Meet Billy. He’s been through it all.
Door kicked in at five years old. Foster care. New families. Did you know families adopt boys specifically to carry on the family name if there are only girls left?
He woke up one day as Rex Road. Next day he was Diva Road. His plan to fix that? Find a wife and take her last name. But, he never got married.
War. Prison. And where he lived? A psychologist later told him it was like a third world country.
But ask Billy what the hardest part was and he’ll tell you it wasn’t any of that. It was coming home – to see his family. He used to sit on the side of the road for three hours before walking through his own front door, just waiting until he could calm himself down enough to do homework with his nieces and nephews like nothing happened.
He pushes back hard on the PTSD label. It’s not that he can’t handle what he saw. It’s that he got very good at separating work from home. He doesn’t know how to stop doing that.
Then one day he got an email. Good news, for once. He sat on it for a few days. He wasn’t used to good news. Then he had a stroke. Can a body mistake good news for a threat when bad news is all it’s ever known?
He made peace with all of his past. Everything. Because without that door getting kicked in at five, he never would have found Mozart. Picasso. Rimsky-Korsakov. He would have never discovered the world.
Does anyone know Billy and his pup?
#veterans#homeless#FosterCare#war#peopleofvirginiabeach#virginiabeach