Stranger Care

trailing spouse

I always imagined myself a mother. I kept a list of possible names for my future children, pictured myself pregnant and listening to fast fetal heartbeats, looking in wonder at the image on the screen. But I had reservations. I d absorbed the messages in the cultural ether that framed motherhood as both holy work and trap. My ambivalence grew.

When Eric and I married in 2004 we agreed we d eventually have a child, but we were busy doing other things ­writing dissertations, writing books, chasing academic jobs around the country ­and by the time we started talking in earnest about becoming parents, I was in my midthirties, and Eric was close to forty.

We moved to Southern California in 2007 and lived in a townhouse subsidized by the university where we both taught. Eric had been hired for his first tenure-­track faculty position in a graduate school of education, preparing teachers for public school classrooms. I was the trailing spouse, language that reminded me of the signs along some California highways that show an adult holding the hand of a small child who appears to float in the wind, feet not touching the ground.

Eric liked our life as it was. He liked our freedom, the ease of escaping to the Sierras to backpack and to the Alabama Hills to climb, the unfettered time for activism, for work that might make a difference. We could turn our attention and our resources toward all children, he reasoned, not just our own.

You re enough for me, he said. I m okay if it s just the two of us.

My friends had desperately wanted to be pregnant, and many had been willing to do anything to make pregnancy possible ­take hormones, give themselves shots, find egg donors, buy sperm, endure IVF procedure after IVF procedure, go into debt, hire surrogates. Their certainty threw my uncertainty into relief.

I don t know what I want, I said.

Figure out what you want, he said, and we ll do whatever you decide.

I d struggled for

Sarah Sentilles is the author of Draw Your Weapons, Breaking Up with God, A Church of Her Own, and Taught by America. A graduate of Yale University and Harvard Divinity School, she lives in Idaho s Wood River Valley.

In prose so gripping it reads like a thriller, Sentilles describes the choices that led to the moment when she and her husband are on the phone with a social worker, saying yes to fostering a three-day-old girl. . .  What makes this book so powerful is that by experiencing motherhood through the lens of fostering, Sentilles is able to look at the wrenching and worn-out topics of parenting in a new way. San Francisco Chronicle

A heartbreaking memoir that, if you let it, will change the way you understand love and loyalty and family and caretaking and belonging. Chicago Tribune

An astonishing account of motherhood experienced through the complex lens of foster parenting. Shelf Awareness

Beautiful, harrowing, and profound . . . With sensitivity and insight, Sarah Sentilles takes readers with her on her tender and wrenching path to motherhood while grappling with the complexities, contradictions, and injustices of a system meant to protect the most vulnerable. I love this book so much it hurts. Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild

This is a memoir for anyone who has ever loved a child or a whale or a bird or a tree, or indeed any part of this hard, beautiful world we all share, which is to say everyone. It is a memoir for everyone. Laurie Frankel, author of This Is How It Always Is

Stranger Care is an illuminating and heart-wrenching look at the foster care system in America, which includes half a million children and disproportionately impacts parents and kids of color. It is a transformative revelation. Piper Kerman, author of Orange Is the New Black

Stranger Care is a book about loving a child without boundaries, without bloodlines, without limits. This is the only book about parenting that I would recommend to anyone, because it strikes at the essential, complicated, and heartbreaking core of what parents do every moment of every day: love, love, love, love. No matter what.