by Steve Chapman

Created on: March 14, 2010

Throughout my life I have heard most people I know talk about their desire to hurry up and leave home. My life experience has run contrary to that, and at 48, I have never lost my desire to go home. it has been a yearning driven by many years as a young child, and adolescent, of trying to get home, and having that effort ended, always being taken away against my heartfelt effort. No more. I am going home, and there is now no one to stop it.

When I write, I work very hard to write things that are representative of my desire to share quality works, as well as being respectful of the time of those taking the time to read what I write. But in this article, althought still mindful of those goals, I have decided the potential hope this writing may offer someone like me is more important than waiting to "edit" the content.

This "home" I speak of is just that, the one and only home I ever experienced growing up. I lived in 14 different places growing up, and although each "house" or residence was with different relatives, only one was "family" in it's truest and meaningful sense.

At the age of 4, as I played with my mother, then divorced from my dad, and my little brother on the vacant lot we called our yard, our world turned upside down. My father, in law enforcement, drove up along with two other cars, and what felt like hell ensued.

Placing us in the back seat of his car, locking the doors, I watched him hand custody papers to my mother. He had sucessfully proven her unfit in court, and beating the back window as we drove away, I watvhed helplessly as she collapsed on the ground. I could not comfort her, and my little brother as we drove towards our new home. Although the way my father did this, as well as his motive, was wrong, my new home became just that, a "home."

He drove us that day, to the home of my great aunt and uncle (generationally and literally), and with them, my brother and I took up our new home. My Dad pretty much gave us to them. For a while anyway.

Life began to make sense, and became a normal, balanced and healthy daily experience. But Dad wanted to "show out" as I call it. Several years later, he remarried, and took us to a new apartment, with he and his new wife. I will describe the next year as nothing less than an emotional train wreck. After a year, they seperated, and back to our "home", with our great aunt and uncle. Thank God I thought, but almost before I could settle back in to a home and life of normal, healthy daily life,

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