Sometimes when I see an apartment with sheets on the window for curtains, I start to shake.
This is what reactivated post-traumatic stress disorder looks like: threads that hang out from the dryer. It’s an undoing, an unspooling.
When my daughter, 3 at the time, had a temper tantrum in the wet basement of a house we were doubled up in, my childhood friend’s husband threatened to beat her. He pounded and pounded and pounded on the door: “If you don’t handle her right now, then we are going to handle her my way.”
And once again, we were gone in the middle of the night.
At the welfare office, the woman in front of us was denied insulin. She looked at the window and screamed: “You could die on the floor, and nobody would care.”
I think of her often. She spoke to the unspooling.
My social worker told me the unique thing about my situation was that we didn’t look poor. “But you dress her so cute,” the lady at the desk told us as my daughter sat on the floor and colored. Everything we owned came from the $1 bins.
The welfare office called me a month later and told me I could pick up garbage off the side of the road for $300 cash. I asked: What do I do with a young child? Who takes care of her while I tend to the garbage? They told me to think about it some more, and then they hung up.
An odd thing happens when you finally get your own apartment. It’s something nobody tells you: It will be empty. For 14 months, we slept on the floor.
The Goodwill doesn’t deliver. Neither does the Salvation Army. You will be acutely aware of the fact that you don’t own a massive truck every time you try to buy a couch.
One of the worst days of my life was when I drove us out to Ikea. I remember this day vividly because the ice cream cones cost $1 each, like the clothes we were wearing.
I just wanted to lie down on a bed, so we skipped from exceptionally clean modern showroom to an even more exceptionally clean modern showroom like we were going to buy the whole cubicle. You know you are in a fantasy world when there are fake sky panels glued to the wall. Those were very different panes than the welfare windows we stared into for two years.
We thought about what a new life might feel like, beginning with a perfectly creased corner of a bed.
If only one of them were ours, could be ours. If only I tried harder.
When Chicago Public Schools laid me off, my daughter asked me if we were going to lose our house. She is a teenager now and restless with questions.
She stared at me with the look: “Is this really happening to us again?”
We broke eye contact.
She knows what happens when the yarn begins to fray, and the bobbin of your life spins completely out of control.
Sometimes people will tell me, “You have such a unique connection with her. You look like you’ve been somewhere together in a past life.”
We have been somewhere together, to a shapeless place we don’t speak about. It’s now 10 years later.
The pain is still black-light responsive. Turn off the lights, and our bones glow.
Andie Townhouse is in the layoff pool as a temporary assigned teacher with Chicago Public Schools as she searches for a new school. She holds a master’s in English from Roosevelt University, a master’s in women’s studies and gender studies from Loyola University, and a master of library and information science from the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. In 2023, she was a Heart of America recipient and won a national grant to remodel the library at Clemente High School.
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