The Foundation
Every house begins with a foundation. Mine was poured before I could even name it, in the choices my parents made when they were still little more than kids themselves. They were young — my mom still in high school, my dad working. We lived with my grandparents in those first years, and though I don’t remember that time, I’ve heard the stories from my parents’ friends: teenagers stopping by after school, seeing me as the baby in their circle. I was part of their coming-of-age in a way I didn’t understand until much later.
The psychology of being raised by teen parents is layered and often misunderstood. It means watching your parents grow up as you do, learning their own roles as adults at a pace set by necessity, not choice. Developmental psychologists sometimes speak of “parallel maturation” — the idea that a parent and child may both be navigating formative transitions at the same time, each shaping the other’s experience. As author Anna Quindlen observed in Loud and Clear (2004), “We grow into our responsibilities, just as responsibilities grow into us.” For many families, this strain can crack the concrete before it ever sets.
But somehow, they made it work. My mom balanced schoolwork with the work of caring for me, crossing the high school graduation stage not just with a diploma but with a child she was already raising. My dad took on full-time work, the kind of steady labor that kept food on the table and the lights on. I imagine they were exhausted more often than not, yet they kept building.
Brick by brick, they created something lasting. They bought a house. My mom went to college, working toward her degree in education and eventually becoming a teacher. My brother was born when I was four, and the foundation stretched to make room for more. There are whole rooms in their story I’ve never entered — details of their struggle, their marriage, their private fears. But I know enough to be grateful. As Irish poet John O’Donohue writes in Anam Ċara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom (1997), “The foundations of your belonging are laid down in the shelter of others.”
I remember the good things vividly: learning to read at home, my grandpa coming in for lunch and watching television with me, my dad coaching my soccer, baseball, and football teams. These moments were not decorative trim — they were the very concrete that kept the structure of my childhood solid.
Even now, decades later, my parents remain my rock. They have been there for every major turning point, steady in both crisis and celebration. I’m a teacher in no small part because of them — because my foundation was poured with both sacrifice and love. And when I look in the mirror of gratitude, I see not just myself, but the hands that laid the first stones.
The Frame
If my parents laid the foundation of my life, Robert built the frame. To say that the church was fundamental to my early development doesn’t even begin to unpack that period of my life. And if the church was so important, then it goes without saying that my youth pastor, Robert, was its embodiment.
I was raised in the Southern Baptist church, and those formative years shaped not only my faith but my sense of identity. I saw myself through the lens of the Great Commission — as someone called to evangelize, to live in a way that would bring others to Christ. It gave me a sense of mission and belonging, but it also strained my relationships with people outside the church. I measured friendships against the urgency of salvation, often placing conversion over connection. My sexual identity was equally shaped by that environment. I was dedicated to abstinence, not simply as a rule but as a defining part of my character. In my mind, these convictions were marks of moral integrity, proof that I was living as I was meant to live.
Robert was the living embodiment of that world for me. He was young, intelligent, and passionate in a way that made faith feel alive. From my first day in the youth group in sixth grade, he saw something in me worth investing in. We went on mission trips together — Kansas City, Birmingham, Phoenix, Fort Worth. He took me to my first concert, a Waterdeep show that felt like stepping into a world where music and spirit intertwined. He gave me opportunities to lead, in both teaching and worship roles, at an age when most people wouldn’t have trusted a teenager with that kind of responsibility.
Robert was my first true mentor. For nearly six years — from middle school through half of my senior year — he was a central figure in my development. He didn’t just teach me scripture; he taught me how to think about it, question it, and apply it. He gave me a framework of confidence and purpose that became part of my internal structure. As Carl Jung observed, “The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed” (Modern Man in Search of a Soul, 1933). In those years, Robert’s influence transformed me.
And then, suddenly, it ended. He was pushed out of my church and community in December 2000, halfway through my senior year. His departure was abrupt, and I was left to navigate the rest of that formative season without the person who had shaped so much of it. In the years since, I have rarely seen him and spoken to him less. It was a kind of death — not of the body, but of a living connection — and in some ways, it carried a Jungian weight. Losing Robert’s presence meant confronting the loss of guidance itself, and the understanding that the structures we rely on can be dismantled without warning.
Gratitude, I have learned, changes with time. The things I cared about then — the zeal of belief, the sense of certainty, the strict moral boundaries — are not the same things I am grateful for now. Back then, I might have said I was thankful for being “set apart” from the world. Now, I am grateful for the leadership opportunities Robert gave me, the trust he placed in me, and the ways he encouraged me to think critically — even if that critical thinking eventually led me away from the faith we shared. As David Whyte writes in Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words (2014), “Gratitude arises from paying attention, from being awake in the presence of everything that lives within and without us.” Time has shifted my attention, and with it, my gratitude.
I am an atheist today, and I see my Southern Baptist upbringing in context — as both a source of deep personal formation and of ideas I’ve since let go. I am grateful to the people of my church, and to Robert, for the sincerity of their care and the investment they made in me. I also recognize the narrowness of the frame they helped construct, one I would later remodel entirely. But the fact remains: without Robert, the house my parents began could not have taken shape. And perhaps that is one of the strange gifts of gratitude — it can honor the role someone played in your life without having to agree with the blueprint they were working from.
The Walls and Rooms
If my parents poured the foundation and Robert built the frame, then these people built the rooms I live in — spaces that gave shape to my inner life, each with its own character and purpose. They are gone now, but their presence is still felt in the way certain corners of my life are lit, the way certain doors open, the way the walls hold steady when the wind picks up.
It’s hard to talk about these people without getting emotional. The influence of those now gone can take on a mythic quality, as though in death we canonize them. But behind the myth are the real people — flawed, human, and still profoundly important. Their absence leaves rooms that are quiet now, but never empty.
Grandpa Ernie died when he was 65, and I was 20. He didn’t live to see me struggling toward the man I am today, and I often wonder what he would say to me now. Our differences were real — in politics, in temperament, in how we saw the world — but the love would still be strong. He taught me the value of steady work and the dignity of public service, having given twenty-five years to the water and electric department. His life was proof of Kahlil Gibran’s words in The Prophet (1923): “Work is love made visible.”
Dr. Glenn Colthorp, my college mentor, built a study with wide windows in my mind. He believed in my capacity to think critically and to contribute meaningfully, long before I had much evidence of my own potential. He asked questions that made me stretch, encouraged ideas that felt fragile, and never made me feel foolish for not knowing something. I never got to tell him that I finished my doctorate — a sentence that even now catches in my throat. As long as I live in that room he built, I will carry the ache of not having been able to show him the finished work.
Robin Hicklin and Tammy Burch, my first teaching mentors, built the first classroom I ever truly stepped into as a teacher. Robin died recently, a man in his fifties, still young in my mind. Tammy died of cancer, also far too soon. They showed me what it meant to hold high expectations while also holding space for struggle. They taught me that teaching is not simply about content, but about seeing each student as a whole person. Their absence still feels like missing walls — the kind that once defined a space and made it safe, now replaced with open air.
Fr. Steve Wilson built a chapel in my inner architecture. As a spiritual mentor, he invited me to wrestle with big questions, to understand that faith could be both deeply held and deeply examined. He died during COVID, also in his fifties, with years of plans still laid out before him. I expected to have him for decades more. His absence left the chapel quiet, but the light still streams in through its stained-glass windows. As Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in Letters to a Young Poet (1929), “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves.”
I thought I had more time with each of them. I expected their rooms to be lived in for years or decades longer. Each loss touches a nerve still very much alive in me, because these are not just the builders of my house — they are part of its load-bearing structure. Gratitude here is threaded with grief. As Joan Didion wrote in The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), “Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.” And when we do reach it, we find the rooms they built are still standing — rooms we return to, again and again, even if only in memory.
The Windows and Doors
Every house needs openings. Windows to let in light. Doors to step through into new spaces. In my life, these have been the countless people who, whether for years or for a fleeting moment, changed my perspective or opened a path I had not seen before.
Not all influence comes from those closest to us. Some comes from a single act of kindness, a well-timed question, or an unexpected opportunity. These are the people who became windows — showing me a broader view of the world, letting in the kind of light that makes you see old rooms differently. Others acted as doors — standing at the threshold of a new chapter, encouraging me to walk through, sometimes holding the door open, sometimes giving a gentle push.
I could try to list them all, but the truth is I would fail. Not because I don’t remember them, but because the list is always growing. Gratitude here is more like sunlight than a ledger — it spreads, it shifts, it catches on unexpected corners. As Brother David Steindl-Rast writes in Gratefulness, the Heart of Prayer (1984), “The root of joy is gratefulness… It is not joy that makes us grateful; it is gratitude that makes us joyful.” These windows and doors have taught me that joy comes not just from what I have, but from the ways I’ve been allowed to move and see.
There are teachers who never had the title “mentor” but left me better equipped to teach. Friends who appeared only briefly but gave me a lesson I’m still unpacking years later. Strangers whose generosity reminded me that goodness is not as rare as cynicism would have me believe. Students whose resilience reframed my understanding of my own.
These openings — whether grand bay windows or narrow side doors — remind me that my house is not sealed off from the world. It is part of a larger neighborhood of connection, and I am both a recipient and, I hope, a giver of light and passage. I am grateful not just for the rooms I live in, but for the ways in and out, the chances to look beyond my own walls and invite others into the shelter I’ve been given.
A Yearlong Journey
This year has been about looking in the mirror and tracing the lines of who I am back to their sources — humility in February, truth in March, wisdom in July — each month adding a different layer to the reflection. August, with its focus on abundance, feels like the moment to step back and see the whole structure. I am not the sole architect of my life. The house I inhabit was built by many hands, each leaving a mark that cannot be erased.
As a teacher, I seek to honor all of the people who built me by investing and building in others. Every lesson plan, every after-school conversation, every word of encouragement to a student standing at a crossroads is part of that work. It is my way of extending the architecture — adding new rooms, reinforcing old beams, repairing cracks where the structure has been tested.
Gratitude is not just backward-looking; it is forward-moving. It asks not only, Who gave to me? but also, What will I give to others? The people who shaped me — my parents, mentors, friends, and even those I no longer share beliefs with — did not invest in me expecting repayment. They built because it was in them to build. Now, it is in me.
In this way, abundance becomes a legacy. The walls and rooms others built for me will stand longer if I open my own windows, if I build for others to inhabit. And when I am gone, I hope my name will be one of many in someone else’s incomplete list — a reminder that they, too, were never building alone.