When my 22-year-old son’s girlfriend moved in with us, I thought I was being fair by setting boundaries. Bills were climbing, and I started to feel more like a hotel manager than a mom. One evening, I told my son, “If she’s going to live here, she has to contribute.”
He looked at me quietly, then said words that stopped me cold: “Mom… didn’t she tell you she has nowhere else to go?”
In that moment, I felt my heart drop. I had been so focused on the costs, the receipts, the grocery lists—yet I hadn’t considered what she might be carrying.
Later that night, I sat down with her at the kitchen table. With her hands folded into her sleeves, she admitted the truth. Her mother had passed away, her father was absent, and since 19 she had been moving from couch to couch, sometimes even sleeping in her car. “I didn’t want to be a burden,” she whispered.
Her words pierced me. Suddenly, the little things I’d noticed—her gratitude for leftovers, the way she folded laundry without being asked—took on a deeper meaning. She wasn’t just polite. She was surviving.
From that day on, I made a decision: she wasn’t a burden. She was family.
She began opening up more, sharing her dreams of becoming a nurse and the struggles that had pushed that dream aside. I watched the way my son looked at her—not just with love, but with the kind of loyalty that grows when you’ve seen someone’s pain and chosen to stand beside them anyway.
Continue reading on next page…