“Home isn’t always a place. Sometimes it’s the person whose presence makes you feel safe, loved, and like you belong.”
When people hear that I was raised by a single father, they usually respond with surprise. “A man raised a little girl?”
Yes.
And my dad did the very best he knew how and did extremely well at it. He carried a responsibility that I wouldn’t fully understand until I became an adult myself. He was a single father trying to keep a roof over our heads, food on the table, clothes on my back, and the bills paid. That meant he worked.
A lot.
As a little girl, I didn’t understand what it meant to carry that kind of responsibility. I only knew that Dad went to work and came home tired. Now I understand that working was one of the ways he loved me.
He was providing.
He was surviving.
He was making sure his little girl had what she needed. But while my dad was working to build the life that supported me, there was another person quietly taking care of the life happening inside of it.
My grandmother. And when I think about my childhood now, I realize just how much of it was shaped by her. Calling her my grandmother almost doesn’t feel like enough.
She was my guardian.
She was my caretaker.
She was my comfort.
She was the person I depended on.
In so many ways, she filled the space of both a mother and a father when my dad couldn’t physically be there.
She woke me up for school.
She drove me to doctor’s appointments.
She attended parent-teacher conferences.
She sat through school programs.
She cheered from the sidelines at my softball games.
She handled the ordinary things—the things that don’t seem extraordinary when you’re a child because you assume someone will always be there to do them. But someone was there.
Her. Again and again, it was her.
I never felt like I was being passed off to someone because my dad had to work. My grandmother never made me feel like taking care of me was an obligation. She made me feel wanted. She made me feel safe. She made me feel like I belonged exactly where I was. When I needed something, I knew I could call her. When something happened, she was the person I looked for. When I think of the word home, I don’t immediately think of a house or an address. I think of my grandmother. Looking back as an adult, I don’t know how she did it. She had already raised children of her own. She had a family, responsibilities, and a life outside of me. Yet somehow, she continued giving. She made room. Not just in her schedule. In her life. And in her heart. I don’t think I understood what a gift that was when I was little.
I do now.
She gave me something every child deserves—the security of knowing there was someone in this world who would show up. One of the other beautiful gifts that came with my grandmother was my cousin.
Technically, we were cousins. But “cousins” never felt like the right word for us. We grew up more like sisters. We shared adventures, secrets, scraped knees, laughter, trouble, and summers that seemed like they would last forever.
If one of us was getting into something, there was a pretty good chance the other one wasn’t far behind. Some of the happiest memories from my childhood have her standing right beside me.
I also had an older brother, eight years older than me. Because of the age difference, our childhoods existed in different worlds. While I was still playing with dolls and turning the living room into whatever imaginary place I had dreamed up that day, he was becoming a teenager. He had friends, interests, and a life that an eight-year age gap made difficult for me to understand.
I don’t remember many moments with him from those early years. Most of our memories together would come later.
Memory is funny that way. There are entire stretches of my childhood that feel like blank pages. And then there are moments so vivid that, even now, I can close my eyes and almost step back into them.
Some of those memories take me straight to Crooked River Ranch in Oregon where our family would go most Summers.
Every summer, our family would pack up and head there. I can still see the dusty roads stretching out ahead of us. I remember the dry summer heat against my skin. The smell of campfires after the sun disappeared behind the hills. The sound of crickets filling the evening silence. I remember climbing over giant sun-warmed rocks with my cousin, searching for tiny lizards that always seemed to be one step faster than us. We rarely caught them. That never stopped us from trying. And somewhere in so many of those memories was my grandmother. She would gather all of us kids together and take us down to the community pool. Those afternoons felt endless. We didn’t care what time it was.
Nobody was checking a phone.There was nowhere else we needed to be. Back then, summer wasn’t measured in days. It was measured in adventures. My childhood also had days on the lake with my dad.
Those memories are special in a different way. Dad loved water skiing, and I remember watching him glide across the water, cutting through the wake like he had done it a thousand times. To that little girl watching from the boat, he seemed larger than life.
He was my dad.
He was my hero.
During those years, he had a girlfriend who also became an important part of some of my childhood memories. She was patient and kind. She laughed easily, treated me gently, and gave me a glimpse of something I secretly wished for—a motherly presence. I don’t know if she ever realized what that meant to me.
But I did.
Dad would pull my brother, my cousin, and me behind the boat on an inner tube. We would laugh until our stomachs hurt. Sometimes we’d hold on with everything we had. Other times we’d go flying into the cold water, resurfacing and laughing so hard we could barely breathe.
Those moments felt endless. If I could step back into one day from my childhood, it might be one of those summer afternoons.
The sun warming my face.
My family nearby.
My grandmother watching over us.
My cousin beside me.
My dad is somewhere close.
The sound of the boat engine carrying across the water. For a little while, life felt simple.
Life felt safe. And maybe that’s what I remember most about my grandmother. She gave me safety in a childhood where there were already pieces missing. My mother wasn’t there in the way I needed a mother to be.I didn’t understand addiction or adult choices. I didn’t understand why some mothers stayed and others couldn’t.
I just knew mine wasn’t there.
But my grandmother was.
She couldn’t erase that absence, and she never tried to pretend it didn’t exist. Instead, she loved me in the space that was left behind. She showed me that motherhood isn’t always defined by the woman who gives birth to you. Sometimes it looks like the woman packing your things for school. Sitting beside you when you’re sick. Driving you where you need to go. Showing up to the game. Listening to the story you’ve already told three times.
Making sure you’re fed.
Making sure you’re safe.
Making sure you know that somewhere in this world, you have a place to land.
My grandmother was that place for me.
She was home.
As I grew older, though, I began noticing the difference between having someone who loved me like a mother and actually having my mother.
Girls at school talked about shopping with their moms. Doing their hair together. Talking about boys. Sharing secrets. Having those little mother-daughter moments that seemed so ordinary to them. I smiled along. But somewhere inside me, a little girl was wondering what that felt like.And that was the complicated part.
I was deeply loved.
I had my dad.
I had my grandmother.
I had family.
I had beautiful memories.
But a child can be surrounded by love and still grieve the love she wishes she had received from someone else. I didn’t have words for that then. I only knew there was a space inside of me that I couldn’t quite explain. At first, it felt like sadness.
Then confusion.
And eventually, it became something much heavier. But before that part of my story began, there was my grandmother.
The woman who showed up. The woman who helped raise me. The woman who gave me stability when I didn’t even understand that stability was something I needed. The woman who taught me, long before I could put it into words, that sometimes family isn’t about the title someone carries. It’s about who stays. Who shows up. Who loves you through the ordinary days. Who becomes the place you know you can always return to.
My dad gave me everything he could by working to provide for me. But my grandmother gave me somewhere to land while he did. And when I look back at that little girl now, I understand something she couldn’t have possibly known then. She wasn’t growing up without a mother figure.
She had one.
She called her Grandma.
And for so much of my childhood,
Grandma was home.
