I grew up in a nice house in a decent town. We had trash pick up, a good sized yard for the middle of town, got our own bedrooms, and lived near parks and libraries that we could walk to.
Then, right when puberty hit, we moved. The family land; a farmhouse with all the quirks, mice, land, and charms an old, poorly renovated farmhouse could have. We spent a time living there with my grandfather, my best friend (who happened to also be my cousin) lived down the street, we had a trampoline in the back yard and chickens in the front.
To say I lived a charmed life is perhaps an overstatement but I was generally happy. It was a struggle to move an hour away from my town friends but I made new friends soon enough and hardly ever thought twice about what it was actually like to live in a constant construction zone as my father took on the years-old farm house.
Of course, I had the small-town dream of “one day I’m going to get out of here!” I fully planned on getting married and moving ‘back to civilization’ one day, knowing that as soon as my best friend left the neighborhood a great deal of its charm would go with her. It’s normal to leave your parent’s house, your old neighborhood, and start fresh somewhere when you grow up, right?
And grow up I did. When I was 17, four years after moving into the farmhouse, I met the love of my life. When I was 18 he asked me to marry him and we quickly got our courthouse wedding. When I was 19 we gave birth to our oldest son. And in the meantime, we were still living in the farmhouse.
But that wasn’t the plan! He was buying me a house when we were engaged; a tiny cottage in a development that had HOA fees and a lot of rules but there was a lake and we both pretended we could deal with the strict rules because my dad had told him we had to have a place to live to get married.
We were supposed to close on the house the day after our honeymoon. The homeowner decided at the last minute not to pay some fees he had verbally agreed to pay and suddenly we didn’t have enough money; short by $10,000. That’s a lot to spring on an 18 and 20 year old. So suddenly we were in a hotel with nowhere to go, and all our stuff was in boxes at my parent’s house. They kindly said my old bedroom was still available and we could of course move in while we looked for a place.
In the mean time, the day after I had left home, my parents had opened their home to another woman who was also facing homelessness. So we had gone from living as a family of four in a five bedroom house, where my sister and I had our own bedrooms and a common room and a bathroom in our own part of the house, to a very cramped 6 people squished into the same space with 3 households worth of stuff shoved between us.
The lady who lived there only stayed a month or two, but we stayed much longer. Homes were hard to find, even harder to get financing due to our age and lack of credit. My husband didn’t want to rent, because his income was so inconsistent, but buying was almost not an option.
So I spent my pregnancy in my childhood bedroom. My family generously rearranged things so we could have the upstairs space with two bedrooms and a bathroom. We welcomed our son home in the same house my grandmother had welcomed my dad home in. And he ended up spending his first birthday there as well.
In all this time, my discontentment was growing. What had started as being grateful for a place to live turned to resentment; my mother and I strained our relationship as we both tried to captain our households. I was frequently frustrated with my husband for refusing to just rent an apartment, but I knew that he would never be able to thrive in an environment where we had to share parking spaces. I was often angry, but tried to make the best of only getting to cook dinner for my family once a week.
One day, a for sale sign appeared in the neighborhood. My great uncle who lived down the hill had moved in with his son and stopped paying the mortgage on his home, so the bank sold it to a realty company in another state. Curiously, we walked down and peered through the windows. It needed work. Actually, it probably needed a lighted match and a fresh house, but we called and the company was willing to finance anyone regardless of credit.
I vividly remember signing papers, rereading the contract to make sure we were safe, sitting in the car one day as my husband spoke on the phone with the lady who handled our house as she told him the combination to open the doors and get the key. The house was ours.
Okay maybe not ours yet; we still had several years before we paid it off. And we couldn't move in because we couldn’t actually walk through the front door without tripping on trash. But we had prospects now and it wouldn’t take long to finish, right?
I can laugh about it now.
It took us months just to clean the trash out of the living spaces. We spent days tearing down hornet infested trailers scattered everywhere on the property. We ripped the bathroom down to studs and had to replace the floors, walls, tub, sink, toilet. We repainted, we cleaned, we put in floors; we took everything out and then had to figure out how to put anything back in.
All this between my husband still working. And then loosing his job. And then searching for something else to make a living. So we still lived with my parents for close to a year after we had the keys to our house. And every day that we didn’t spend working on the house I spent angry. Because I felt like my husband didn’t care how much of a struggle it was for me to live there, and mentally I was battling myself because I had never even left the neighborhood that I swore I’d leave in my dust.
But one day, the day came. I packed things into my car, my mom and I moved things down the hill, I was buzzing with excitement. It was a month after my son’s first birthday, it was still cold out, but spring was in the air and suddenly nothing looked so bleak anymore.
That first night was bizarre, as it always is when you move to a new environment. It was creepy and cold. The window in our bedroom was broken and the wind howled through the cracks all night. It was April, and while it was decently warm during the day, it was still very cold at night. My son’s bedroom was carpeted and curtained and warm with a heater, but the rest of the house was very cold.
I don’t remember the first morning anymore. It was years ago, and time obscures even what feels like a huge deal in the moment. I do remember how excited I was to take charge of my home, and how quickly reality set in.
We had indeed cleaned the house. The living area was free of trash, but we had several doors closed to areas that still needed cleaning. But that was hardly a concern when we first moved in. The bathroom and my son’s room were finished enough to be usable, but that was it. We had a refrigerator, but no stove, no oven, no kitchen sink, no counter, not even a hot water heater. No washing machine, no dryer. No internet. We had a bed, a crib, the fridge, a recliner. We had a tv and some DVDs, my son had his toys, we had a handful of books, plates, pots and pans. But we had been living with my parents for 2 years, we had huge gaps in what we needed that had been filled by their stuff.
So we went to the dollar store and Walmart and bought a toaster oven, my parents gave us the old induction top from a camper my grandfather had kept for some reason, and I bought some bins to wash dishes in. I got cold water from the bathroom sink, boiled it on the single eye I plugged in at the kitchen table, washed dishes with that. I heated premade chicken nuggets in the toaster oven, I boiled pasta on the camper eye, and I tossed dirty dish water out the door into the yard. And I was so grateful for the sun shining through the front door of my own house, so thankful for having my own dishes to wash, so thankful for having a home of my own.
The cold water got old fast; it takes a long time to bathe when you have to fill up the tub one pot of boiling water at a time. So within a week, my husband bought a hot water heater. He installed it in a room that was shut off from the rest of the house because the floor was half rotten, but the pantry was fine and a perfect place for the hot water heater. We swore we would fix the floor and make that back into the kitchen like it used to be before winter. We didn’t.
Hot water is such a blessing when you haven’t had it in a while; and it wasn’t even that long. We took hot showers and I pulled already heated water for dishes. We hosted a housewarming party and I washed the guest's dishes in my little pans. It was all so exciting.
It was also very hard. It was about a month before we got a kitchen sink, and even longer before we plumbed it in. It was a shop sink, definitely not what I wanted but I was grateful to have it. I would fill it up with water from the bathroom, and then drain it one pan at a time into the old dish washing bins and then dump those outside. Eventually, after many more weeks like that, my husband ran a drain line outside and I could just pull the plug to drain water, and he ran hold and cold water to a spigot that was too short and broke my back but it was still running water.
Next came a stove. A used stove from a college frat house with rust stains running down the side, but now I could cook with four working eyes, and even though the handle was broken, the oven worked. It took a while but we got a handle for the oven door and almost 6 years later that stove still runs and works just fine.
My mom found a dishwasher for $25 from the 70s and bought it as a gift for us. We ran the water to it, and drained it into the sink. If you filled it up too much on top the whole thing would tip over. One disaster later, my husband screwed it to the wall.
We built our own ’counter’. It was (and still is) wobbly. But it has shelves and it is a surface to put appliances on and store things in. We laid out the kitchen in a corner of the living room, and it’s small. But there were cabinets! And a place to cook and eat! And I was so thankful!
The washer and dryer took a lot longer to get around to. I washed clothes in the bathtub and hung them to dry on the porch because the front yard was still full of trash, or I took them in baskets to my mom’s house and spent the day there, or when my mom and I weren’t getting along because I was young and angry sometimes, I would go to the laundromat. It was like that for over a year.
Eventually, we got the washing machine and dryer. They came from an auction and were loud and I had to go into an outside room where it was very cold but I was so thankful that I could push a button and have clean clothes. We got internet too, close to a year later. It was slow as molasses, and only thanks to our neighbors sharing were we able to get anything at all.
Somewhere along the way, I started to grow discontent. I wanted things finished and I wanted them pretty. I was no longer happy with the ugly but useful stove. I didn’t appreciate our pretty, tiled shower surround because I couldn’t see past the cracked, peeling ceiling in the bathroom. We had mice, we had an eyesore of a trailer in the driveway (which was a whole other set of frustrations with renting that out), everything worked but nothing worked perfectly. I didn’t have enough storage, I didn’t like what things looked like, the house wasn’t finished, and I was impatient.
During this time, my husband had lost his job and was trying to figure out what to do next. He’s not a 9-5 type of man, he’s very independent and the only thing he likes being tied to forever is me. But I made his life miserable with my constant complaining and begging him to buy me a house or at least rent one that was closer to finished.
I broke him down. Our marriage was strained but he loved me so much and wanted to make me happy. Eventually, when business ideas kept not working out, he got that 9-5. It started with him taking the trash from rental houses and ended with him sitting at a desk everyday. A desk, in an office, under a burning, fluorescent light. The highlight of his day was deciding which takeout food to order for lunch and staring out the tiny sliver of a window at the outdoors where he longed to be. He needed an on-paper, steady job to buy me a house, in the hopes it would make me happy, and he was living through his idea of hell to make it work.
In all that time, the renovations stopped. Every time he did fix something or make it look a little nicer, I immediately gave him another expensive, time consuming task. He stopped trying on the house because I made it miserable. I became more miserable because he stopped trying. We couldn’t buy anything because we didn’t have enough money unless we wanted another project house, and if we had gotten a mortgage, it would have meant he was trapped forever behind a desk.
This man, my amazing husband, was miserable. He worked so hard to figure things out and make it work for us, but it was never enough. His hobby is fixing cars and we knew we needed space for him to store his projects. If he’s not busy outside he’s pacing like a caged animal. He wanted a garage, but we only had a kind of muddy driveway, 3 acres of land that was mostly swamp and mud, and an old barn full of other people’s stuff. It was a lot more than other people have, but it was going to take a lot of work to make it useful, and instead of helping him reach that goal, I was tearing my husband and home apart with my constant complaining.
While he was working that 9-5, I tried to be helpful, even though I ultimately made things worse. I got several jobs over several months, each one ending when it inevitably conflicted with my duties for my family. It reached a boiling point when I tried to make it work by getting a job at a ski slope. It was a ‘fun’ job that sucked up all my time. It was a culture of drugs, parties, hookups, and spending time on the slopes at the expense of all else.
I had a foot in both worlds; I was a wife and mother, and I was a fun-loving loyal employee. Jesus was right to say you cannot serve two masters.
I learned a valuable lesson whilst at the ski school. At the beginning I toed the line between my conflicting lives. I went to the parties but didn’t partake in the drugs. I hung out with everyone but I turned down men flirting too hard. It was a difficult balance to be fun but responsible. While there, my husband found a house and we started the process to buy it. He was tiredly happy to see me happy at the prospect but ultimately it fell through because of finances and how much work it would have taken to live there.
Towards the end of the season, my husband took our son to visit family in another state and I stayed behind because I had to work. The chasm between me and my family was ever widening, and I used the days they were gone to hang out until late on the slopes or at friend‘s apartments. I thought I was having a good time. But situations kept coming up that made me not only uncomfortable, but felt downright dangerous. I still refused to be part of the drug and hookup culture, but you can only be around it for so long before it starts to drag on your life.
By the time they came home, my heart had abruptly changed. I longed for home, for family, and I knew I wanted to make our house into our home. I asked my husband if we could have another baby, as the selfish desire to stay young and cool and not have a bunch of kids evaporated when I saw how lonely my then 4 year old was. I made the conscious choice to stop complaining about our house and just make it work, so my husband didn’t have to work a job he hated just to buy me another house.
I finished that season at the ski slopes, another month of work. It was a long month, but there was a light at the end of the tunnel. I worked to switch my schedule so my son could come to work with me and I could work towards being a more attentive mother. As soon as the season ended I went home, and I have been home ever since.
It’s been 3 years now since I had that moment at the ski slopes. Since then, I’ve given birth and am pregnant again. My second pregnancy started me on a journey towards reading the Bible. Although I was raised in a Christian home, I had strayed very far from what I had been taught, and needed to discover it for myself in order to fully appreciate the majesty of God, and the sanctity of what has been done for mankind.
While my journey to thankfulness and contentment began on a bench at the ski slopes, it took form and had a purpose as I began reading my Bible. It wasn’t a lightbulb moment; there’s been many dark days and struggles since then, but when I peer back in time at a young woman who thought she was happy because she learned the value of her family, I barely recognize her compared to the woman I am today.
There is no ‘happy ending’ to this story because it is far from over. Our house isn’t finished, and as other homeowners can attest to, likely never will be. My husband and I still both have our days where we look longingly at expensive mansions in remote parts of the world and daydream about how nice it would be to have a house like that. But now we both agree that we are grateful for the experience, and home, we have here.
When I first came home, my husband didn’t believe me when I said I was done searching to leave. We even looked at other houses during that pregnancy, but ultimately decided not to buy. We still look at houses on occasion, because it’s fun, and because we know that God can use any time or situation to change our living space, and we want to follow wherever He leads.
My heart change didn’t follow with my husband immediately finishing our house. It didn’t come with a sudden fancy for housekeeping and homeschooling. It didn’t come with automatic contentment and an always quiet spirit. It took close to a year of me quietly cleaning and putting up crooked shelves on my own for my husband to realize I meant what I said. It took a pandemic for me to realize that homeschooling was the best option for our family. I still have days where cleaning and cooking sounds like drudgery and I don’t want to, but I’ve learned that putting my hand to the plow and not looking back is an important part of being happy and content.
Our struggles didn’t vanish with my complaints; I still go into a freezing cold outdoor room to wash laundry, the bathroom ceiling is still peeling, there’s still an unfinished room with a hole in the wall that lets the wind rip through on really cold nights. But I also have a place to wash my laundry, I have a nice bathroom with a hand-tiled shower, I have enough rooms in my house to make space for my soon-to-be three children. And now, thanks to my sweet husband, I have a spigot on the kitchen sink that not only is long enough to let me wash dishes without back pain, but it also has a super cool light on it that fills a need I didn’t even realize we had.
I've learned a lot since I was a young girl moving to the country in a house full of mice (I still live in the country with a house full of mice). And a lot of it I’ve learned from the example of my husband; godliness with contentment is great gain, and love covers a multitude of sins.
Our story isn't over. We still have a lot of work to do. But learning to be content and work hard with what God has given us has changed our lives, though our lives haven't outwardly changed.
"Whatever work you do, put yourself into it, as those who are serving not merely other people, but the Lord. Remember that as your reward, you will receive the inheritance from the Lord. You are slaving for the Lord, for the Messiah." -Colossians 3:23-24
"That is, everything you do or say, do in the name of the Lord Yeshua (Jesus), giving thanks through him to God the Father" -Colossians 3:17
"Always be joyful. Pray regularly. In everything give thanks, for this is what God wants from you who are united with the Messiah Yeshua"-1 Thessalonians 5:16-18
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