How I Found My Home

I created this printout to help me with the vision of the next chapter of my life

I don't really believe in miracles. But I have noticed that when you get very clear about what you need, life starts helping.

The beginning of 2017 was the hardest stretch I have lived through. I had just turned forty. Odin was five, Athena was three, and my husband and I were still living together while we negotiated a separation agreement that was going nowhere.

It was a twilight zone. The old life was over and the new one had no shape yet.

When an apartment came up for rent in our condo building, I took it without thinking twice. My mother lived in the same building and was my main help with the children, so staying close to her was the only thing that made sense. The apartment gave us somewhere to land. I knew it was temporary.

Once we moved in, the question I couldn't put down was: what happens next for us?

Should I buy a house? Where? Could I afford it? And what about my mother?

If I bought a house somewhere else, would she come with us? The basement? I couldn't put my mother in a basement. I also couldn't carry a house and her apartment both. And as much as I loved her — I knew I couldn't live under her microscope every day. I was trying to build my own life too.

Then one day the answer was obvious.

I should buy a three-bedroom in our own building. High floor, overlooking the park.

There were about seven units in the whole building that fit, and they almost never came on the market. Being a Realtor, I set up a search.

Then I did something less practical. I printed the floor plan of the unit I wanted and put a photograph of me and the kids on it. I wanted to be able to see us there — a small picture of a future I had no idea how to reach.

In May, one of the seven came up.

Not for sale. For rent.

I wasn't looking for another rental. I had just moved and signed a year-long lease. But it was one of the seven, so I asked the owners whether they would consider selling instead.

I expected a no. It was a long shot and I knew it. I asked anyway, because it was the unit.

They said YES. Really? What do I do now?

I had a yes and nowhere to put it. My divorce wasn't settled. My finances were tangled up inside it. I had just signed a lease on another apartment. Nothing about that year suggested it was a sensible moment to buy a home.

But I knew what I had found. This wasn't simply a nicer apartment. It was the answer to a problem I hadn't known how to solve. My mother could stay close and still have her own life. The children could stay in the building they knew. I would have room for the three of us and still have a life of my own. And I believed that as a single mother I could carry this home and her apartment both.

So I kept going.

I made an offer, and we agreed on rent-to-own: I would rent for a year with an option to buy at the end of it. I asked my landlord to let me find replacement tenants for the apartment I was leaving, with my name staying on that lease through the full term.

None of it was clean. But it was a path.

A year later my divorce still wasn't finalized. But after years in this business I know good mortgage people, and they helped me find what was possible. I got the loan and I bought the condo.

That was almost ten years ago.

We have made this place completely our own. We love the views, the light, the rooms, the feeling of coming through the door. My mother no longer lives in the building, and the circumstances that made this home so necessary are long gone.

The home stayed.

It is our fortress — full of peace, home cooking, friends around the table, children growing up, a lot of love.

And here is the part that still gets me. None of the other six units has come on the market since.

I still don't know whether I believe in miracles. But I know that the door that opened for me was never supposed to be a door. It had a FOR RENT sign on it!

At our dining room table. Our dinner and the table are still going strong!