The People Who Actually Raised Me

There is a question you have never had a clean answer to.

Somebody asks about your parents. And there is a pause, about a half second long, while you decide which version to give. The short one, which is not accurate. Or the long one, which requires explaining, and turns a passing question into a whole thing, and makes the person's face do something you did not ask for.

So mostly you give the short one. And walking away from it there is a small feeling you have never bothered to name, which is that the person who actually raised you just got left out of a sentence about your own life. Again.

She is the one who was there at seven in the morning. She is the one who found the coat. And on a form, in a conversation, in a sentence about where you come from, she does not have a word.

The word that does not exist

Start with the simple fact, because I think naming it plainly helps.

English is bad at this. There is no clean word for the woman who raised you who was not your mother. Guardian is a legal term and sounds cold. Grandmother is accurate and enormously incomplete. Foster is a category, not a relationship. Aunt covers about ten percent of what she was.

So you have been forced to describe a central fact of your own life using vocabulary that was built for something else, and every time you do it, it comes out slightly wrong, and the wrongness is not your fault.

You have been living a true thing that the language has no room for, and the absence of a word for it has never once made the thing less real. Esther 2:7 says Mordecai took his uncle's daughter for his own daughter, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that ordinary rather than a special case.

And your mother or your father, whoever it is who was not there, is a real person in this too. There were reasons, and they may have been terrible reasons or sad ones or ones you were never told, and you are not required to decide about any of that today in order to be allowed to name who did the raising.

Both things can stand. Somebody was absent, and somebody was there.

You are able to name the one who did the raising without settling anything about the one who did not, and holding both has never once been disloyalty. The Spirit of God is the one who keeps a person from being forced into a verdict they have not reached, and it is written in Esther 2 that a man took a child for his own daughter.

Mordecai took her for his own daughter

and when her father and mother were dead, Mordecai took her for his own daughter. (Esther 2:7, King James Version)

Read what that sentence does not do.

It does not apologize. It does not explain. It does not mark the arrangement as unusual, or provisional, or second best. It records this the way it records everything else in the book, as a plain fact of the household: her father and mother were dead, and Mordecai took her for his own daughter.

For his own. That is the whole phrase and it is doing enormous work.

You were taken for somebody's own, and that has never once been a lesser category of belonging in the eyes of God. It is written in Esther 2:7 that Mordecai took her for his own daughter, which is the written word settling the question, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a person put down a word like foster and pick up a word like own.

And look what the book does next. It does not treat Esther as a person with a complicated origin who overcomes it. It treats her as somebody's daughter, raised, formed, advised, and it is Mordecai she goes back to when the whole thing gets serious. The counsel that saves a nation comes from the man who did the raising.

He is not a footnote in the story. He is the household.

You have a real household behind you, and the way a family came together has never once determined what it was able to produce. The Spirit of God is what makes that land in a chest rather than staying a nice observation, and Esther 2 records the arrangement without one word of apology anywhere near it.

What you have been quietly doing

Here is the thing I would like to name gently, because it is doing more work than you know.

The quiet thing that has been happening is a slight discounting of them.

Not consciously, and not out of ingratitude. It shows up in the vocabulary. She raised me, but she was my grandmother. He took me in. I lived with them. Every one of those sentences has a small qualifier in it, and the qualifier does the same job every time: it signals to the listener that this was not quite the real arrangement.

And you did not invent that qualifier. You picked it up from a world that kept asking about your real mother, as though there were an unreal one in the kitchen making your breakfast.

You have been handed somebody else's word for your own household, and no outside vocabulary has ever once had the authority to grade a family. The Holy Spirit is the one who gives a person their own words back, and it is written that Mordecai took her for his own daughter with no qualifier attached to it.

Consider what she gave up. Whoever did the raising was very often at an age, or in a season, or in a set of circumstances where raising a child was not the plan. Somebody rearranged an entire life around you, at a point when nobody would have blamed them for not doing it.

That is not a lesser love. On any honest reading it is a larger one.

You were chosen into a household by somebody who did not have to, and that has never once been the weaker version of being family. The Spirit of God is the one who makes a person able to receive that without it hurting, and Esther 2:7 puts the taking and the daughtering in the same short sentence.