We never did have an empty nest.
J.R. and I have been raising kids for about 30 years now. We raised our son and daughter, and for the last nine years, we’ve been raising our grandchildren. Our oldest grandson came home from the hospital with us in 2017. Now we’ve got two grandsons and a granddaughter, and we’ve never really had that point where the kids grew up, moved out, and it was just the two of us.
We’ve talked about retiring together, getting an RV, and going somewhere. We have a camper, and we love to go camping. But right now, we’ve got three little ones at home, so I don’t know when that’s going to happen.
Our oldest grandson is just like our son, Trey. Those two are always playing football, frisbee, or something. Trey lives close by, and he’ll come over and they’ll get their boxing gloves out and go at it in the living room.
Our younger grandson is completely different. He’s more mechanically inclined. He likes taking little motors out of things and figuring out how to make something else work. He’ll take a motor out of a remote control car, hook a battery to it, and make his own little contraptions.
And now we’ve got a little girl in the house, too.
The boys ride their bikes all the time. We go camping together, and there’s usually somebody playing ball in the yard or the living room. J.R. has had health problems, but he’s still right there playing with them.
Sometimes I think about what we’d be doing if it was just the two of us. J.R. says it’d be boring. He doesn’t know what we’d do.
We’d probably get sick of each other.
And he’s probably right.
I grew up in Lebanon, Missouri. I’ve lived here my whole life. We actually live about a mile from where I grew up. J.R. moved around some because his dad was in the military, but he ended up here, too.
I’ve worked on an ambulance as an EMT since about 2002. J.R. spent 35 or 40 years building boats, and he taught computers at OTC for a while. We worked, raised our kids, and lived our lives like everybody else.
Then, in 2017, our daughter found out she was pregnant. She was struggling with drugs, and within six weeks, she was in jail.
I told her that if she had the baby, we’d take him. Back then, I had a little bit of hope that maybe one day she’d be able to raise him herself.
He was born while she was incarcerated. I went to the hospital in Jefferson City and brought him home.
That was one of the most overwhelming times of my life.
My mom had fallen and broken her knee, and my sister had muscular dystrophy. She was in a wheelchair and had a trach, so there were some serious medical things we had to take care of. I had been staying at my mom’s to help them both.
When we brought the baby home, I started going over there every morning with a newborn, taking care of my sister, and doing whatever needed to be done.
Then our son had an accident with a wood splitter and needed surgery. Around the same time, we found out the baby had a broken clavicle from birth. Before he was even three weeks old, he had to have surgery for pyloric stenosis. The following weekend, we were back in the hospital with a virus.
It was just one thing after another.
Eventually, we started getting past some of that. Then my sister had a stroke. Around that same time, J.R. went to the doctor and was told he couldn’t work anymore because of his shoulders. There wasn’t much more they could do.
My sister passed away unexpectedly that night.
I was living some of the worst days of my life, and we had this little boy who needed us every day.
Then, in November 2018, our second grandson was born. Our daughter was incarcerated again, and I went to Mercy Hospital and picked him up, too.
So now we had two little boys, 18 months apart.
Our daughter has continued to struggle with drugs over the years. She’s a good person. She just uses drugs. As much as we’d hoped things would change, the boys have been with us since the day they were born.
We’ve never wanted to keep the boys from their parents. They’re still their mom and dad, and we want them to have those relationships.
J.R. was home because he couldn’t work anymore, and I kept working. There was a time when I was working two jobs. We had the boys, and we were trying to figure everything out.
In 2021, we finally got legal guardianship. I used our COVID money to pay the attorney and court costs. We didn’t have much financial help. The boys had Medicaid, and we got a little bit of TANF, but we were pretty much doing it ourselves.
And that’s just what we did.
Our son has been a big part of the boys’ lives, and we’ve always tried to keep their family connections. They’ve never lived anywhere else. This is home to them.
Then this summer, our granddaughter came to live with us.
She had been living with her parents, but this summer, some concerns came up, and she came to stay with us. About eight days later, Children’s Division showed up at our house around eight o’clock at night. They needed to know right then whether she could stay with us or whether they needed to find another family.
J.R. said we’d keep her.
So now we had a little girl to take care of, too.
It’s been an adjustment for everybody. She’s getting used to being with us and being around her brothers. She’s started daycare, and she’s got a little cousin she loves playing with.
She’s only little. We’ve got hope here.
I think about the future a lot more now than I used to.
The boys are getting older, and we’ve kind of done the math on that. But with our granddaughter, when she’s 18, J.R. will be 78.
That’s what worries me.
How long can I keep working and making sure I’m providing for my family? How long can we keep up with three kids, financially and every day? With J.R.’s health problems, those are things I have to think about.
If you get to a point where you can’t do it, who’s going to do it then?
I don’t have an answer for that. I just know that right now, we’re doing what we can.
And we haven’t done it all by ourselves. Our family has been so supportive, and the people I work with have been great, too. J.R.’s sister Connie volunteers at Fostering Hope Closet. For a long time, I didn’t even know what it was. One day she told me I needed to go up there, and she explained what they did.
They’ve helped us immensely with the boys and now with our granddaughter. There have been things we couldn’t afford right then, or things it was going to take us a while to get. Having people there who understand that makes a difference.
Sometimes I think about the things other people our age get to do. J.R.’s brother goes to the casino, and I think, that’d be cool. Me and J.R. could go do that.
Then I remember we’ve got a little girl at home.
I mean, it definitely disrupts your life.
But like J.R. says, if we didn’t have any of them, it would be boring. He doesn’t know what we’d do.
And I think he’s right.
We never really had anything set in stone about what we were going to do when the kids grew up. We just figured we’d get there eventually.
Right now, we’ve got two boys who are always busy doing something, a little girl who’s getting used to all of us, and a house that isn’t very quiet.
It’s not exactly what we thought we’d be doing at this point in our lives.
But I don’t know what we’d do without them.
Michelle Brown, Grandmother, Kinship and Guardianship Caregiver
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