I never really understood the difference between a house and a home until I meet an amazing woman named Sheree. Through my church, I met a wonderful young family that consisted of a stay-at-home mother, and army dad and three young children. They seemed like the perfect family, so much so that I had even considered them role models. I never really knew how wrong I was until one day the wife left what I now understand as an abusive relationship. The husband had been mostly mentally and verbally abusive, constricting her in her personal, social, and even spiritual life. I never would have guessed but he had been inflicted this torture on his family for years. After this, there was a very long and complicated divorce and custody battle. Although we fell out of touch during this time, a wonderful community of women came together who helped Sheree, the wife, gain back custody and help piece back together with the life that had been momentarily shattered. Recovering from this depth of manipulation and cheating is truly inspiring to me. Sheree’s actions as she worked a full-time job for the first time, got her own apartment for her and her three kids, and enrolled in medical school to become a nurse made her much more a role model now than ever before. She reached out to me about a year and a half after her leaving her husband, about watching her youngest child once a week. I had been and still am very busy with school, sports, church, and work, but I knew that if I had the opportunity to help and serve this woman who was now stronger than ever, I had to. I offered to watch Eliza, her youngest kid every Tuesday, while she finished going to nursing school on those days. At this point, she had full custody and had an alarmingly busy schedule, as most single mothers have. When she called me about babysitting Eliza she had said that she didn’t know what she could pay me, but when Sheree walked back into her house, returning from school on the first Tuesday I had played with Eliza, I knew I couldn’t take any money from her. Seeing her in her scrubs was so heartening that when she reached out her hand with some cash I immediately protested. I just wanted to make her life easier. She gave me many life lessons but one specific talk we had has always stayed with me. Her former life with her ex-husband was in a house. It may have seemed to me, from the outside, like a perfect haven for a beautiful family. It was a house, with people living in it but nowhere near close to the home she has built for herself today. Now, her home is full of happy children running around, full of love and family. Home is where the people involved chose to be there and feels free to be themselves.
