Well, that’s a loaded and dramatic title.
My fourth flip house was something a little different, and much closer to my heart than houses 2 and 3. It was a journey I never expected to take, and one that has changed me and many of the pieces inside of me.
This is going to be one of those overshares.
Takes off shoes and lays down on couch. Settles in. Steeples fingers. Thanks for having me. It’s going to get weird in here.
I don’t habitually refer to her as “my birth mother” or anything that dramatic, but I also don’t refer to her as “mom” or “my mother” either. I don’t call her anything at all mostly; if anything I will refer to her by her first name.
That’s because the relationship between us is new. We’re in uncharted waters, and everything feels strange and foreign like we’re wading through mud in a dense fog. Neither of us really knows what we’re doing or where we’re going.
The story is this: I was adopted and raised by what are biologically my grandparents. When I talk about “my mom” or “my parents” (as in Flipping my Parents’ House here) this is who I’m referring to (or “to whom I’m referring,” if you want to get uppity). On that note, when I talk about my sisters, I am referring to what are biologically my aunts.
Upon my entry into this world my Birth Mother was not at a place in her life where caring for me or raising me was feasible. And so, my parents stepped in and offered her a solution. They offered to adopt me and begin raising me but to let her stay close by and step in when she was ready, if she chose to.
She chose not to.
There are a lot of issues that are too personal to share here, despite the fact that I’m not naming names. It feels like a betrayal to try and explain all of her circumstances and feelings from my own point of view, which I admit is wildly skewed. All I can fairly share is my own perspective and experience and how this story has affected me.
Adoption is great. Adoption is amazing and wonderful and a gift from God.
Adoption, when you are aware of and living in the same home as your biological mother throughout the course of your young life, is weird and confusing. Our bedrooms shared a wall at my parents’ house. She worked nights and lived in my parents’ home throughout my early years. She was so close I could touch her. But she didn’t want me. At least, that was my childhood deduction.
Despite having wonderful parents who stepped in for me and doted on me and loved me as their very own, I still felt an unsettling shadow of unwant looming over me, lurking in a corner behind me. I never felt any intense longing for my birth mother specifically, but I vividly felt the sharp sting of rejection from an early age. I knew when I was quite young that the mother who birthed me didn’t want me, and being around her on a regular basis served to drive this point home to me over and over again.
As human beings we are intrinsically wired to seek love and acceptance from our mothers, and mothers are born with the desire to lay down their lives to love and care for and protect their children. My perception was that there had to be something wrong with me for her to not want me.
(Please hear my heart here. I know as an adult brained human that not every female was *meant to be* or has chosen to be a mother and that many women choose other options such as adoption for their children when they find themselves pregnant, and this gift is beyond description. I do not wish to minimize the journey of or the gift that is another woman’s choice of adoption for her child. Please hear my feelings described here from a child’s eyes and heart.)
That early feeling of rejection and unwant has shaped the core of who I am today. Thanks to this I am a people pleaser. I *need* to please people and to have them like me, to palpably feel them love and accept me. That’s a fun sentence to type publicly. Woof.
If you are somewhere out there in the world and you do not like me, but you think that it has escaped my attention: it has not. Please know that I have already obsessed over it endlessly and daydreamed of a scenario in which I have won you over, and we are now the closest of friends. Is this healthy? Of course not. Exhausting? Yes. Creepy? Absolutely.
PLEASE LOVE ME.
Let’s go deeper since we’re already having so much fun here. You know how some women have Daddy Issues? I have what I can only coin as Mommy Issues (trademark, copyright, publish this in all the text books; cite me, pay me all the royalties.) I felt rejected specifically by a woman, a mother- the most important woman in a person’s life. Because of this women terrify and intimidate me. I feel an overwhelming need to be accepted and liked and loved by other women.
I’m sure this is the source of my social anxiety if we’re really getting down to it. I do well enough with my written words, but I assure you that in person I’m far less dynamic or interesting (don’t get too excited here, I am aware that the descriptors “dynamic” and “interesting” are a stretch for my written word even). The fear of saying something that could be perceived as undesirable or unlikable paralyzes me. I’m quite certain that I often come across as a cold fish or vapid or intensely shy or just generally lacking, but it’s simply this loop holding me back: say the exact right thing or say nothing at all.
As an added bonus I have a subconscious, perpetual fear of my established female friendships ending at any given time when they decide that they no longer want me.
What can I say? I’m a treasure. There will be a signup sheet to become my friend at the end of this post. Don’t all rush to apply at once- I don’t want the server to crash.
The message in this overly detailed declaration of public humiliation is this: I’m a little broken.
But that’s my favorite thing about us- humans. We’re- all of us- just a little bit broken.
None of us have made it to this point in our lives without some dents and dings. We have different things that break us, different stories that shape us and hurt us and harden different sectors of our hearts, but also wounds that light up sectors of our hearts like Christmas trees. Wounds that make us tender and compassionate and forgiving. Some of our wounds are, in fact, our gifts.
My wounds make me a better mother.
I felt like I was waiting my entire life to become a mom. But when I finally became pregnant, after all of the struggles it took to get there, I was consumed with fear. What if I didn’t love or want my baby? What if I inherited this gene that made me not want my offspring? What if the cycle repeated itself? As happy as I was to be pregnant I was absolutely terrified, and I prayed every day for God to help me love and want my baby.
But as it turned out, loving my baby was never something I needed to worry about. My love was so instant and pure and deep and full and natural. It helped to heal some of the brokenness inside me.
It was at that time, six years ago, with the birth of my first son that my Birth Mom asked if she could have a relationship with him. Record screech. I felt immediately defensive and suspicious and on edge and unsure. What could I expect? What if she tried it out but didn’t want him in the way that she didn’t want me? What if he became attached and she said, “this isn’t for me,” and walked away? I would be damned if I let my son experience that heartache and rejection. Mama bear be fierce. I don’t care who you are- hurt my babies, and I’ll claw ya dang eyes out.
But God worked on my heart. Despite a mile high wall it had built up out of resentment and bitterness and mistrust He let it open just a crack. He let it soften just a smidge. He let it be just a little bit vulnerable. Just enough to give this relationship a shot.
For the last six years she has been in our lives. Mine and my sons’. She visited once, and she kept coming back. Almost every day for the last six years she has visited my kids. She is faithful. Next to myself and my husband she is my boys’ favorite person on this planet. She is so proud of them. The look on her face when she is with them could make the Grinch’s tiny heart grow three sizes.
We have had only one short conversation in the past six years about our past, our history. She tells me that she lives with great regret about her choices. She said with tears in her eyes that she didn’t realize that her life would forever be altered when she made the decision to allow my parents to take me and adopt me.
What if she wasn’t the villain in my story after all? What if she had a narrative of her very own, full of her own brokenness and hurts that shaped her path? What if her brokenness and her choices were, in fact, my gift?
This was a hard pill to swallow, but what if I stopped judging her for just a split second and tried to actually love her as a fellow broken human?
Woah.
Don’t mistake this for a story of forgiveness. Simply put, in my newfound self-actualized, mature state I realize that she has nothing to be forgiven for. She made exactly the right choice for both of us on that day all those years ago. My life would be dramatically different than it is today had she not. This is a story of hearts being changed, hurts being healed.
35 years ago it wasn’t time for our story, and that’s okay. It is now.
Out of the ashes and all of the brokenness comes something new and living, something unexpected and different, unconventional even, but exactly perfect.
She is sixty years old, and she has worked as a night time stock person for Wal-Mart for the past 20 plus years. She is a hard worker. Her body aches, and her hands are visibly swollen and crippled with arthritis, and still she would never complain that her loads are too heavy. The person I once thought she was is changing and morphing the more that I learn about her. Because it is really only now, in these past few years, that I have allowed myself to learn anything at all about her. It should be noted that she is an intrinsically GOOD person. I am learning that she is kind, and she is generous. She has little to give, but she would give you the shirt off her back or her last twenty dollars. Not the universal/rhetorical you- but YOU, an unknown stranger reading this. Anyone. Without blinking an eye. She has worked hard, and she doesn’t have much to show for it by way of material possessions. And she’s okay with that.
So, on that note, she has never dreamed of owning her own home. It didn’t seem feasible, not for someone like her.
So, why then, when I came across a small, 842 sq. ft, two-bedroom, one bath house, couldn’t I get her out of my mind?
Why did she pop up anytime I made my plans to flip it? Why did something stir inside of me, urging this home in her direction?
I purchased the home for a great price and after repairs and improvements stood to make an excellent profit on it. At my after repairs price point someone would snatch it up in a heartbeat to make it into a rental property. It was going to be a quick, cheap, in and out job.
WHY THEN COULDN’T I STOP THINKING OF HER IN THIS HOUSE?
You see, God whispered, and I found excuses not to hear. So He spoke louder, more firmly… and I covered my ears. So He nudged me… and I turned the other direction. I had a million reasons why I could not, should not, would not do this. A million reasons why God could not be commanding me to do this very uncomfortable, strange thing. I wanted to start a business with this newfound passion, and the first rule of business is that you MAKE A PROFIT. I could not already be asked not to do that on only my fourth house, and not for this woman who rejected me and didn’t want me. NO.
Sure, her relationship with my boys was great and all, and I was becoming very wise in my old age and learning to understand her journey, but don’t start thinking that I had completely laid down all of that resentment and bitterness and hurt. Just when you think you’ve unpacked all of that ugly stuff God goes and commands you to do the very thing that reminds you that you are, in fact, still schlepping it all around.
So, no, God. Firmly, adamantly, I WILL NOT DO THIS. [Picture me in full teenager mode here yelling this and stalking off to my room and slamming the door and cranking some very emo music on my stereo and flopping dramatically on my bed to lay and think of all the reasons why I was right and God was wrong.]
So God got quiet… or so I thought.
And then, one Sunday after church, Kevin and I were sitting in our living room relaxing. Not quite napping, but not quite parenting either. You know that in between zone where you’re mildly cognizant of the little people around you maintaining life and appendages, but you’re off the clock? Parenting is closed for today. Please stay alive on your own. Make good choices.
Out of nowhere Kevin burst out, “Every time I think of the small house I think of [her]. I can’t explain it, but I feel like we’re supposed to do this for her.” He waited a very tense pause where he looked at me a little wild eyed, ready to be defensive, very unsure of how I would respond to this outburst. He and I had not discussed this- I hadn’t told him that I had already been having the same stirrings on my own heart. Because again, let’s be real here: she and I are not exactly to the braiding each other’s hair and talking about boys point in our relationship. Things are still very awkward and new at times.
You see, God didn’t go quiet, He outsourced because I wasn’t listening. While I was busy pouting and ignoring Him He was busy whispering to someone who would listen because He had a plan. In that moment, I knew without a doubt that God had set this like a ten ton weight on both of our hearts. It confirmed what I already knew: this little house was always hers, God was just waiting for me to realize it.
I was shy and nervous when I called to tell her about the house. To ask her if she would even be interested or consider something like this. She has only ever lived in a small apartment and has always been content with that. To my surprise she was open to the idea. Then, within days she was EXCITED about the prospect. She asked shyly if she would get to have her own driveway. I said, “you will get to have your own garage!” She asked if she could put a swing set in the backyard for my boys. The Grinch’s heart grew three more sizes.
And so it began: instead of flipping the small house for a profit I was renovating it with a specific person in mind. A person with whom I had a tangled and complicated history. A person with whom I was building something new.
Out of the ashes comes something living.
*Follow along in the coming weeks as I share the before and afters of this special little house. Spoiler alert: she lives there now, just over a mile from our house, so she can visit our boys frequently, and she tells me that she has never been happier.*