Our little family of three was living just outside of the Simi Valley area just east of the 210 freeway in California. Long story short is that my work with a large hotel chain is what brought us out to California for a while and after our son was born I left the 24/7 hotel management lifestyle and and pointed our wagon train east to more familiar territory. We’d lived there in a 3-bedroom, 2 bathroom, end-unit town home that we purchased in 1998 for $112,000 and sold six years later for $275,000 during the California real estate bubble. Our son was 3 years old and we were moving back home to Colorado. I grew up in Colorado Springs and my husband grew up in Denver so somewhere in between was our goal for our new home so we would be close to both sides of the family who still lived in Colorado Springs and the Denver areas.
We sure had ideas of where we wanted to live and it wasn’t going to be in any neighborhood that was governed by a home owner’s association! We had enough of being scolded anonymously for leaving the broom on the porch, or parking in front of our garage, or not having the right backing on the curtains, or having to have a properly approved screen door. The plan was to be semi-rural, away from the city, lots of roaming room, and neighbors that were not a just stone’s throw away but more of a slingshot distance away and slowly acquire toys like quads, motorcycle, a tractor, and also animals like horses, goats, and a barn cat. As a kid, my family moved a lot with my dad in the Air Force. My mother, who passed away when my sister and I were young, was born and raised on a farm in Kentucky. As it turns out, I was always more of the country mouse and my sister is the city mouse. My brother, who came along after my dad re-married, is a crazy talented tekkie and has lived near Silicon Valley for many years very successfully. My husband grew up in the city but doesn’t like crowds so he was excited to look for a house outside of the frey as well.
The next person to touch our lives doesn’t even know, to this day, what a blessing she was for our family. We needed to track down a realtor who would help us with our new adventure relocating to Colorado. We didn’t have the time or funding to be going back and forth to look at homes between the two states. I don’t even remember how we found her, but Beth Ann Mott is the realtor who partnered with us. She found us a nice two-bedroom apartment with a balcony in a large complex with a 6 month lease we could live in while we settled in and was able to take our time looking for a home. To my knowledge she did not get paid for doing this because she knew if she could get us to Colorado with minimal stress about a living situation then she’d be able to find a home for us to purchase and she was looking at the long term business, not the short-term income.
After a 3-4 months of our new apartment living Beth Ann took us to see houses. Lots of houses. She stayed within our price range, tried to show us homes that were outside of the suburbs, we didn’t want a basement, had to have a good sized back yard, at least 3 bedrooms, and a bathroom connected to the master bedroom. We wanted Bailey, west Golden, Morrison, and other areas of west Jefferson County or even Gilpin County. She did find and showed us some, but gently also pulled us into non-HOA suburban older developments as well. One day she led us to a house in a cul-du-sac in and unincorporated pocket of the county. A neighborhood build in 1980 (my husband was years in construction and didn’t want anything newer than 1995 as he says quantity vs. quality started taking over then and he saw all the shortcuts builders took and subsequent problems). Big yard (almost 1/4 acre property), master suite with bathroom, no basement (although a split-level), no HOA, 3 bedrooms and room for a home office since I was a full-time admin assistant to several district manager for a tutoring company. It felt like home from the first time we entered even though it had been vacant for 6 months. Neighbors all around us. Not our ideal location, but the cul-du-sac with only 5 houses, very close to mountain access, and the house felt like it needed to be ours. This is the house we purchased through Beth Ann and we had no idea how important this location would be just a few months later.
Beth Ann knew we wanted to be semi-rural and she repeated a few times that the areas we were wishing for were farther from suburb/city conveniences than we realized and kept gently steering us back toward where we ended up living. To this day I believe God had his hand on her shoulder and she listened to His message telling her that we needed to not be far from conveniences, even if she didn’t realize she was listening at the time.
Just six months after we purchased our home in suburbia, I was pregnant and we were thrilled! My first ultrasound revealed a problem in the fetus, the amniotic fluid was trapped and building up in my baby’s bladder instead of circulating to help develop the lungs and other vital processes in the womb, and we saw a variety of neo-natal specialists. The bladder kept distending with amniotic fluid and there wasn’t much on the outside of the baby to swim around in. We had some quick physiology lessons from that moment on. The fetus swallows the amniotic fluid which develops the lungs with every swallow, then essentially ‘pees’ it out and swallows it again throughout the pregnancy — it’s how they ‘breathe’ in the womb. My baby was swallowing but something was preventing the recirculation of the fluid.
Doctors did an amniocentisis to see if I was eligible for in-uterine surgery to repair and save my child. The qualifications were no chromosomal abnormalities, the fetus had to be male, and the kidneys be without significant damage. We passed two of those tests and found out we were having a boy with no abnormal chromosomes. It was a relief until the doctor showed us that both kidneys showed significant damage due to all of that fluid backing up in the bladder. When you are pregnant you always want to see the heartbeat but you don’t think about what all of the other organs are doing and the kidneys weren’t able to perform their function even before he was born.
The doctor proceeded to tell us that even if our baby survived the pregnancy he would most likely have a compromised quality of life. We couldn’t believe the words we were hearing. He continued to paint a dismal picture of a future high schooler who would have a hard time making friends, left out from his prom, and the general burden it would be on us and any other kids we would have. He then spoke the words I never thought I’d hear a doctor say. He said, “Many couples elect to terminate the pregnancy and start over.” I couldn’t believe it. This is not a project in woodshop that was cut wrong so I just “start over”. This is not a cassarole that I dumped too much salt into so I just “start over”. This is not a diet that I started then binged on a quart of ice cream and had to “start over”. This is a human being with a soul that was known to God even before he was known to us. No, we wouldn’t be a “start over” sort of couple. We would be leaving it in God’s hands to fulfill his plan for this little one and for us.
Our realtor, Beth Ann, from a few months ago was finding home for other families and living her own life, not even knowing what a significant contribution she had by finding us our home in a place that wasn’t our ideal choice.
Stay tuned for Part 2 of 2: In The Beginning — But if you try sometimes, you get what you need.