I remember sitting on the floor of our rented room with Faith asleep in my lap, looking at the three twenty-dollar bills left in my purse. Sixty dollars between us and the street.
I got a job as a nurse’s aide at St. Raphael General Hospital the next day. I didn’t have a degree. I had barely finished high school. But the shift supervisor saw something in my eyes—desperation, perhaps, or determination. She put me to work cleaning instruments and changing sheets for five dollars an hour.
Faith grew up in the waiting rooms of that hospital. She did her homework while I finished the night shift. She learned to read between the smell of disinfectant and the endless white hallways. By the time she was eight, she knew how to take my order from the cafeteria and carry it to the nurse’s lounge without spilling a drop.
I worked sixteen hours a day—double shifts, triples—when they offered them to me. Every extra dollar meant one brick closer to having something of our own. I saved the money in a cookie tin hidden under my mattress because I didn’t trust banks.
In three years, I saved $1,200.
With that money, I bought a lot—a piece of land with no utilities on the outskirts of the city. So cheap that the seller laughed when I asked if the price was real.
“Mom, there’s no water or electricity there—just dirt and rocks.”
I didn’t care. It was mine.
I hired a builder who agreed to let me pay him weekly. Sunday after Sunday, I would go to see the walls of what would be our house grow. Faith would accompany me with her favorite doll, sitting on the piles of bricks while I argued with the foreman about every penny spent.
It took us four years to finish it—four years of sacrifices that Faith never truly understood, because by the time we moved in she was twelve years old and only remembered living in rented rooms. For her, the house was simply where we lived. For me, it was the result of blood, sweat, and sleepless nights.
I managed to connect the electricity by paying bribes that pained my soul. The water came two years later when the city finally extended the pipes to our area.
