It’s been six months since my mother and I moved into our little studio apartment. We were homeless for three years running between shelters to avoid actually living in our car out on the streets. My worst nightmare had come true, that I would end up homeless as a result of my health issues and maybe even some bad luck. If you counted the three psychotic roommates that my mother and I moved in with before we ended up in the shelter system, we would have been homeless altogether five years. See I define homelessness as not having a consistent place to live where you can feel welcome and safe. So even though in our three roommate situations my mother and I were consistently paying rent, we did not feel safe or welcome. I’ll give you a flashback. Our first roommate was a long-time friend of another family member who we were lead to believe was a trusted and responsible friend. The truth turned out to be that our family member owed this “friend” a favor (probably money) and decided that this would be a perfect opportunity to have me pay for the favor they owed by renting a room from the friend. So I found myself in a situation where I was basically an indentured servant sent to this person’s house to pay off the debt of my family member. When my relative’s friend realized that I would not stay with her for the rest of my life to help her pay off her mortgage, as my relative said I would, she became incensed. She felt that my relative had lied to her. Add to this the fact that my mother was also staying with me in the room I was renting, because she was afraid to leave me there in a bad situation, this made my landlady even more infuriated. All her hopes and dreams of me helping her to grow cannabis plants in her backyard for the rest of our lives was destroyed. I had never agreed to that as part of the deal anyway. I was just looking to safely rent a room until I could get back on my feet and move on. Lesson #1, If you are tricked into becoming the personal slave of the person you rent from this is probably a red flag. You should be on red alert and get out of the situation as soon as you can if this happens.
I found myself renting from my next psychotic/criminal landlord when in a hasty effort to get out of the rental situation I was already in I accepted what was explained to me as reduced rent for a room in the home of an elderly grandmother who basically needed a companion. Her grandchildren explained to me that they were concerned about her since she had recently taken a nasty fall and injured her head when nobody was there. Little did I know that the original deal was for my mother to go stay with the elderly woman whose grandchildren lived a few houses down from the “lady” that I was currently renting from in order to get my mother away from me. I was also not aware that these neighbors not only owned a skip-tracing business, but actually hated my landlady and had always had bad dealings with her. So ironically when the neighbors saw that my mother and I were different from the my landlady, and that we were trustworthy and reliable, they jumped at the chance to have one of us stay with their grandmother. My landlady told me that she had made arrangements for my mother to stay with her neighbor’s grandmother as an elderly companion so that my mother would have her own place to stay. But instead I packed my bags and left as fast as I could to go stay with this elderly lady out in the country thinking this would be a way of escape for me and I would get my mother latter. My now former landlady was even more furious when she saw that her plan was ruined when I left instead of my mother.
Meanwhile when I arrived at the elderly woman’s home, I’ll call her Dora, I saw that something was wrong there as well. For one thing the woman who had been staying with Dora before me was still there and was in the process of making her own hasty exit. I introduced myself to her and Dora when I got there and she immediately let me know through her expression that there was something wrong with the situation there. She was pleasant and showed me where everything was, but I could tell by her behavior that she couldn’t wait to get out of there. In a few hours her friend arrived to pick her up. They threw all her belongings in the back of the SUV and she was gone as quickly as I had met her. I soon found out why this other lady was in such a hurry to leave. She was being cheated by Dora’s unscrupulous son, who I assume mislead her, as he was attempting to mislead me, into believing that Dora was far less disabled than she actually was. As I observed Dora I realized that she was recovering from a concussion that she received as a result of her fall. On top of that she had a fractured back, she was suffering from dementia, and was almost completely deaf. It was obvious that Dora needed a real medical caregiver with her twenty four hours a day. If all this wasn’t enough, Dora could also be violent and cantankerous from the dementia due to “Sun Downer’s syndrome”. Once again I was stuck between a rock and a hard place with another unethical landlord. A week went by and I realized that I could not handle Dora’s needs on my own, especially since I did not have my own car to get around. I was basically stuck with Dora as a prisoner in her home with my only connection to the outside world being when Dora’s other granddaughter checked on her several times that week. Dora’s whole family seemed to be unwilling to challenge and confront her oldest son regarding the neglect he was putting her through, and the abuse he was putting her live-in companions/tenants through. After this first week went by I was able to persuade Dora’s son that I needed my mother’s help to provide Dora with the kind of twenty four hour a day supervision that she actually needed. So I called my mother who was still staying in my previous landlady’s home, and told her the situation I was in, and that I needed her help. So my mother moved into one of Dora’s other spare bedrooms a few days latter seeing the dilemma I was in. Well my old landlady finally got her wish. She was finally rid of my mother, but she was unhappy because she was also rid of me, and I was not coming back no matter what happened in this latest situation.
STARTING OVER AGAIN PART TWO: continued in next post