Meeting the Mother of My Foster Child Changed My Life

On this episode of Our American Stories, Christina Dent shares how her life was forever changed after she became a foster mother.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is our American Stories, and now a story from
our own, Monty Montgomery, about one woman's transformative journey.

Speaker 2 (00:21):
Christina Dent grew up in the capital of Mississippi.

Speaker 3 (00:26):
I grew up in West Jaxxon in a wonderful, happy home.
I grew up in a Christian home and just had
a really happy childhood. My mom homeschooled me and my
brothers all the way through high school. And I grew
up in a community that had a lot of crime
in it. I would lay in bed at night and

(00:50):
hear ambulances and gunshots. Of the two sounds I remember hearing.
I went through a lot of anxiety as a child
because of that. Our neighbors were held up at gunpoint
while we were home, and our neighbors didn't have a phone,
and so they came over right after it had happened
to use our phone to call the police. And that
happened when I was about eight or nine, and that

(01:12):
set off for me a lot of even deeper anxiety
than I kind of already had, and that was hard.

Speaker 4 (01:19):
I begged my parents to move out of state. I
thought maybe if we went somewhere else I would feel safer.

Speaker 3 (01:24):
I thought that was just how it was, and there
wasn't really anything we could do to change that. I
grew up always thinking tough on crime was a way
to go, so I got there by saying, there's crime
in my community, and I don't like that, so we
need to be tougher on crime to make that crime
go away. And I associated anything related to drugs in
with that. Just be tougher. If we can just get tougher,

(01:46):
if we can just lock more people up, then I
wouldn't hear these gunshots. I wouldn't hear these police sirens.
That was my framework, and I never really knew much
about it. I wasn't politically involved. I was always voting,
felt like that was really important to do, but never
really understood what was happening or what maybe could be

(02:06):
different for me and for kids like me.

Speaker 2 (02:14):
After getting married, Christina and her husband had two children
of their own before deciding that they wanted to start adopting,
and they knew they did taking their chances on two toddlers.
But while that door closed, another one would open.

Speaker 3 (02:32):
I had never been interested in foster care, even in
my interests with adoption.

Speaker 4 (02:36):
I wanted nothing to.

Speaker 3 (02:37):
Do with foster care, but now that door had kind
of been opened, and we had to consider, you know,
if we were willing to take those two kids in,
why couldn't we be willing to take another kid or
two from somewhere else in. And so we ended up
deciding we were going to foster through the state and
we would just kind of see where that went. Maybe
it would end with the children going back home, maybe
it would end in adoption. We were open to either

(02:59):
pass ability, and just thought that would kind of be
a temporary thing that we would participate in. And so
we went through about a year of getting certified and
then we got a call out of the blue from
our licensure worker and she said, congratulations, missus Stent, you
guys are licensed to be a foster family.

Speaker 4 (03:18):
And I said, oh, this is great, thank you.

Speaker 3 (03:21):
And she followed that right up with we have a
baby that we need a foster family for and can
we bring him over now? And we were completely unprepared
for that because we had been slogging through the licensure
process for so long. We thought it would be months
before we still were even approved to foster, much less
actually had a child coming to our home. We went

(03:42):
home and we got everything ready, and we're texting our
family and saying, there's this baby coming this afternoon. And
they brought this little boy over to our house and
we became his foster family, and that was the beginning
of four and a half years of foster care for us.

(04:08):
My husband got a call about eighteen months after we
had taken that first baby, and he called me and said,
they have another baby they need a foster family for
and I really feel like this time we need to
say yes. I just feel like God has this child
for our home. And I said, oh, I don't know,
this feels really overwhelming. I already feel overwhelmed. I homeschooled

(04:30):
my children, and I just thought, I don't know that
I can do this again with an eighteen month old,
with two older kids at homeschooling, and a new baby.

Speaker 4 (04:37):
This would be crazy.

Speaker 3 (04:39):
But I thought, you know, my husband really feels strongly
about this, and it's never gonna seem like the best
time to have another child in your home, So okay,
we'll do it. And they brought this new little baby over.
He had just been released from the hospital after his birth.
He was born premature and so he was tiny, was

(05:00):
just about five and a half pounds.

Speaker 2 (05:02):
He was also the son of a mother who used
drugs during her pregnancy, and the.

Speaker 3 (05:08):
Social worker brought him to her house and she said, oh,
it was so sad. When I left the hospital with him,
it was like a funeral. His mom was there, the
nick you nurses were all there with her. Everyone was crying.
And I felt this shift of something inside of me,
this feeling of wait a second, that's not right. Because

(05:30):
a mom who would use drugs.

Speaker 4 (05:31):
While she was pregnant couldn't love her kids. How does
that work? So here you're.

Speaker 3 (05:37):
Telling me this child was removed from her custody because
she used drugs prenatally, but she's also crying as he's
taken away from her at the hospital. That does not
fit what I think about moms who would use drugs
while they were pregnant. But through that experience, I met
the mom of one of our foster.

Speaker 2 (05:56):
Sons, and her name was Joanne.

Speaker 3 (06:02):
He was at our house for a couple of weeks
and then we had his first visit with her. So
I hadn't met her at this point, but we had
the first visit with her at the local child welfare
office in Canton, and so I had drove up there
with our other children and our new little foster son,
and I popped his car seat out of my van

(06:22):
and I turned around in the parking lot, and across
the parking lot is sprinting this woman with tears streaming
down her face, and she runs up to me and
she just starts kissing the baby, who I'm just kind
of standing there awkwardly holding his car seat, and she's
talking to him. And I felt this shift again of

(06:42):
what is going on here, because this isn't what I
thought was real. Now, I admittedly knew nothing about addiction.
It had never come close to me, and so I
only had what I had kind of picked up from
our cultural narrative about addiction, which is bad people use drugs,
bad people become addicted to them, and we should be suspicious.
And so that's what I thought, and I did feel

(07:04):
very suspicious. I thought, maybe maybe she's just putting this on.
Maybe she just wants to make me think she's a
great mom and loves her son, so that somehow I'll
put a good word in with a social worker and
that's gonna, you know, make things better for her. And
so she got to spend her one hour of a
lot of visitation time with her son in the little

(07:25):
side meeting area with one couch and a couple toys
in it.

Speaker 4 (07:29):
And I went to the local park and played.

Speaker 3 (07:31):
With my kids to give her some privacy while she
was with her son for that time. And then I
came back and picked them up and we went back
to our house and Juanne left for impatient drug treatment
a couple hours away in North Mississippi. But she would
call me from treatment. She would call about once a day.

(07:51):
They would, you know, allow her to make a phone call,
and she would call me and she would say, can
you put me on speakerphone? And I would, and she
would see to her son over the phone. And again
this growing sense of something is not right, because what
I'm seeing here is a mother who loves her son

(08:12):
deeply and is also struggling with a complex.

Speaker 4 (08:16):
Serious health crisis.

Speaker 3 (08:18):
But what I believe is that moms like her don't
love their children. And I could start to follow those
dots and say that belief is part of what I
have to believe to support moms like her being put
in prison, which I know is happening every day, not
just moms, but moms dads, sons, daughters, brothers, sisters. There

(08:39):
are people using drugs and struggling with addiction that we're
arresting every day.

Speaker 4 (08:43):
And I knew that.

Speaker 3 (08:44):
And so the more that I got to know Joanne,
the more I saw her love is real. Her love
for her son is real. When she asks me to
let him sleep with a particular little animal, Blanky, because
she wants him to still be able to smell to
mail her and she had had that with him in
the hospital, that's real. She cares for him, she loves him,

(09:06):
she wants him to remember his mom. She's working hard
so that she can regain custody of him and parent
him and raise him. I could see as I looked
at what would this do to Joanne and to her son.
What would it do if we put her in prison
for ten years while her son grew up without a mom,
if he lost the ability to have a future relationship
with his mom.

Speaker 4 (09:26):
With Joanne and treatment, we had the potential for a
positive outcome.

Speaker 3 (09:30):
And we know that not everyone who goes to treatment
is able to stay sober. Not everyone who goes to
treatment and is sober is necessarily able to parent. But
I could see that the only way that that could
happen for Joanne and for her family is if she
wasn't in prison. In prison, there's no opportunity for a
positive outcome there. It is the nuclear option on a family.

Speaker 4 (09:55):
We grew up in the eighties together.

Speaker 3 (09:56):
We're almost exactly the same age where both that white
wo i'men in our thirties and middle class families. We
both were homeschooled kindergarten through high school. We made some
different choices, and those choices led to different outcomes. But
I could see more and more as I got to
know Joanne that really those choices were choices I could
have also made, and they my life could have had

(10:19):
very different outcomes. And it wasn't a difference in fundamentally
who I am and who Joanne is. That is the
difference in where we are now. We're the same kind
of person, and I saw Joanne as a mom like me.

Speaker 1 (10:35):
Christina Dent's story a beautiful one, a Mississippi story too.
Here on our American stories