, hugging each other. The story had rolled over to the front page. Because it was so early in the morning, it would likely stay there for quite a while, perhaps even for hours.

  Sure enough, Homeless Tales saw masses of traffic from the story—perhaps forty thousand or fifty thousand hits that day, and even raised more ad dollars than usual. I even saw quite a spike in my traffic, from people who had searched out my blog, intrigued by the story. Nowhere near Matt’s volume of traffic, of course, but maybe four thousand or five thousand hits, and several supportive comments. It was quite the rush, and I understood the thrill Matt got out of his work. I was experiencing it, too, vicariously.

  Dropping Matt off at the airport was difficult. We’d rented a motel for our last couple of nights before his departure. Sometimes we just needed to feel human, and summer was nigh, so the trailer was often stifling, even at night. A couple of evenings with air-conditioning, a working stove and microwave and a TV (for him to watch his soccer matches and for me to watch The Daily Show and The Colbert Re
port) did us an indescribable world of good.

  We sat hunched on the floor, backs against a window, and cuddled at LAX for the two hours before he had to head through security. It was so strange, how having had one another in our lives for such a relatively short period, neither of us wanted to imagine life without the other.

  When it was time for him to go, I tried to put on a brave face, but as he handed his passport to the security guard, I burst into jagged, red-faced, snot-running sobs. They let him through, and he ran up to the barrier, leaning over and kissing me for a long time, weeping himself. It was oddly reassuring to see him cry, too. I finally watched him head up the escalator toward the boarding area, until I lost sight of him. He turned around many times to catch my eye and wave.

  I tried to keep myself occupied with random tasks, like updating my blog, surfing the internet, catching up on So You Think You Can Dance online, making dinner (ramen noodles again!), reading books—anything to keep my mind off the gaping hole in my life. It was hard enough being without Matt before he ever showed up in California, but now that he had been here, it was much worse. I wasn’t only longing for something I’d never had, I was now missing something that had been here, filled my life and was now absent.

  The passenger seat of my car felt empty. My hand felt empty without his to hold. The mattress felt empty without him to cuddle with. Everything felt kind of sepia-colored and a weight rested on my chest. Occasionally, I thought I was all cried out, but something like a half-finished carton of grape juice or a bag of Doritos he left behind would start me off again. My pillow smelled like him. There was still sand on the floor that we’d tracked in from our day at Newport Beach the previous weekend (he’d wanted to see the Pacific Ocean). I knew I’d feel a little better once his flight landed and he had arrived safely home in one piece. But I wouldn’t be top-notch until he also returned to me safely in two weeks’ time. Then, things would be well on their way to as perfect as imperfect, unpredictable life could ever possibly be for two crazy kids madly in love with each other.

  Chapter Twelve

  I woke up the next morning to a flood of emails and blog comments, all from people who had read Matt’s article—currently homeless people, formerly homeless people, people who had never been homeless but “just wanted to say, ‘You go, sister!,’” people who wanted to wish Matt and me well, and share their own crazy love stories. I was confused. I’d thought the hype had died down over the previous two days, and I didn’t understand where the revival was coming from. I had to read several of the emails before I figured it out. I kept reading, “I found you on the BBC,” and “I found you through AOL.” Huh?

  Some quick searching pointed me in the right direction. A website called Urlesque.com had picked up the story in its “Today’s Cry” column, and it got so many comments that AOL linked to the article on its front page. The BBC Web Monitor had also picked it up. Matt and I were the human interest story of the week. I spent hours frantically trying to get hold of Matt, who, by my calculations, would have just gotten home on the train from the airport, and would probably be conked out for the next eighteen hours, recovering from jet lag.

  Matt loves the BBC with a passion. Much of his visit to California was spent lamenting that American news stations don’t cover as much international news and topics as the BBC. I think a little part of him died every time he saw a major news channel run something along the vein of “Twiggy the Water-Skiing Squirrel” when he was thirsting for more information on Iran, North Korea and Pakistan.

  “What is this crap?!” he would yell, sitting on the edge of the motel bed and gesticulating wildly at the TV as I sauntered in the door from work.

  “What are you watching?” I jumped behind him and locked my legs around his waist.

  “This! Where’s all the real news? What’s wrong with these people? They’re idiots!” I leaned over his shoulder, then laughed.

  “Baby, you can’t watch this. This is Fox News. It’s not real news. No wonder.” Duh. I grabbed the remote from his hand before he could hurl it at Nancy Grace’s monologuing face. “How about we try a little CNN? That should be a bit more to your taste.”

  Matt was thrilled with the response to his article. He’d never expected quite this much interest in the events surrounding our relationship, and we’d even been contacted by a Newsweek reporter taken by the story.

  Meanwhile, Matt attended the ultrasound scan with Lori. The doctor said everything was fine—the baby was healthy so far and developing normally—but Lori was extremely underweight. She wasn’t eating enough for her and the baby, and except for the basketball stomach, was looking increasingly frail and skeletal.

  “She looks really rough,” Matt told me over the phone. “I mean…just really haggard. She’s looking awful.” I expressed concern for her, though my concern was more for the baby. It was perhaps a mean-spirited thought, but I was secretly glad that he found me prettier than Lori.

  Most births in the UK are facilitated by midwives. Hospital births are only for emergencies or complications. Lori had selected a local midwife, but the doctor sternly told her that unless she’d gained more weight by the next scan, she would have to have a Cesarean section in the hospital, as it would be far too dangerous for her to give birth naturally. Matt was nervous, but confident that she understood the seriousness of the situation, and that she would step up to the plate and start eating.

  I knew he must have been pretty preoccupied with the scan and talking to Lori about her health, but hoped he’d at least gotten a chance to mention the custody stuff to her. He had tried. They talked about what they agreed on, and he explained to her that we were moving to New York together and getting married. She seemed agreeable to sharing custody, he said—the baby in New York with us every three months, and in Scotland with her every three months. Later, when the baby was old enough for school, we could switch to the school year in one country, vacations in the other.

  “Oh my gosh, that’s so great! I’m so glad that she’s being reasonable about it! Tell her if she wants, we’ll even pay for her to fly out with the baby, put her up for a week in New York or something; she can have a minivacation while she’s at it!” My words bubbled and tripped over themselves. I was so happy that things seemed to be going smoothly.

  He liked the idea—thought it would go a long way as an olive branch. He also said that he’d sign over his council flat in Huntly to her once we were married, since her stepfather’s house, where she was currently living, was disgusting—no place for a baby. I suggested going the extra mile, and that perhaps we could offer to pay her utilities on the flat, too, in addition to the child support. So that she could use her benefit money on important purchases—clothes and food and such for her and the baby.

  It was we all the way in my mind—how could it ever be anything else? I wanted nothing more than an amicable relationship between the three of us adults, for all of our sakes, and for the baby’s sake. “I thought about that, too. I was going to bring it up with you. I’m so pleased we’re on the same page about all of this!” He really did sound happy, too. Maybe none of this would be so bad, after all. I mean, sure, we’d be paying for an international plane ticket every three months, but I was working and we’d swing it, somehow, especially if he kept up his social media work online and expanded it a bit, and once we were married and he had his green card, he would be allowed to work in the United States and bring in a regular income in addition to mine. He didn’t bring in much at the moment from his social media work, freelance article writing and ads from the Homeless Tales’ site—maybe a couple hundred dollars a month in addition to his disability benefits—but it was a start. We could save up enough for an apartment or a mortgage, whichever we could manage first, by the time we were ready to get married and move him here permanently. I wouldn’t be living in a parking lot for much longer—I just knew it.

  “Perfect! So is everything in writing?” I trilled. Life was looking up!

  “Er…” My heart
sank. “Well, I pulled out the form, but she said she didn’t want to sign anything right now, and that we could do it later.”

  “Later? When? You’re coming back here in a week and a half, and you won’t be back in Scotland until just before the baby’s born! Please, do it all now before the third trimester crazy hormones kick in!”

  His good mood vanished as abruptly as it had come on. “Look, do you know what she’s going through? Her stepfather is a disgusting pig, all her brothers and sisters were taken away from her neglectful mother, who just kept pumping out babies one after the other from different men, even after they started taking them away, and her mother and aunts are now trying to convince her that I’m going to try to take the baby away from her! They’ve got her paranoid!” He didn’t want to spook her.

  But…but that was the whole point. A written agreement wasn’t just for him—it protected both of their rights. A written agreement ensured that he wouldn’t take the baby away from her, just as it ensured that she wouldn’t take it away from him. I couldn’t understand why he would willingly make the situation any more precarious than it already was. Even if it was hard to get her to focus, couldn’t he at least try to sit her down and make her understand the importance of an amicable custody agreement?

  I got nowhere with him on this one, though. She wasn’t going to be pushed and that was that. He’d try again later, in three months, when he went back to Scotland for the birth. It was one of the rare times that I wondered why he bothered asking my advice at all. Did he think that, because he was twelve years older than me, I was dumber or less experienced than he was? That I just didn’t know how the world worked?