Heidi's Story

Hello, my name is Heidi. I'm so glad I didn't know 30 years ago that today at 52 I would still be single and severely disabled for 17 years now. I would not have known how, with such losses and uncertainty, such a life could be good, too, with love, laughter, hope, encouragement, joy, and even satisfaction.

I was born and raised in Congo, Africa. My parents were missionaries, and for the first five years of my life, I had the wonderful blessing of a warm and loving family in a cross-cultural setting. My dream was to have the same kind of life when I grew up. But when I was 5 years old my dear mother died, suddenly and unexpectedly, of cancer, right after giving birth to her fourth child. My siblings and I eventually learned that our prayers for Jesus to send Mommy back to us were not going to happen. So we began praying for a new mommy, and we began asking every lady we knew, even married ones at first. It is another story of how single missionary "Auntie" Louise became our new mommy.

Daddy and our new mommy were kind and caring parents, but their Depression-era childhoods had taught them to meet suffering with a stiff upper lip, to keep going, to not dwell on the past. So that is what they expected of us. So I learned to be brave and "strong".

This Life

We wait, we long for, we pine after, … we desire, we yearn. We wait.

I wait

I am thirteen

Puberty explodes like a rash, an epidemic.

My girlfriends hold hands with boys we only months ago snickered at, turned up our noses at, as though their very essence was a disease. Now the disease appears to be, that my girlfriends can’t stop gawking over these same specimen. I decide to play along and choose my crushes. I crush my way through high school, waiting to be asked out. Waiting by locker stalls during break, waiting for a nudge in the hall, a simple “hey,” a nod. I wait, standing pressed against the wall, through all the slow songs on Friday nights in the darkened gymnasiums. I wait for an invitation to senior prom. I wait.

Through this waiting, I feel like it is not working, meaning me. Something is not working with me…my friends acquire boyfriends, hold hands, kiss, and I acquire journals, stashed by my bedside, full of wonderings and waiting.

{Wait: as defined by Webster’s: To be ready and available}

It is July.

I’m twenty-two.

My days of being a serial “crushest’ are about to end.