I am losing my house.
I already lost my heart.
I have always had mixed feelings about this house. It's not the one I wanted, but it was the one my then-wife thought would make her happy. I could barely afford it, but she promised she was going to get a job and help with it. Which she never did, but our marriage didn't last much longer after buying this house, anyway.
When we split up, I went through a destructive phase. Let the house go to hell. Spills, messes, punched holes in the wall. And the market was shit. After we split up, I felt like I couldn't sell it, because I had trashed it, damaged it, and people weren't buying.
Plus when we split up, I was also temporarily laid off. It was a crazy time. That was 2009.
During that time, I got about a month or so behind on my house payment, which I never seemed to be able to get caught up on, but was never really worried about it, either.
Back in 2012, I started missing work because of depression, and lost a whole month of work, actually six weeks I think, when I (for lack of better term) broke down. I missed a little over a week when I tipped, then went to the hospital for four days, took a little time for myself, and then my HR boss sort of gave me the runaround for a couple of weeks once I felt I was ready to go back to work. I was something like three or four months behind on my house payment once things "normalized."
I also picked up a roommate in 2012. A couple of months after the hospital. My cousin. My jobless, alcoholic cousin. He was "trying to turn his life around." He said. He was really just using me. He only worked about a single month at three different jobs in the entire time he lived with me, almost two years. When he did work, he spent every. last. penny. on alcohol.
He was latched on like a leech. I spent a year trying to get him to leave. He always had a two week plan that was about four weeks on the horizon. I had my own shit I was dealing with, my inner demons, and having him around made everything so much worse.
Anyhow, I had gotten four months behind in 2012, and had mixed feelings about the house anyway, and I had a problematic roommate. I couldn't decide whether I wanted to keep my house. I wanted to just let it foreclose. I stopped making the house payment and got six months behind. And got foreclosure letters.
I was torn in different directions and didn't know what to do. On the one hand, I hated this stupid house. It was a money pit that my ex-wife cursed me with. And letting it foreclose would solve my roommate dilemma.
But on the other hand, it was MY house. Sure, I'd been dumping my money into it like crazy (I could barely afford the payments), but all that money was mine, and it was paying for MY house. My worthless roommate would never shut up about how awesome a house it was. Sure, he just liked living there for free, but it was nice to hear that something of mine was GOOD.
Also, even if we parted on bad terms, my ex-wife and I grew close after we split up. She's become one of my best friends. I didn't want to screw her by letting the house foreclose, because her name was still on it.
I owed $8,000 in back payments, and I had 3 or 4 thousand in my account, but the bank said they would still continue with the foreclosure process even if I paid them everything I had.
So I filed Chapter 13 bankruptcy. To save the house. That I didn't even want. Don't know what the fuck is wrong with me.
So, I kept the house, and the worthless roommate.
Then in January 2014, I took the next step in my demise. I let another family member move in.
But this one came with four kids. Aged 10, 8, 3, and 1 years. Pretty broad spectrum. And they came from a chaotic home. They were uncivilized.
And I had my own shit I was dealing with. I had been trying to teach myself a sense of self worth. Which I never learned. Probably because I was taking care of a loser who brought me down all the time.
Well, I cracked. It was too much. My alcoholic and violent cousin always being drunk and picking fights with me. Four wild children who broke everything I owned. And their mother who wasn't much better than the alcoholic roommate.
I had never entirely got over my suicidal thoughts. But at that point I was trapped because I couldn't even kill myself, because there were too many people depending on me. I ended up back in the hospital, and they threw a band-aid on me, and sent me back out to the wolves.
Actually, I am sure they tried to help me. But the only reason I went there was to prove they couldn't help me. When I decided I was right, I put a smile on my face, told them I was feeling better, and they let me go.
I was just biding my time, because, at that point, I knew that suicide was inevitable. Oddly enough, knowing it was eventually going to happen actually made me feel better. In an strange way, I suppose it gave me something to look forward to.
I got my drunk cousin the fuck out my house finally. When you're living on borrowed time, you don't want to waste it on being miserable with a miserable drunk.
Once he was out of the house, something peculiar happened. Things got a lot better.
I actually started liking those damn kids. I took it upon myself to potty train the 3.5 year old, and it worked. (I bribed her with candy, but it fucking worked! Better than her mother's plan, which was to keep buying diapers until she was thirty, apparently.) I spent time with the two older kids, and it turned out they were pretty cool. They were inquisitive and liked spending time with me.
I was actually happy. Out of the blue, just like that *snap*, I was happy. I never even saw it coming.
I felt useful. I felt loved. I felt *part* of something.
And then, one day, with no warning, their mother told me she was moving out, moving back in with her abusive husband. "He's changed. The kids miss him. Blah, blah, blah." I tried to tell her how stupid it was, but she didn't hear me.
That was bad. That was rough. It wasn't just that they left, but how sudden it was. They said, come visit! We'll visit! But they never came to visit. And every time I tried to go see them, they were "busy" that weekend. They cut me off.
It was rough for several weeks, but I got through it, got over it. I thought I had gained something. I thought, maybe I could be a dad. Maybe I do have something to offer someone. Maybe, just maybe, I had value?
But maybe not.
I don't have a large social circle, but I was determined to get a girlfriend. I had a huge house, good job, why couldn't I hope to have a family someday? A wife and kids? I hadn't dated anyone since my ex-wife and I split up. But I was determined to change that.
I was brave enough to ask out some women from work, and also some women who were friends of friends that I came across at every-so-often social engagements.
Some said yes. But one of two things happened every single time. They either broke off the date before we went out, or I never got another date after the first. Two cases of each of those.
And then there was on-line dating.
Using two different sites, okcupid and plenty of fish, I never got one single message back. Not one. Ok, that's (barely) a lie. I think three different women messaged me back one time each.
And I'm talking massive amounts of women. Dozens. I wouldn't say hundreds, but maybe over a hundred. I didn't count. And I'm not saying I obsessively sent hundreds of messages to hundreds of different women. I am talking about slowly, over the course of a year or so, not giving up on it. And it's not like I was just going after super hot ones way out of my league. They were "average" women that seemed to have similar interests to me.
I asked my ex-wife to look at my profiles--mind you, we are good friends now, and she's remarried with kids now. She said they were ok, not bad at all, "good" profiles. She offered a couple of minor critiques and pointers, which I listened to, but she said I had done a good job. I even showed her some of the people I had messaged and what I sent. She said I was doing fine, and had no idea why I was having so bad of luck.
Anyway.
So, I tried. But there's something wrong with me. But enough about that.
Well, actually, it was really starting to fuck me up in the head. I went back to counselling, but I was trying to manage.
Anyhow.
After my cousin Nicole, the one with the four kids, after her husband had been beaten her up a few more times, she called me up and asked if she could move back in. Of course she could. Right?
Only it was different. They had been gone a year. The kids were more uncivilized than ever.
When last they lived with me, those good three months we had after the alcoholic cousin left but before they moved out, that was summer. I worked the evening shift at work, but being summer, I could send time with them.
Now they were in school. When I was working, they were home. When they were in school, I was home. And they were uncivilized, wild, crazy: fighting amongst themselves and breaking shit all the time.
The 4.5 year old still wore diapers to bed. Actually, her mom put her in diapers about 7pm, and she would pee through one or two before she went to bed. The 2 year old was not being engaged to talk or potty train. The 9 and 11 year olds were always fighting and yelling at each other and breaking shit. Hell, they all took turns breaking shit.
All this stuff I only get to be a part of on the weekend. I never saw them during the week. I couldn't get on day shift or night shift. I was stuck on the 3pm to 11pm shift. And working 1 to 3 Saturdays a month as well. I treid my best to work with them, but I just wasn't around enough.
I was already screwed up when they moved back in. And now I had another bad situation that couldn't figure out how to improve.
The mom:
Their mom had back problems. She went into her first surgery a couple months after moving in the second time. It was nerve pain. She couldn't move around before the surgery very well. She had a long recovery. She re-injured her nerves a couple months after surgery and had to get another surgery. The second one didn't work. She needs to get a different kind of surgery, but before the state health care will pay for it, she needs to do so many months of physical therapy just to ensure that the surgery is necessary. But she had been living in Kansas, and I live in Missouri. So she had lived in Missouri for a year, and now she's in limbo with a jacked up back and leg as she waits for the Missouri benefits kick in.
So they moved in in August of 2015. I did my best, and more or less managed for almost a year. Despite the fact I was in over my head, and did not have the knowledge or skills to deal with any of that stuff.
But that's only half the story. Here's the kicker.
Summer of 2015, I bought a $14,000.00 motorcycle in cash.
Now, I was still in the bankruptcy program. I had $10,000 saved up. You know, just money for emergencies. Money to feel secure. That sort of thing.
Late spring, I checked my bankruptcy statement, and it looked like nothing had come off from what I owed on back payments for the house. At the time when my bankruptcy went through, I was behind $12,000. Now three years into the program, it was saying that I now owed $14,000 on back house payments.
I called my lawyer, and asked, What's up with that?
He said, and I quote, "Mumbo jumbo. La dee da. This looks fine. Everything looks fine. Let me punch up some numbers...Oh yeah. This looks just fine." I had a couple of hospital bills pop up into the program after filing and those were paid off first. But he assured me I had nothing to worry about. So I didn't.
Well, just goofing around, I was looking at motorcycles for sale. Because I effing love bikes. I just like to look around once in a while. I already owned two really nice bikes. But one was old (an '87 Sportster) and I worked on it more than I rode it, and the other was a sport bike ('07 Buell Firebolt) fun as hell to ride, but uncomfortable for long distances. So, there I was, just casually browsing. And I saw the bike of my dreams.
This was like a month or two after talking with my lawyer and being reassured that everything was fine.
$13,900.00 was the asking price. They were firm. And it was a steal at that price. Blue book was 16,500.
I only had 10k. But my job paid good enough that I could work 16 to 20 hours of overtime a week and have an extra $3,000 in six weeks. So that's what I did. Because I had to have that bike.
I over-worked myself. Severely.
My job was physically demanding. I loaded lead plates into a machine. 15 lb. stacks of lead plates, 8 times a minute, standing, all day long. And the machine is finicky, and the plate quality always varied. So it was mentally challenging as well, because pay was based on production, and the finicky machine had to be ran juuust right to get good production.
For six weeks, I did that for 12 hours a day. I was completely burned out, completely exhausted to my core, by the time I bought that bike.
Then, two weeks later my cousin and her four kids moved in. I was in hell.
I was flat broke when they moved in. And I never could get caught up, trying to take care of all those people. My bankruptcy payment was huge. Without working overtime, at least half my paycheck went to my bankruptcy payment.
Between the chaotic lifestyle and the constant financial stress, I was fighting a losing battle.
In January, last year, after they'd been living with me for five months, my lawyer called me. "We're too far behind. They're going to dismiss your case and take your house unless you pay them $450 more a month. $1650 to $2100."
"That's over $100 a week," says I. "You just told me eight months ago every thing was okay."
"Well," he says, and proceeds to recite all the figures I pointed out to him 8 months ago. "So that's where we're at. Lose the house, or pay an extra $110 a week. We go up to $2100 a month and everything will be fine." Like it's no big deal.
$110 a week is a lot of fucking money when you're trying to take care of five extra people. But I was too stressed out to deliberate it. I told my lawyer, "Fine. Whatever."
So things got tighter. I got tighter. But I kept pushing on. Kids were wild and destroying my home around me while I was at work, and I had no help and no support. But I pushed through.
For a while.
Then, in July of 2016, on my birthday, my lawyer calls me up.
"Looks like we made a mistake. They're going to dismiss your case and take the house out from under you and the four kids you've been desperately trying to support." I am paraphrasing just a bit. "We need to get to $2200 for the plan to work. But you don't have the income to support that. So, you're going to have to try to get the bank to refinance your loan, or defer some of these payments. But you already tried that didn't you? Yeah, that's what I thought. There's not much we can do here."
I asked, "So why can't we go to $2200?"
"You don't make enough income to support that. Unless you got a raise of some sort, did you?"
"No."
"Well, there's just not much we can do." Here's the part I can't remember very closely. I was hungover this whole time btw. My drinking was a little out of control at that time. "If you can bring a pay slip by, we can look it over just to be sure, but I don't think this is going to work."
That's when I gave up. On everything. I didn't go to work that day. And I never went back.
I called in. I called my HR manager. Told him I was fucked up big time. He told me to pick up FMLA papers. I didn't pick them up, but I kept calling in. He asked my why I hadn't picked up the papers, I told him I couldn't go get them. So he fired me.
I had tried to kick my cousin and her four kids out. She said she had a plan and was going to move out in August. I was just going to kill myself, but she and her kids had to move out first. I'd had the plan since forever ago, so I ordered the stuff I needed.
But she never moved out. And I couldn't do anything with the people in the house.
But all this was months ago. July and August. I am not suicidal anymore. I've grown too close to the kids that live with me. Even if they moved out now, there's too much guilt now for me to kill myself.
But I have no plan for life.
I had the best job I could ever hope to get, and I lost it over nothing, failed completely and horribly. I've been doing everything I can for so long to keep this house, but I failed at that, failed miserably and utterly. I've sold off my motorcycles for fractions of what they were worth so that I could keep paying utilities. But next month is the last month I can do that before I am out of money.
All I had to do was take that $14,000 and put it towards my back house payment. And *poof* those back payments are gone. Then none of this would have happened. Instead, I bought the motorcycle. Now, I have no motorcycle, no money, and all those back payments still unpaid (even more now!
) I can't even begin to describe or justify that. It's the worst thing I ever could have done in life.
The bank told me they would initiate foreclosure on Jan 7 if I didn't bring my account back to even. On Feb 10th I got a letter from a law office saying I have 30 days to dispute the validity of the foreclosure.
I've lost everything.
And there's still five people in this house expecting me to take care of them. I don't know what they are still doing here. What do they want me to do?
I can't take care of them when I have a job, and I can't support them when I don't.
I had no idea all this was going to come out. I only intended to quickly summarize an update. I didn't mean for it to be so long and depressing.
All of this was just to say that I am losing the house that so symbolically and symbiotically relates to my heart.
That said, you should probably concentrate on founding your own sense of self-worth before you look to others to validate it.
Kia Kaha, my bro. Arohanui.
thank you 
Good on you.