She Gave Me More

My family of four arrived in Tijuana, Mexico in September 2015 with all our worldly goods in a minivan. In November 2017, my family of three left with a different minivan packed with everything we owned.

My husband died the month before from lung cancer that not only took his life but changed our family forever. But then, our family started changing long before when we arrived in Mexico to work with Homes of Hope, an organization that built homes for those less fortunate on the northern peninsula of Baja. It was a mission that we were on and for two years, we found our own paradise amid beautiful people, a colorful culture, and immense poverty.

When we left after my husband died, we were broken. As mourning often does, my two teenagers and I turned inwards, and pain became our constant companion. We went home to family and a community that was incredibly generous and loving, but we were not the same and we didn't know if we would ever be.

But in June 2018, we went back. We decided to build a house in my husband's memory and raised over $10,000 to do so. We took a group of friends and family with us and together, we built a house for a husband and wife and their two teenage sons. It was such a bittersweet trip as we saw old friends who were continuing with the charitable work, but it was also a trip we needed to make. So, we decided to do it again and we raised the money we needed and went back in 2019. This time, we built another house for a woman and her two teenage sons.

This trip was different than the first. I thought, as a mom and a widow, that it should not hurt as much. That losing their father and my best friend should somehow be easier with time, but it wasn't. It was still hard as my teenagers expressed their grief and anger through fighting with each other and often with me. And I did not know what to do -- I didn't know how to make things better. So, instead, I chose to crawled into a deep hole of depression in our small home of pain.

When we went to the place where the house was to be built, I met the woman we were building the house for. She and her two sons had been living in a structure that was barely held together by twine and the three were sleeping in the one bed and sole piece of soft furniture that they had. A dirt floor and no door were what greeted us. A basin on a makeshift table was their kitchen and the electricity was a string of extension cords connected to a neighbor’s house coming through the window. As I was introduced to the mother, the translator explained that the home was being built to honor my husband and in his memory. The mother took my hand and smiled and explained that her husband had abandoned her with her two sons. I did not really respond because I was not sure how to.

Later that afternoon while my friends and family were working hard on the house, she came up to me dragging the translator with her. She said, "I have been watching you and you seem so sad. I understand what it means to lose the father of my children and my partner in life." I just stared at her unsure how to react. She took my hand once again and said, "I know it's not the same. My husband left me and now will not even see his sons. Yours is no longer alive and is unable to be the father he was. But we are the same. We now have children that need us. We have teenagers who are about to become adults and we need to be there to help them be the best that they can be. We can't give up. We can't stop being moms." She hugged me gently and added, "Don't give up and don't be sad. Our children are our hope."

I left that day with a lighter heart and a joy that had been missing for over a year and a half. My children and I may have been instrumental in giving her a Home of Hope, but she, without realizing, gave me something more. She gave me hope for my home.