Making Our Way Home

Home is the place that they take you in. Without reservation. No questions asked.

There was no bus station in that tiny South Georgia town. Once a day a Greyhound would stop in the parking lot of a shabby convenience store. That’s where my mom and I boarded the first of several coaches that would eventually take us to Miami. We were fleeing my abusive father.

We weren’t going anywhere in particular, really. We were escaping, with only the vague notion that we would land in what we could call home. I was eleven.

Photo by Victor Chaidez on Unsplash

In Miami, we shared a cramped, one-room efficiency for a few weeks. Eventually, we wandered north, rolled through a stretch of homelessness, and eventually camped in Atlanta. There, some kind people took us in. They helped my mother find a job. That fall I enrolled in a nearby Catholic school with their help.

The transition from rural Georgia to urban Atlanta, from public school to Catholic education, and struggling to fit in with a bunch of new kids who had known each other since conception left me feeling unsettled. I had es…