“At the end of this long, exhausting appointment, Charity says, ‘Oh, and congratulations on your baby.’ Congratulations on our baby? You mean the one you told me is going to die? I ran out of that room so fast. Despite it all, his broken heart kept beating. I recall a single tear escaping my eye and falling on his face.”
“I made the decision to keep the baby. As word spread, I could no longer bear going to school. I gave birth, terrified. My nurse had been a teen mom. She stayed with me the entire time. ‘I see something special in you, you can do this.’ In that moment, I knew I was going to be a good mom. For you Ella, I would do it all over again.”
“My poor baby was found with finger marks around her throat. Her phone was factory reset. The apartment smelled of bleach and ALL her clothes were washed. He tried to hide her laptop and stole personal items. Yet, he was only charged with drug trafficking. And here we are, living a life sentence without our girl.”
“He looked at me and said, ‘We have to get out of here. We can’t stay here. It’s not safe.’ We just started to run.”
“‘I like you just the way you are.’ Fred Rogers’ words strike such a chord with me because my son has a disability: autism. Fifty years ago, Mr. Rogers’ message was to ‘love thy neighbor,’ and five decades later we need to hear that more than ever.”
“She’s going down the slide, butt naked, COVERED in poop, leaving a long skid mark of poop allllllll the way down on her way.”
“At 19, I moved into my own place and worked like a dog. I felt unfulfilled, but wasn’t sure what I was missing. One day, I picked up an employment newsletter. There it was. ‘Become a Foster Parent Today. Must be 18.’ A month later, I got a call asking to take in a 7-year-old boy. Imagine my surprise to see a white child waiting for me at the supermarket! I was internally panicking. I’d never interacted with a white child before and had no clue how to care for one!”
“I know it can seem like we’re miles apart, even though we are under the same roof. There isn’t much time left for just us. But I want you to know, I promise to always choose you. It’s always been you. So, what do you say… can we make some promises?”
“Yes, I’m deaf and my husband can hear. He reminds me when I leave the water running because I can’t hear it, or when my car is making a funny noise. He makes all my appointments over the phone. The amount of times I’ve said, ‘Huh? I have no idea what you’re saying,’ are endless. But I seriously couldn’t do life without him by my side acting as my ears and being my person. He makes me glad to be born deaf.”
“We didn’t want to talk to him, and we said so. He responded aggressively. ‘Chill, I just wanted to see where you were going.’ Sara responded, ‘No. We are busy and don’t want to talk to you.’ He persisted. ‘You don’t look effing busy.’ In the middle of an upscale neighborhood, on a busy sidewalk, I was scared.”
