Translator: Aline Atsuta Braga Reviewer: Zsófia Herczeg
Have you guys ever had an idea
that was so big
you knew instantly it was going to change your life?
It felt absolutely perfect, all the way down to your toes.
And you knew this wasn't just one answer to your problems.
It was the answer.
All your friends listened, they wrapped you in a big hug,
then they smiled and said,
"Are you nuts? You can't do that!
We're all just a little bit worried about you, honey."
A few years ago, I had an idea exactly like this.
It was huge.
It was life-changing.
And everyone thought I was nuts.
My idea was to build a house with my four kids,
to actually build it with our own hands.
Now, the catch is we'd never built anything larger than a bookshelf.
But we didn't let that little detail slow us down.
We figured we could just build the whole thing
by watching YouTube tutorials.
(Laughter)
I know what you're thinking,
"Your friends are right, Cara. That sounds a little bit crazy."
My kids were 17-year-old Hope, 15-year-old Drew,
11-year-old Jada and two-year-old Roman.
A few teenagers and a toddler.
But this didn't feel like a radical move to us,
not at the time.
It felt like the most logical idea in the world,
like exactly the thing that anyone in our situation would do,
like a slightly larger than usual IKEA project.
(Laughter)
I mean, I get it now.
I understand all of the people
who looked at us like we have lost our minds.
I understand my parents and other sane people
trying to talk me out of this.
But we weren't coming from a sane situation.
For more than a decade, we have been stalked and terrorized
by a man with severe paranoid schizophrenia.
And when I married this muscled-up guy who I thought would protect us,
he became physically abusive.
My kids learned to push their dressers in front of their doors
to survive the night.
They learned to run and hide,
how to be small and how to be broken.
They didn't know how to just relax and let their guard down,
how to laugh or communicate as a healthy family.
We had just spent trudging down this path of mere survival for too long.
And you know,
sometimes it takes that radical move to change your trajectory,
this big crazy idea that will shift your momentum toward a better path.
And this idea to build a house would become just that.
And yeah,
we knew it would be more difficult than a normal family project.
We knew it would be 20-hour days of hard physical labor.
But we weren't a normal family.
We had been through hell.
Imagine after a decade of abuse, fear and stalking,
of waking up to find symbols drawn on your bedroom windows,
finding your pets tortured
and holding a man at gunpoint until the police arrive.
Imagine there hasn't been a single thing that you and your kids can do
to make your life better,
just to make it safe.
And then one morning I was driving the kids to school,
being one of those real overachiever moms,
I was warming two-year-old Roman's blueberry pop tart over the heat vent
(Laughter)
And then I saw my kids in the mirror:
their slumped shoulders, their haunted eyes
and their small, small futures.
I decided, right then and there,
we were done with all these failed little baby steps.
We were going to do something big,
something so crazy and massive
it would forever change the way we saw ourselves
and what we were capable of.
We also needed a safe, inexpensive place to live.
So, when this idea to build a house popped into my head,
you bet we jumped on that.
It was the first spark of something bigger.
The first hint
that we could take physical action
to literally build ourselves a better life.
So, we woke up every day, we gave it everything we had,
and then we gave it some more.
There's also a whole lot to be said
for hitting things really hard with a hammer too,
(Laughter)
for the power you feel when a saw blade rips through a sheet of plywood,
for how it feels to finally take action.
Unless, of course, you get in over your head.
Because as hard as it must be for you to believe
that as a computer programmer and an author,
I didn't actually know how to build a house.
It's true I was clueless.
I mean, I'd driven by construction sites in my lifetime.
And naturally, I always thought exactly like you guys are thinking right now,
"I bet that's really not as hard as it looks."
(Laughter)
Not for the first time I got myself in way over my head;
I seriously misjudged what we were getting into.
The kids and I had to actually google how to set a foundation block,
how to frame a wall, how to do plumbing,
how to run gas lines without blowing yourself up.
(Laughter)
We looked up each one of these things on YouTube,
and then we built it.
And we did this over and over until we had an entire house.
And if you think about it,
that is exactly how every massive goal is ever achieved.
You just make one big "can't go back now" decision,
and then follow it with lots of smaller leaps
that just keep you moving forward.
I can remember, though, the very first day
I saw my four kids standing out on this construction site,
in front of this enormous pile of 1,500 concrete blocks,
next to this mountain of two-by-fours and pipes and nails.
They looked so incredibly small,
standing there in worn-out old blue jeans,
plastic bags on their feet inside of their old tennis shoes
because we didn't even own rubber boots,
their little lips quivering in the winter cold.
I was as scared in that moment as I have ever been in my entire life.
Who wouldn't be?
I just armed my teenagers with power saws, nails guns and a hammer drill.
(Laughter)
But also because I knew in that moment
that every single day for the rest of our lives from this one forward
would, in some way, be shaped
by our level of success on this crazy project.
And what if we failed?
I had to keep fighting back this idea
that what if instead of empowering my kids,
I just set them up for the biggest failure of their lives.
Because I knew,
standing there with bread bags inside my warm tennis shoes,
I knew we could fail.
Exactly like every person who heard about this project had said we would.
My kids couldn't take another failure.
Neither could I.
Lucky for us, I made one risky move at the beginning of this project
that guaranteed our success.
I sabotaged our retreat
by spending every last penny
on these piles of supplies to build this house.
There was no way out.
The only way forward was to puzzle it all together into a house.
And we had exactly nine months to do it,
or we default on the construction loan I'd taken out to buy these supplies.
The stakes were high, the pressure was high.
And we'd been so low for so long
sometimes I had a really hard time measuring up,
especially in the early stages
when one of the first things that I had to do
was to somehow bring water onto this construction site.
Now, unfortunately, my plumber was absolutely terrified
of looking our water line down into the city main.
Maybe I should mention that I was my plumber.
(Laughter)
But not only was that water main more than 250 feet from our foundation,
it was on the other side of the street.
And the guy down at the permit office had told me rather sternly
that if I collapsed the street, I would have to fix it.
Now, becoming a street maker
was even lower on my list of career goals than becoming a house builder.
So, of course, I just kept putting it off,
proving that my plumber was also a coward.
Coward or not,
we still had to build this entire house in this very short nine-month deadline,
which meant to build the entire foundation of the house,
a process for which water happens to be essential.
The kids and I had to hike down to the neighbor's pond,
carrying five-gallon pails
in December and January.
We'd scoop up the water, head back up and dump it in a wheelbarrow
where we hand-mixed the mortar to set 1,500 concrete blocks
and build a foundation that's more than seven feet tall in the front.
And yes, I said we hand-mixed that mortar.
Don't even get me started on the state of my electrician.
(Laughter)
After we finally had all of these concrete blocks stacked up
and stuck together using pails of water,
we still had to fill that entire foundation with this powdered granite,
26 dump truck loads that we moved
by hand with shovels.
So, not only did we have a woman,
a few teenagers and a toddler building a house,
we were doing it kind of like you would in a third world country.
There were my kids dragging these concrete blocks across the mud
because they didn't have the muscle yet to lift them.
There they were hauling bucket after bucket of water
up from this half frozen pond.
There they were, laughing at me for falling on my butt in this muddy mess.
Again.
But what do you know?
There we all were together building the impossible.
After we had this foundation finally finished
and I gathered the courage to hook that water line down into the city main,
it was actually no big deal, went off without a hitch.
Countless times, my kids and I would crowd around some daunting new project
without a single clue between us
of how we were supposed to accomplish a diagonal wall
or maybe a staircase landing.
So, I would shout,
"Bring me a two-by-six. I'll make the first cut."
When the one and only thing I knew for certain was
that this was not how you do it.
But it was my job to keep the momentum going,
to keep the confidence up,
to fake it until I figured it out.
So, there I was, moving a saw blade across a board at a snail's pace.
while I tried to work out the next move in my head,
hoping I would be one step closer to the right move.
Our confidence grew
every time it took less than six tries to get something right.
(Laughter)
I passed my framing inspections and my plumbing inspections.
We laid hardwood and tile.
We painted, trimmed, built sidewalks and flower beds.
I ran gas lines without blowing anyone up.
I have lived in the house we built for nine years.
It's a 3,500-square-foot house
with five bedrooms, three bathrooms and a floor-to-ceiling library,
plus a three-car garage, an enormous shop and a two-story tree house.
And every single day, my kids wake up surrounded by this proof
that our minds and our bodies can do incredible things.
We built this house, and we rebuilt our family.
Today, my kids are plowing through life with fearless determination.
There's no sign of those small broken kids who knew too well how to hide.
My oldest daughter, Hope, runs her own business,
and will soon star in her own television show.
My son, Drew, moved up to Alaska
where he explored and climbed ice walls
and other crazy things that sound awesome
if someone else's kid is doing them.
(Laughter)
My daughter Jada moved into the Ozark Mountains for a while
and lived in a tent through snowstorms,
so she could learn to build a straw bale house,
milk goats and live sustainably.
The youngest, little Roman, runs his own YouTube channel,
make swords in my backyard
and has the biggest, most fearless plans for his future.
My kids and I came out of the other side of trauma,
thinking the most important thing we needed was this place to live.
This story, our story, it was never about a house.
It was this process of building a house together
that taught us how a determined family can turn trauma into power
and fear into courage
as proof that we can all build ourselves a life without limits.
Thank you.
(Applause)