How one family built themselves a better life

For a "battle-hardened" survivor of domestic violence, 45-year-old Cara Brookins comes across, almost paradoxically, as full of life. Where once she lived in constant fear, today, she's the author of the bestselling Rise - her autobiography - and being booked up across the US for speaking engagements, in which she urges listeners to "raise their roofs". Figuratively, of course - although it's what she did literally.
By the time Cara found herself divorced for the third time, she was desperate for change. Her first marriage to her high school sweetheart, with whom she'd had her first three kids, didn't last for too long. She then married a man who, a few months into the union, turned out to be a certified schizophrenic and who continued to torment the family over the next decade, threatening to kill Cara and the kids on multiple occasions, "tapping the house windows with knives and leaving dead animals on the porch". Marriage No 3 was to a "physically strong" guy. "It seemed like a great idea because the kids and I were scared all the time, and I thought he would protect us," she explains over a phone call from Arkansas, US. She had her youngest child, Roman, with this partner - referred to only as Matt in her book (name changed) - but things quickly spiralled into violence, extreme manipulation and yet another divorce.
"My kids and I had spent so much of our lives just trying to survive that I decided we needed to do something big," she says. She considered running a marathon or climbing a mountain, but wanting to "have something physical" to show for the feat, she figured: why not build a house?
"We're all big-time DIY-ers - we didn't have a lot of money, so we'd often make equivalents for the things we needed and couldn't buy," she notes. "But it was always jewellery or art for the walls - never a house!" Cara ran the idea by the kids - Drew, Hope, Jada and Roman, who were aged 17, 15, 11 and two respectively at the time. "I told them we could either buy a small house and pile in, or put together a house ourselves and have our own bedrooms. Of course, they chose the latter!"

Thank God for YouTube
After purchasing an acre of land for about $20,000 with her savings (Cara had a good job by then, developing new computer software systems as a programmer analyst), she took out a bank loan of $150,000 for supplies. Everyone was very enthusiastic about the project, but while they figured it would be hard work, none of them had any idea what they were getting into. From drawing up blueprints for the 3,500 sq ft house to passing city inspections, trying to hook their water pipe to the city main without collapsing the entire street they'd need to drill under, as well as all the physical labour of hauling two-by-fours and concrete blocks every day, they were in way over their heads. But they'd spent all their money, so could neither quit nor hire someone to finish the job. As per the terms of the bank loan, they had nine months in which to finish construction.
And YouTube was all they had to work with. "YouTube in 2008 was very different," says Cara. "We couldn't find videos on how to build a whole house [a quick search today throws up about 54,900,000 results for step-by-step how-to clips], so we were watching processes in five or six videos. There were no smartphones either, so we'd watch the videos at home - we were staying at a place five miles away - and then go next day to the job site, hoping to remember whatever we'd seen."
Often, nobody wanted to make the first move. "We developed a dialogue where we'd ask: what's the worst thing that could happen if we did this? Usually, the worst-case scenario was that we'd have to do something all over again. That wasn't something to be afraid of. Building it wrong was how we eventually figured out how to build it right."

Building a family
Although Cara has written several fiction books (with two more manuscripts due to be published), it was Rise - the true story - that became the bestseller. The book is subtitled 'How a house built a family' - and it doesn't take much to figure out why. "It was great for the kids' self-esteem, in that they could try to remember stuff with me. Their suggestions had equal weight to mine, because none of us knew what we were doing! And it helped us to very quickly learn to communicate with each other like we never did before."
Cara and the kids gained muscle pretty quickly - as anyone would if they regularly lugged 1,500 blocks of concrete around, or pails of water to and from a neighbour's pond, 75 feet away, in order to mix mortar in a wheelbarrow - but they also built confidence and pride. "We were bruised and scraped and beat up throughout those nine months," she recalls. "But when you see your kids, who've been tiptoeing around all their lives, raise a wall bigger than themselves, it's an absolutely incredible feeling. How often do you get to build something larger than yourselves?"
Yet, it was never something they told people they were doing. Only after they moved in did the family begin to feel secure - and proud - in the house, dubbed Inkwell Manor, they'd built with their own hands.
Cara's dad lived 800 miles away and he visited three different times to help her, while her mom stopped by at least once a month, bearing much-needed home-cooked food. "My kids were on a diet of granola and beef jerky and crackers the whole time," jokes Cara. "But my mum would bring a big pot of chili, and coolers full of food and soda, so that was fantastic."
The family worked gruelling 20-hour days, coming back after work or school, and heading straight for the job site, where they'd work until dark (at times, with only the headlights of their car to help them see), then head home, where Cara would help the kids with their homework and put them to bed, then head back to the job site till about 2am, after which it would be: sleep and repeat. Did she ever worry that her kids might throw in the towel halfway through? "I lived in fear of them waking up and deciding they didn't want to do this anymore," she admits. "But it never happened. I think it came from how powerless they'd been their entire lives: they'd watched someone descend into complete insanity, seen domestic violence, and though they did great in school, there was nothing they could do to fix their personal problems until this house. It was the first chance they ever had to literally build themselves a better life."
You also can't discount how much therapy there is in hitting things really hard with a hammer, she adds. "There's a lot of power in firing nails into a wall with a nail gun, or using a power saw to cut into a block. Throughout ancient times, when people went through tough times, it was all very physical. In modern life, we've gotten away from that. Now, we sit on sofas and talk about our problems, or binge on TV."
Today, her kids are 26, 25, 20 and 11 - and there's no holding them back. "Climbing ice walls in Alaska - that sounds dangerous, but Drew did that," says Cara. "Hope moved to L.A., then D.C. to pursue event planning and politics. Jada went up to the mountains in northern Arkansas to help build cob and straw-bale houses and learn to live completely off the grid; she'll be going to Canada to pursue a nursing degree and work with the brain-injured soon. The youngest has close to 51,000 followers on Twitter. These are not the kids I had before we built the house. How small they dreamt then!"
Drew, now an electronics technician, talks about how the project helped him find his path in life. "I didn't know who I was at the time, but building a house showed me that I really enjoyed designing and building things. It gave me the courage to set large, impossible goals - like the 3D printer kit I recently built." The youngster is planning to go back to school in the fall for an industrial design degree and to become an 'infopreneur' (information entrepreneur) some day. "Once I save enough, I also want to design my own house. People still think that idea's crazy!"
Identifying your worst fears has a way of instilling a completely fearless mentality in you, says Cara. "I've feared for my kids' lives. held a man at gunpoint to protect them. Facing your 'worst' fears changes how you approach life. But the most important message I hope people take away from this is not that a woman built a house, but that if I - a person so completely inept and unqualified - could do something so big, certainly, they can reach their dream too."

Once beaten, now brave
Cara, on finding the strength to talk about surviving years of domestic violence

Despite writing being her greatest aspiration, Cara says she never once expected to write about building the house. The project was finished in 2008, but the book came out only in January this year. "It took me a long time to write Rise. I was trying to find the courage to tell the whole truth. Three failed marriages... that's hard. To put all that out there was difficult." But the alternative was silence. So, she finally wrote the "bold, brave version" - and that's the one that was published.
People hear of those enduring years of domestic abuse and say: you should've just walked out. It's not that black-and-white, says Cara. "Anyone in a violent relationship is always most in danger after they leave. Victims are told over and over: if you leave, I'll kill you and the kids. So, they usually have a sense - a false one, driven by fear, but a sense nonetheless - that they can try to placate the violent person or defuse the situation by staying." It's why Cara stayed three years in her third marriage, during which she was often "thrown against walls" or would wake up in the middle of the night to find her then husband drunk and choking her.  
And 'leaving' doesn't automatically resolve situations. Cara's second ex, who'd been diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder (an extreme combination of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder that "made him see people who weren't there"), was a case in point. "He stalked us despite a restraining order. His mental illness kept him out of jail and, without insurance to keep him in a hospital, the docs could only get him stabilised on his medication before setting him free." It was a cycle of torment that only ended with his suicide.
Cara is now "properly single". Have her experiences disillusioned her to men and marriage? Pausing for a beat, she replies, "I write fiction books, so I think I have a really good imagination - but I cannot imagine a scenario in which I would get married now," she laughs. "I might be open to a relationship again but, right now, I'm perfectly happy."
What about her kids? Does she offer input on their love lives? "My first advice is: don't ask me to tell you if you should or shouldn't marry someone - I'm clearly bad at this," she says, good-naturedly. "Seriously though, I just tell them to find someone they can laugh with, but who works hard. The smaller details can be figured out."
Perhaps the most interesting twist in her story is that her third ex has turned his life around. "He no longer drinks, just bought a house, and sees his son every weekend. I wouldn't call him my friend - but we do talk and are able to co-raise Roman very well. I'm not afraid of him anymore."
karen@khaleejtimes.com