The House I Grew Up In

Coming home with our third child Ryder.

We sold our home.  We are moving!  I'm excited.  We are moving into new construction and a bigger house for our family.  Meghan and I were getting so sick of the home improvement projects and the yard work.  It seemed like there was always something: new roof, new windows, new basement, new bathroom, frozen pipes and a neighbor's son recently throwing parties.  We are out of here!  I'm ready.  At least that's what I thought.  

As we started to pack the house, it slowly went from being a little cluttered to being ready for showing to feeling empty and not ours.  Meg and the kids are out of town, and I've been busy packing and moving.  Yesterday my friend John came by and we moved 3 truckloads of furniture and boxes into storage.  Last night our home looked empty, and tonight it hit me!  As I took down all the pictures, each picture brought back a happy memory. When they were all gone, I looked around and all that was left were the memories of this house.  

I can't believe we are moving.  We've spent the last 8 years in this home.  This is where I really grew up.  Meg and I moved in here after being married for only 4 years.  We were really still just dumb kids.  We learned how to argue and accept each other here.  Our marriage became strong here.  That wasn't easy, but we got there.  At the time, we had each other and this house, but there were a lot of empty rooms.

We tried to get pregnant, but we couldn't.  On top of infertility, we both carry the Cystic Fibrosis gene, so even if we did get pregnant, our child had a 25% chance of having CF.  We didn't have a lot of extra money and standard adoption seemed too expensive, so we became foster parents.  We met a little boy named Miles.  He was three months old and being fostered by a really great family.  We met with them and saw this beautiful boy.  His adoption seemed like it was a sure thing.  His birth mother had lost all her other kids.  Her rights would be terminated and we would be able to adopt him.

Long story short, her rights weren't terminated.  I loved that baby as my own.  I had surrendered to him, and then he left.  It tore me up more than I can describe.  Meg and I struggled to understand why it had happened.  We loved him and not only was he not with us, he was probably in a dangerous place.  We couldn't console each other, and we dealt with our pain differently.  I remember laying on his bedroom floor inconsolable. That's when I started running.  Running helped me heal.

The good part of that story is we met our daughter Bre during the process of losing Miles.  She was the most beautiful little girl I'd ever seen: 2 1/2 years old with long brown hair down to her waist and chubby little cheeks.  We fostered her, and this time we were able to adopt.  I remember standing on that front porch, pictured above, before we went to the court house.  It was a huge day in all our lives.  I felt the gravity of it, and I was proud.

We went from living our lives for ourselves,s without a real care in the world, to going through heartbreak and the adoption of our first child in about one year.  I don't care who you are: that is a shock to the system!  We grew up a lot during that year.

A few years went by:  Bre learned how to ride her bike in front of our house, she lost her first tooth, and we worked through the challenges of her first couple of years.  We became so proud of her.  Her strength inspires me.  She'd bounced around the system a bit before being adopted by us, but she came through her first couple of years!  She marches on.  I think of her strength a lot when I run.  

For our next child, we decided to do a standard adoption to eliminate the heartbreak we'd experienced during fostering.  A few months after being in the adoption program, we got a call that we were selected by a birth mom and she was having a baby boy in less than 2 weeks.  Here we go! We were at the hospital the day after he was born.  It didn't take a second to fall in love!  We took him home.  I remember watching Meg with him in our bed.  It felt so good and so right.  But we got a call the next day, and the birth mom wanted him back.  We had no choice:  it was happening again!  The same caseworker who helped us bring him home just a night ago came the next afternoon to pick him up.  My folks came over to help us.  I remember standing in our living room and crying with my family... in the same room where I cried with my father when Miles left.  I passionately told my parents and Meg, "Fuck this world.  We are not going to let it take us down.  We are going to Disney Land with Bre.  It's us against the world."   Later that day, my dad and I brought Bre to the sledding hill right down the street.  She needed to be happy, and it was our responsibility to help her.  

We were on a plane a day later.  Our first night we sat on the beach watching Bre play as the sun went down.  I was tucking it all away, deep inside.  I was going to be strong for our family.  We went to Disney Land and it was perfect.  Bre was so happy.  We actually had a great time.  We had been through this loss before.  We weren't going to let this get us:  we grieved, we laughed, we ate, we healed.  Then the night before we left Disney, we got a call:  his birth mom changed her mind again, and Brady was coming home!  We weren't cursed!  We brought him home for the second time, and worried for the next six months before the birth mom could legally relinquish her rights.  He stayed!

Brady is the energy and personality for our family.  He completed our family.  He was such an amazing gift.  He has a gravity about him that pulls us all together.  There are too many memories to count with him.  He loves to play in our back yard and it's so fun to watch him explore.

We celebrated many holidays in this house, the last being with Meg's mom and dad, her brother and sisters and their families, Meg's aunt, uncle and cousin and our children's Great Grandpa.  I'll always remember Grandpa Great sitting in our living room on a chair giving all the kids books for Christmas.  It was also the first time I really got to know him.  Before the holiday, I'd freaked out about how we would manage Christmas at our house.  The family came together and it was very special.

Shortly after that we had a surprise:  Meg was pregnant!  Total shock.  We were so excited and a little scared.  We were sleeping when Meg's water broke.  We called my mom to come and watch the kids.  What a surreal feeling.  Deep down I prayed that everything went right.  Watching Meg give birth was the most amazing thing I ever witnessed.  Her strength was amazing and then we heard Ryder cry for the first time.  I felt so blessed!

I remember his first night in our bed.  These are the moments that pass by too quickly.  A month after Ryder was born we found out he has CF.  You know what?  We had grown up a lot.  We were ready now.  All the pain, tears, fights, celebrations, professional and personal accomplishments had prepared us to be the family we are today.  This house saw it all.  We filled up our walls with pictures of our kids and vacations.  Our garage became a parking lot for kid toys instead of our cars.  Through the struggle we became who we are today.  We made sacrifices and became proud of our lives.  I say this because I don't know if we would have made the right choices without the  fight that we had.  We fought for each other, our kids and our home.  This time the CF diagnosis wasn't a curse.  It was just another challenge, and after all we've been through we've learned that nothing worth having comes easy.

In two weeks we will walk out the front door for the last time.  I don't think either of us have had a key to the front door in over a year.  We would always go through the garage and that door would be unlocked.  It's just one of the stupid things you do.  We will be leaving behind a lot of memories.  We will be leaving the place that made me a man.