I spent a good part of my childhood at my best friend’s house across the street. My home was turbulent, and hers was the exhale I needed. From the moment I woke up until the street lights came on, that’s where I was. Her mom used to make us fried bologna sandwiches. I loved her for that. Nobody willingly eats fried bologna unless the alternative is worse — and for me, the alternative was worse.
But I didn’t always feel welcome there. Her dad and brothers had a way of reminding me, matter of factly, that I was an extra mouth. Why are we always feeding you? Don’t you ever go home? Where are your parents? I learned early what it felt like to be a burden. And I carried the shame of that the way kids do — quietly, and for a long time.
Then high school came, and so did Carrie.
I started going home with her after school, and at some point I just never left. I became a fixture at her family’s dinner table. Then their vacations. No one asked questions. No one made me feel like a cost. Her parents, Linda and Bill Fisher, already had four kids of their own. There was no extra room, no extra budget, no reason to take on another. They did it anyway. They just absorbed me into their lives the way you absorb another blanket on a cold night — without ceremony, without calculation.
The same thing happened after I graduated. Another friend’s family opened their home while I was a cadet at the police department. Again, no questions. Just room made.
On Mother’s Day this year, I reached out to both families. Because I’m an adult now with grown children of my own, and I finally understand what they actually did for me. I told them. I tried to put words to something I’d been carrying for decades.
Linda Fisher replied with tears and a line that stopped me:
“I still have trouble wrapping my head around how much my matter of fact welcoming meant to you.”
Matter of fact.
To her, waking up one day with an extra kid in the house — eating her food, sleeping under her roof, piling into the vacation car — was simply what you did. It wasn’t a sacrifice she tallied. It wasn’t a burden she managed. It was just her default. Her normal.
And her normal saved me.
That gap — between what something costs a person and what it means to another — is the thing I can’t stop thinking about. Because Linda had no idea she was doing anything extraordinary. She thought she was just making room at the table. I thought I had finally found a place I was allowed to exist.
The same kid at someone else’s dinner table. Completely different experiences of what it meant to be there.
Here’s what that means for you.
Someone in your life right now is experiencing that gap. Someone who shows up at your door — literally or figuratively — is deciding, based on how you receive them, whether they are a burden or a gift. And you may not be thinking about it at all. You may be going about your day, making dinner, answering emails, running a meeting — completely unaware that your default is the thing that is shaping them.
The family across the street from me wasn’t malicious. They weren’t trying to make a little girl feel like an inconvenience. They just had a different default. Scarcity instead of abundance. Accounting instead of welcome.
And they never knew the difference.
So the question I’ve been sitting with is this: Are you the house people run to — or the house that sends them away?
Not in the dramatic moments. Not when someone explicitly asks for help and you rise to the occasion. But in the ordinary ones. The unremarkable Tuesday. The third time someone needs something. The moment when welcome would cost you just a little bit of comfort and you have to decide, without even realizing you’re deciding, what your default actually is.
Linda Fisher didn’t set out to save anyone. She just loved without keeping score. And for a kid who had learned to feel like too much, that mattered more than she will ever fully understand.
Most of us will never know who we’ve saved. We won’t get the Mother’s Day text. We won’t see the tears. We’ll just go on living our lives, matter of fact, never knowing that our ordinary was someone else’s everything.
The only question worth asking is whether your ordinary is a door that opens or a door that closes.
Because someone is standing on the other side of it right now.
