God Bless the Child

Sometimes the hell we live in is hidden in plain sight. For six years my mother led my sister and me on a turbulent, erratic homeless journey -- from apartment in the projects to horrific public shelters to bitter cold alleyways. As a homeless family, it was as if we were invisible, neglected by a system that turned a blind and overlooked by strangers who hurried past us. From the age of 10 until I was "emancipated" at 17, my "normal" was a nomadic existence as we crisscrossed 32 cities in 23 states and slept in some 200 homeless shelters -- searching for "home." Instead, we found in each place a new ghetto, a new shelter and another level of poverty. Twice in our lives, my mother received a totally of $27,000 start-up cash to mass-produce her greeting cards. In both cases, the money was squandered within a matter of weeks as she seesawed between sanity and madness.

GOD BLESS THE CHILD is a true and revealing account of how a person can break the most toxic family cycles. I will draw back the curtain on a little-known world of public shelters, a dehumanizing world that I came to know all too well.Sometimes the hell we live in is hidden in plain sight. For six years my mother led my sister and me on a turbulent, erratic homeless journey -- from apartment in the projects to horrific public shelters to bitter cold alleyways. As a homeless family, it was as if we were invisible, neglected by a system that turned a blind and overlooked by strangers who hurried past us. From the age of 10 until I was "emancipated" at 17, my "normal" was a nomadic existence as we crisscrossed 32 cities in 23 states and slept in some 200 homeless shelters -- searching for "home." Instead, we found in each place a new ghetto, a new shelter and another level of poverty. Twice in our lives, my mother received a totally of $27,000 start-up cash to mass-produce her greeting cards. In both cases, the money was squandered within a matter of weeks as she seesawed between sanity and madness.

GOD BLESS THE CHILD is a true and revealing account of how a person can break the most toxic family cycles. I will draw back the curtain on a little-known world of public shelters, a dehumanizing world that I came to know all too well.