Published in Ladies Home Journal| June 2011

Life offered me a Sandra Bullock moment, and I’d like to say I seized it.  

But playing surrogate mom to a homeless teen was harder than I thought.

My 15-year-old daughter, Lizzie, first mentioned Nick last February. Perhaps because her own family is, in her words, “so boring,” she is drawn to tumult in the lives of others. Nick, a friend two years ahead of her in school, was experiencing more than his share.

Nick’s family was poor, their hardscrabble circumstances a pile-up of bad decisions and worse luck. He was living—unhappily and uneasily—with his stepfather in a shabby rental a few blocks from the high school he and my daughter attended here in Eugene, Oregon. His mother had gone east to deal with her own family crisis, a temporary absence that soon turned permanent.

Life with the stepfather was, according to Lizzie’s daily reports, a rough ride. There was no physical abuse, she said, but Nick complained that his stepfather didn’t trust him, didn’t understand him, didn’t respect him. I know teens aren’t easy. I just got my two sons through those years and now am in the thick of my daughter’s adolescence. I figured maybe Nick was a bad kid, a troublemaker. But Lizzie told us he was an honors student who took AP classes and spent his after-school hours tutoring others in math and working on projects with the school’s robotics club. He wanted to be an engineer. He had applied to top universities.

Nick was miserable, Lizzie said—so miserable that he was talking about running away. Only he had nowhere to run.

One night a few weeks after Lizzie started talking about Nick, we invited him for dinner. He was a big kid—six feet, 200 pounds—with a still-round face and the padded body of a boy who spends more time at a computer than on a playing field. He was soft-spoken, articulate and quirky in a charming, nerdy way. He immediately engaged my husband, a science geek, in a lengthy conversation about (yes, really) the rate of decay of radioactive atoms.

When dinner was over, Lizzie and Nick went to watch TV in another room, and my husband and I cleared the table and debriefed.

“He’s too good a kid to be so miserable at home,” I said. My husband raised an eyebrow. “I think he and this stepfather need a cooling-off period, a little time away from each other.” Another eyebrow. “Maybe he could stay here for a night or two? Until the air cleared?”

My husband counseled caution. We should call the absent mother. We should call the stepfather. We should make sure our daughter was comfortable with the idea. But I knew he was on board when he volunteered the big leather couch in his office for Nick to sleep on. “Temporarily,” my husband said. “Until he and the stepfather can work things out.”

Only that’s not what happened. A week and a half after his two nights with us, Nick informed Lizzie that his stepfather was leaving town. Suddenly Nick had no home, no money, no relatives to take him in. He started sleeping in a homeless shelter for teens located two long bus rides from school. Under the shelter’s arcane rules, he could sleep there only five nights in a row. Then he had to spend two nights away before coming back.

I knew that shelter—I’d organized a project last year that involved young journalists interviewing local homeless teens—and it was a rough place. Nick’s situation was none of my business, really. But now that this boy was on my radar, how could I ignore him?

Once again, the couch in my husband’s office became Nick’s bed—a short-term fix, I told myself, as I called social service agencies to find out what could be done for him. Meanwhile, every morning my husband or I drove Nick and Lizzie to school, and every afternoon they rode home together on the bus. Nick was quiet, mostly. He took long naps. He raided the refrigerator. He texted. He watched TV. Occasionally—too occasionally, I thought—he asked if he could help out around the house.

It’s hard to admit now what a lovely time I had on my solitary beach vacation because when I came home, there was Nick sitting on our back steps, filthy and exhausted. It turned out that he’d stayed with a friend for two nights and then, when that family had other plans, he’d gone back to the shelter. He toughed it out for one night there and then spent the remainder of spring break . . .where?

“Uh, not really anywhere,” he said. “I just walked. I walked around downtown.”

“But where did you sleep?” I asked.

“At the bus station. On a bench,” he said. The bus station was outdoors, and this was March in the Northwest. The temperature at night was in the forties. It rained. “Well, actually, I didn’t sleep a lot,” he added, deadpan, no self-pity. “Mostly I read books.”

There was a large, ugly, infected blister on his foot. He had lost his school-issued bus pass and used all the money we’d given him for food, so he’d walked everywhere, including the five miles from downtown back to our house. His shaggy hair was matted, and he smelled like a locker room. His backpack was stuffed with dirty clothes. In among the grubby T-shirts and grubbier socks were a two-pound brick of processed cheese and a can of apricots given to him at the shelter. He had no way of opening the can, no knife for the cheese.

Nearly a week passed, and I was still making calls and getting no answers. At 17, Nick was too old for foster care (which he would have resisted, anyway) and too young for adult halfway houses. “This is the hardest age,” a social service worker told me, clearly as frustrated as I was. Now spring break was approaching, and we had places to go. My husband and daughter were off on a long-planned trip to Washington, D.C. I was spending a few days alone on the Oregon coast.

“We’ll be closing the house for a week,” I told Nick that night. I was matter-of-fact, just stating our plans. Nick, I was learning, liked things simple and direct. Unlike my dramatic daughter, he was not attuned to, or much interested in, emotional subtext. I figured that was 50 percent survival mode, 50 percent teenage boy.

“That’s cool,” he said, nodding. “No worries.” He’d call some of his buddies.

And so, a few days later, we closed the house and left. I didn’t tell my husband, but I slipped Nick a twenty. My husband didn’t tell me, but he did the same.

It’s hard to admit now what a lovely time I had on my solitary beach vacation because when I came home, there was Nick sitting on our back steps, filthy and exhausted. It turned out that he’d stayed with a friend for two nights and then, when that family had other plans, he’d gone back to the shelter. He toughed it out for one night there and then spent the remainder of spring break . . .where?

“Uh, not really anywhere,” he said. “I just walked. I walked around downtown.”

“But where did you sleep?” I asked.

“At the bus station. On a bench,” he said. The bus station was outdoors, and this was March in the Northwest. The temperature at night was in the forties. It rained. “Well, actually, I didn’t sleep a lot,” he added, deadpan, no self-pity. “Mostly I read books.”

There was a large, ugly, infected blister on his foot. He had lost his school-issued bus pass and used all the money we’d given him for food, so he’d walked everywhere, including the five miles from downtown back to our house. His shaggy hair was matted, and he smelled like a locker room. His backpack was stuffed with dirty clothes. In among the grubby T-shirts and grubbier socks were a two-pound brick of processed cheese and a can of apricots given to him at the shelter. He had no way of opening the can, no knife for the cheese.

While Nick took a half-hour shower followed by a four-hour nap, the family debriefed. It was clear to us: We had to take him in. “Taking him in” was different from letting him crash on the couch. It meant making a commitment. That night I told him he could stay with us for the rest of the school year, two and a half months, until he graduated. I cleaned out my oldest son’s room to make a place for him.

Nick hadn’t asked for our help. As articulate as he was about physics and philosophy, as chatty as he could be about computers and video games, he was mostly mute on the subject of his own situation. Maybe it embarrassed him. Maybe he needed to pretend it didn’t matter. Maybe he just refused to think about it. I’m not sure. All I know is that we offered him a home, and he accepted.

Lizzie was thrilled. She had always gloried in her role as little sister who got to play video games with the big boys. She’d thrived on the energy and noise and clutter. But for the past two years, since her brothers had gone off to college, she’d been an only child. Now, with Nick’s arrival, she had a live-in playmate. A senior! A senior with good tunes on his iPod and excellent gaming skills!

My husband—easygoing guy that he is—took it all in stride. I was the one with “issues.” One day I was all Sandra Bullock in The Blind Side about this new responsibility—expansive, generous, kindhearted. The next, I was overly impressed with my own nobility, a little too preoccupied counting karma points. And then there were the days I was grumpy and resentful: another mouth to feed (with that voracious teen-boy appetite), another load of laundry, another schedule to juggle, another child to worry about.

I watched as our utility bill skyrocketed, due in part to Nick’s daily 20-minute showers and his habit of keeping all his electronics on 24/7. Our food bill climbed back to an all-time high, with grocery receipts reminiscent of the days when both my sons lived at home. We could afford these extra costs, and I didn’t begrudge his wolverine appetite as much as marvel at it. But it meant more trips to the store for me. It meant buying items I rarely bought and didn’t much want to.

In the meantime, I worried about his chronic allergies. I thought he needed an eye exam. He didn’t get enough sleep. He should be taking vitamins. I worried that he wouldn’t get into the one college he’d set his heart on—Reed, a small elite liberal arts school a couple of hours away in Portland.

Most of all I worried about how he was handling all that was happening to him. He spent a lot of time in what was now his bedroom, door closed, lights dimmed, playing the online game League of Legends. Whenever I had him alone, I tried to get him to talk about real life, maybe even about his own emotional state. But a 17-year-old boy—whatever his circumstances—is a tough nut to crack. Nick didn’t want to, or couldn’t, open up. But that didn’t keep me from trying. I thought he needed help. And I knew I needed something. I needed to feel . . . needed. And not just as a cook or a chauffeur, but as a mother.

If I couldn’t engage him emotionally, maybe I could do some good behind the scenes. I talked to a teacher who knew Nick and found out about counseling options available at school. I contacted the financial-aid office at Reed—Nick had been accepted —and pleaded for a full ride. And I told myself to relax about this big, space-hogging, refrigerator-raiding boy in our midst. I started to see not just how Nick was affecting us, but how we were affecting him.

I watched him study my husband, hungry for a role model. My husband either saw this too or just naturally rose to the occasion. As the weather grew warmer, my husband taught Nick how to use the lawn mower, how to barbeque and—something Nick hadn’t had the opportunity to learn yet in his life—how a loving father acts toward his family.

I saw that Lizzie, too, was benefiting from Nick’s presence. She was catching a glimpse of us through his eyes and could sense the difference that a functioning family makes in a child’s life. When she looked at Nick, I believe she saw a smart kid in difficult circumstances who didn’t regard himself as a victim, and this was an important lesson too.

As for me, I longed for an emotional breakthrough, a misty-eyed expression of appreciation, maybe a bear hug. But we’re talking about real life here, not the movies. What I did get was this: One Saturday afternoon toward the end of the school term, Nick thundered down the stairs and asked me if I’d look at something he’d written. It was a letter to Reed College explaining his circumstances and asking for a deferral until the following fall. (We’d talked about this option if the money he needed didn’t come through.) The letter was on his computer upstairs. He’d never invited me into his room before. He’d never asked my opinion before. Maybe this wasn’t a big thing, but it was a big thing to me.

That night at dinner he told us he’d gotten us tickets to his graduation ceremony. He was never going to say, “Thanks for being a family to me,” but this came close.

Two weeks later, we were in the driveway saying goodbye. Nick’s mother had suddenly materialized to attend his graduation and take him back east with her. She and I had never met and had talked only once, briefly, on the phone during the more than three months he lived with us. Her motives— and her life—remained a mystery, and that was fine with me. I wasn’t going to understand anyway.

She looked down at the ground as she thanked me, then got in the car and started the engine. I stood waiting for a hug from Nick, who shifted from size 13 foot to size 13 foot and squinted into the sun. I could tell I wasn’t going to get that hug. So I moved in close and stood on my toes, reaching my arms around his big shoulders and drawing him toward me. For what seemed like a long moment, he didn’t move. Then he patted me on the back. And that was enough.