Chapter Fourteen
Starting Over With Me
Eventually, I walked away from nearly two decades of my life.
I left the house. The land. The vehicles. The things Daniel and I had worked years to build.
What I took couldn't be loaded into a moving truck: my memories, my experiences, my children, and myself.
At the time, I wasn't completely sure who that last person was anymore. I was about to find out.
? ? ?
Starting over sounds exciting when people say it from a safe distance. A fresh start. A new beginning. A clean slate.
Actually doing it is different. Starting over means questioning whether you've made the right decision. It means accepting uncertainty because you've finally decided uncertainty is better than the life you were living.
I found another place to call home. It wasn't the life I'd spent years building, but it was mine, and the quiet belonged to me.
My older children were growing up and building lives of their own. My youngest daughter was still with me. I was still Mom, but motherhood was changing, and slowly I realized I had room to become something besides the person who spent every waking minute taking care of everybody else.
For most of my adult life, I had been somebody's daughter, somebody's mother, somebody's wife or partner. Even as a CNA, I was the person taking care of somebody else.
Now I had to answer a simpler question: Who was I when nobody else's name came after mine?
Neva. Just Neva.
? ? ?
I worked. Work had always been something I understood. You showed up and did what needed doing.
Slowly, I made my new home mine. Little decisions felt important. If I wanted quiet, I had quiet. I didn't have to negotiate my own existence.
At first independence felt strange. Then it started feeling good.
There is a difference between being alone and being lonely. I had spent years surrounded by people and still experienced loneliness. Now I could sit by myself and feel peaceful.
I began to understand that strength didn't only mean enduring whatever life handed me. Strength could also mean deciding, I don't want to live like this anymore, and changing it.
I had left property, land, vehicles, things with real financial value. But I had gained peace. You can't park peace in a driveway or put a price tag on it.
? ? ?
There was another truth waiting for me, the same one that had followed me since Paintsville.
Women.
I'd known my attraction to women was real since I was young. I'd been honest with Daniel about it. But knowing something privately and allowing yourself to live openly are very different things.
By then, I was tired of worrying about everybody else's reaction.
If I had survived losing houses, losing Dad, losing Mom, divorce, raising children, and walking away from almost everything I'd spent years building, what exactly was I still so afraid of?
I'd survived worse things than disapproval.
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By 2018, my life had changed. I knew I could support myself. I knew I could make decisions for myself. I knew being alone wasn't something I needed to fear.
Then, on May 13, 2018, I lost my brother Calvin.
He was only thirty-six years old.
Calvin wasn't just my brother. He was my only full sibling, the one person who had grown up beside me and shared the childhood memories that belonged to the two of us.
By then, Calvin had grown up, married, and had a son of his own.
Losing him took away a big part of my life. There are people who know the adult version of you, and then there are the people who knew you before you became any of those things. Calvin knew that little girl. He knew where we came from.
I had already learned what grief could do after losing Dad and Mom, but losing my brother was different. It felt like another piece of the family I had started this life with was suddenly gone.
Thirty-six was far too young.
I carried that loss with me as life continued moving forward.
Then I met a woman.
I didn't know what the relationship would become. For once, I wasn't trying to see the ending from the beginning.
I was a grown woman, a mother, a survivor, and after all those years of learning how to live for everyone else, I was finally beginning to understand how to live for myself.
For the first time, loving a woman wouldn't have to be a secret.