This story takes place on a thick and sweaty Wednesday, which is the only kind of Wednesday we have here in Texas prior to Halloween. My three-year-old, Owen, left our red-brick one-story after breakfast, cheerfully singing his way to my husband’s white Toyota Corolla (which only had three hubcaps), which would deliver him to a blessed few hours of childcare. I stayed behind with our eleven-month-old, Gabriel. He and I would leave the house soon, too, in the Sienna that looked like the Corolla in that it was a white Toyota, but different in that all four wheels were properly covered, and it was a minivan, and it held in the trunk a repurposed Amazon Prime box I’d loaded the night before.
The box had originally arrived filled with books I then stacked on my nightstand like a fortress around my breaking heart. In those days, the fracturing inside and sweltering heat outside threatened to fold me right in half like a slammed novel or a snapped clam. That box had arrived full of books for a grown woman. It would go out full of shoes for a baby.
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After not enough coffee and too much breastfeeding, I strapped Gabriel into his car seat and drove. His eyelids fluttered shut as the road lulled him to sleep. By the time I pulled into the driveway of a rambling Southern manor a few miles away, his snores were puffing out a hypnotic rhythm.
Two of my friends stood in front of the manor’s detached garage. Trash bags, Rubbermaid containers, and overflowing boxes surrounded them. The bags and containers and boxes held donations for a new endeavor they had dreamed up: a pantry filled with clothes and supplies for foster families welcoming children into their homes. Foster families like the family I’d thought I’d have.
As Gabriel dreamed, I snuck out of the still-running van to deliver my box that overflowed with tiny cobalt Nikes and miniature camel Sperry Topsiders—gifts given to Owen from family members all-too-ready to spoil the first grandchild. I’d assumed for so long that every pair of shoes in that box would enfold the feet of more than one child living within our four walls. I’d thought that, after Owen wore the Lilliputian pairs, we’d keep them on hand for the foster children we’d planned to host. When I learned I was pregnant with Gabriel, I figured he’d wear the shoes, too, like his older brother had, and like his foster brothers to come would. So I kept them all on a high shelf in the nursery closet for a long time, confident they’d be pulled down and put to use. We were going to steward those shoes with the best of them.
And then, five months after Jared and I opened our home for foster care, Gabriel entered the world—with medical needs that would require tremendous focus, and feet that would be shrouded by casts and braces starting at nine days old. We couldn’t maintain our fostering license. He couldn’t wear the shoes. I couldn’t maintain my dreams of what stewardship and family and baby Nikes should look like.
I handed off the shoebox as a goodbye to the norms I had expected, and, perhaps in an effort to ignore all the symbolism for a moment, I asked, “So, what else does the foster pantry need?”
I learned that they’d received a lot of clothes, but still lacked larger items like car seats, strollers, and high chairs. As I glanced back at the van to check on Gabriel, I offered to try out some crowdfunding on social media. Maybe I just wanted to be distracted. Maybe I knew I’d be awake all night anyway—Gabriel had just had surgery, his legs wrapped in casts again, and our sleep came in fits and starts.
Maybe I felt guilty that I couldn’t muster up the energy and resolve to be a foster mother while caring for my biological children. Maybe I still had hope that I could be faithful to the foster care community I’d grown to love even though my schedule now sank heavy with trips to the hospital two hours away and sponge bathing a casted baby. Whatever the motivations, mixed and many to be sure, I asked the question. And that evening, I posted a picture of a car seat with a caption describing the foster pantry, and I invited people to give toward it.
My husband’s grandmother paid for the car seat in whole, so I posted another, and a few people contributed enough to cover it as well. As the night went on, I fed the boys, and did the dishes, and texted my two friends who had stood sorting clothes in the driveway, asking them what else could be useful. By midnight, I was sitting on Gabriel’s bedroom floor, pushing his swing with one hand and posting crib sheets and strollers from my phone with the other. Every few minutes, a PayPal notification would proclaim another goal had been met. And 24 hours later, after logging dozens more Facebook posts than hours of sleep, I placed an Amazon order for over $2000. More boxes, more hope, more acknowledgment of stewardship, and life, and baby shoes looking different than I’d thought they would.
That muggy Wednesday was almost four years ago now. I still know the sadness of having a dream dashed, but I no longer carry a heart made sick by deferred hope. Now, I see the death of one desire giving birth to so many others—being the best mother possible to one child with medical needs and one without, supporting foster families in ways I never could have if my own home had been full of foster children, expanding my definition of stewardship.
Owen will sing his way to first grade this fall. Gabriel will pull the fire-engine red straps on his leg braces tight then trot off to pre-k. And a Facebook group that began the day after that first posting spree will keep replenishing the foster pantry shelves that held the car seats, crib sheets, and baby shoes, once worn.