A moment that changed me: My family moved to a shelter - and I longed for my childhood home

When I was a kid, we lived in a fake 1980s Tudor house in a working-class town in Connecticut. Already in my family there were signs of financial peril: my parents had divorced years earlier and my mother was struggling as a single mother of three children. She had borrowed money from friends, and when repayment was not possible, a couple came to our house with a moving van to collect any valuables. They took the furniture, the TV, the lawnmower and even my collection of dolls. The convenience store my mother ran had collapsed and around the house we had giant trash bags full of the store's contents. For meals, my siblings and I rummaged through bags for dented cereal boxes and chocolate bars in crumpled wrappers, like we were in an apocalyptic movie. Outside, the unmown grass was above knee height.

But we still had the house. Or at least that's what we thought.

We found out that wasn't the case one evening in August, when my siblings and I were returned from a two-week trip to California to visit our great-aunt. My eldest sister, 12 at the time, chaperoned us on our connecting flights.

We returned to the airport exhausted, full of stories about the layover at O'Hare, during which we saw another unaccompanied child — a king among children — eat not one but two personal-sized pizzas because his family had given him a crispy 20 bucks to spend. During the flight, we twirled a pink box between our knees that contained Blum's coffee crunch cake, a treat my mother had asked us to bring back as a souvenir from a childhood trip.

< p class="dcr-3jlghf"> We climbed into the back seat of the car, the cake box in my lap wet with handprints, the streetlights flickering above it, as we speeded down the freeway. Then my mom looked in the rearview mirror and told us we weren't going home.

Our house wasn't ours anymore - she planned for us to be away as she arranged a foreclosure. Our things had been stored and my cat stored in my grandmother's apartment, and we were living in an emergency shelter for homeless families. We settled down for the night on beds covered with rubber sheets to protect the mattresses from urine. One of my siblings cried and wanted to go home. I felt the same, although I don't think I cried because I was too angry. I focused my anger on the cake, which couldn't respond and therefore seemed more capable of introspection and remorse than some adults I knew. -spacefinder-role="inline" data-spacefinder-type="model.dotcomrendering.pageElements.ImageBlockElement" class="dcr-10khgmf">

We stayed at the emergency shelter all fall and into December. I started the year...