In my life, there are many mothers I respect and admire. Friends, family, colleagues, even strangers. Mothers I see in the world doing the right thing with children, showing small kindnesses, endless patience, needed discipline. Moms who have faced huge obstacles, small tragedies, who started their journeys late or in roundabout ways. But heroic mothers? I only know one, and I don’t know her well. She is a midlife mother, in her 50s, and attends the same church as I do. I know her because our congregation has adopted her cause as ours — emergency foster care of the youngest children in our city.
Her name is June, and she and her husband are the only ones in our large city who take in babies and small children outside of office hours. That often means in the darkness, in the wee hours, or on the weekend when parents are overwhelmed, or under the influence, neglectful or abusive to the point where their babies and preschoolers are taken away without notice and handed to June and her husband, to be cared for until the child welfare offices open again in the morning or on Monday and longer-term foster care can be arranged.
The emergency nature of June’s mothering means children sometimes arrive on her doorstep in nothing but a diaper. Often they are just in pajamas, bewildered and scared, too tired to sleep or too traumatized to talk. Others arrive apparently content and incautious, ready to play with June’s daughter, game for whatever is for supper and wherever they are laid to sleep. Some take their trauma in stride, without a tear or hiccup, suggesting they’ve gotten used to life without a routine, with the regular disappearance of their parents.
June has a grown son and an adolescent daughter, and is a stay-at-home mother who might otherwise have moved on to a hobby once her children started growing up and needing her a bit less. Instead she became a foster parent. For years she fostered children awaiting adoption — longer-term placements that allowed her to get to know the children and settle them into good health and habits while they awaited their future families. But then, after fostering a little boy from birth to just past one year old, the baby was adopted, and the new family did not want to keep in touch with June. No updates, no transition visits, no photos. And June told her husband that she couldn’t do the heartbreak anymore, she wanted to switch to emergency foster care, where she could care for children in the most urgent, immediate way, but only for hours or a weekend at a time, before sending them on to their next stop on the fostering treadmill. Before they could attach to her heart.
At midlife, with her children increasingly independent, June has decided to give each child who comes through her home as much as she can in what is often less than 24 hours. A brand new set of clothes, a new pair of pajamas, new socks and underwear, and a backpack with a stuffed toy or doll. They arrive with nothing and leave with just enough to help them through the next, crazy, 24 hours, into another home and another bed or dinner table.
On average, June and her family host 50 children a year. Sometimes they come in clusters, sometimes one every night for a week, sometimes none for days. But each one needs a fresh set of clothes, pajamas, something to cuddle, a toothbrush, often even shoes or winter clothes. June is under no obligation to provide NEW clothes — and she has stacks of used clothing to keep everyone dressed while they are with her. But she has pledged to send each child off with a complete set of daytime and nighttime clothing, and that’s where our church congregation comes in. Twice a year, we head out to shop for baby and preschool outfits, sized newborn to 6X, along with stuffed animals and toothbrushes and backpacks, according to the season we’re entering and the needs of June’s organized chaos of clothing racks and shelves and her revolving door of different-sized children.
Of course, some children care not at all about their clothes, new or old. But many, June says, are enchanted by their new outfit, their sparkly shirt or fuzzy pajamas, price tag still attached. She talks about little girls who stand in front of the mirror to admire themselves in a new outfit, who can’t believe they get to keep it all, to take it with them, in their new backpack, with their new little toy. It is not much to celebrate, in the scheme of their messy lives or unhappy history or uncertain future, but it is what we can do, for now, to soften these hours between one home and the next.
So twice a year I go shopping for an imaginary child of a size and gender June has written on a piece of paper. I debate pink versus purple, the sweater versus the fleece, comfortable versus stylish. When I shop for my own children, I admit I’m often shopping for me — the styles and colours that I like, and usually at consignment stores. With these children, I’m shopping for them. I want them to love their new outfit and hope it makes them feel cared for and confident, though I realize it is really a lousy substitute for lasting help. It’s the best I can do to help June help these little ones.
I’m already an older mother, and my children are still tiny, and I’m single and working full-time. I’m not sure I’ll ever have the ability to be a foster mother, and doubt I have the skills or heart needed. A phone call in the middle of the night, in the middle of the school play, in the middle of the soccer game, phone calls that send June into her cupboards for food and her closets for clothes to feed and warm a new little stranger in her life. I can’t imagine being able to respond like that, quickly and calmly and without resentment for the interruptions to her weekend plans.
I don’t think I’ll ever be a foster mother, or an adoptive mother. But I have friends who have adopted from our city’s foster system, and have friends on the adoption waiting list, eager and anxious about the child that will become their own, one day, soon. And I am grateful for the midlife mothers like June who are out there, shepherding and sheltering these littles ones on their difficult path to the future.