Single mother makes journey from darkness to light

ROUND ROCK—The gray clouds and rainstorms that trailed her from her East Texas hometown to Round Rock weren’t the only things dark in Brandi’s life on the day she parked in front of Family Care’s Reid House on the Texas Baptist Children’s Home campus.

“Darkness was my only friend,” said Brandi, a 28-year-old single mother who asked that her last name not be used, as she recalled that day in May 2007. “There was no light in my life.”

Brandi and Ruben visit with Resident Case Manager Marie Schmidt in the Reid House in Family Care at Texas Baptist Children’s Home. (PHOTO/Children at Heart Ministries)

In a battered compact car filled with clothes and her son’s toys, and with less than $20 to her name, Brandi arrived looking for a better life for her and Ruben, now 9. She hoped a brighter future, a career and an escape from the bad choices and guilt that had plagued her 10 years. But, as she sat in her car, she couldn’t move, frozen by fear.

“She was just a wreck,” said Marie Schmidt, the resident case manager who greeted her. “I sat in the car with her for an hour before she would come inside. She was very, very scared.”

“It was overwhelming,” Brandi acknowledged. “I had left my hometown, all of my family, all my friends. Now I was facing something unknown, living in a house with other women I didn’t know, wondering if I made the right choice.”

Brandi’s escape from her hometown was sparked by an abusive relationship with a man whose parting blow was to clean out her checking account. But she believes her problems when her mother was killed in a car accident in October 1998, when Brandi was 17.

“We were very close, but I was a typical teenager,” she says. “The night before her accident, we had a big argument about the guy I was seeing, and I said some ugly things. The next morning when I left for school, I was still mad and didn’t talk to her. I never dreamed it would be my last chance to see her, hold her or tell her I loved her.”

A burden of guilt 

When she arrived at Family Care—a program of Children at Heart Ministries—Brandi carried tremendous guilt from her mother’s death and the bad decisions that followed, her case manager recalled.

“Her body was alive, but inside she was completely dead,” Schmidt said. “For the first couple of months, I would get up in the morning and look in her room to see if she had left. Sometimes, I don’t know how she made it through. It took a year before she felt she was safe.”

Today, Brandi bears little resemblance to the frightened young woman who arrived at Family Care. Thanks to counseling, the unconditional love she found at Family Care and her acceptance of Jesus Christ as Savior, her life today is filled with light.

She and Ruben— a quick-to-smile youngster who says he is proud of his mom for all she has accomplished—have moved out of Reid House into transitional housing on the Texas Baptist Children’s Home campus while she waits for her name to reach the top of a waiting list at a local apartment complex. She works as a teacher’s aide in a local school and attends college part-time with a goal of becoming an occupational therapist.

Breaking down walls of fear 

The counseling she received at Family Care was crucial to her life change. She was able to break down the walls of fear she had built around her and all of the pain she kept inside of herself. She learned to trust, open up and talk about her feelings.

She also learned there is light in her life, thanks to God, whom she calls “the ultimate healer. He’s the only one who can pull you out of anything and give you the strength to overcome whatever you are going through.”

The changes in Brandi are startling even to those who have walked with her on her journey since she arrived at Family Care.

“I took her out for lunch on her birthday not too long ago, and it was like having lunch with a totally different person,” Schmidt said. “She’s excited about life, and she feels she has a purpose. I could hardly believe that was Brandi sitting across from me.”

Brandi has come to terms with her mother’s death and any unfinished business she might have felt she had.

“I finally let myself off the hook,” she said. “It used to be too much to bear and too difficult to talk about. So, I closed myself off from everyone. But I allowed myself to grieve, and I don’t have to carry that heavy burden with me any longer. She knew that I loved her more than words could describe, and I know that she loved me the same.”

What she has learned in the past 18 months also is helping her deal with her father’s terminal illness.

“Three months ago, I found out my dad has liver cancer and has six months to live,” she said. “Instead of being over-stricken by grief and letting it consume me and take the life right out of me, I have given that burden to God. There’s nothing too big for him to handle. He has given me strength to get through it.

“I’m very grateful for all he has done. God gets all the glory, not me. God never stopped loving me, even when I didn’t love myself. Because of him, my chains are broken off and I’m set free.”