Fostering, Mothering, Caring: A Review of Stranger Care

Stranger Care: A Memoir of Loving What Isn’t Ours

by Sarah Sentilles

Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2022; 432 pp; $18.99

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The preface of Sarah Sentilles’s wrenching memoir, Stranger Care: A Memoir of Loving What Isn’t Ours, addresses her foster daughter: “You have so many mothers. The one who birthed you. The one who brought you home. The earth. The mountains visible outside your bedroom window. The three spruce trees in our yard. Ocean. Rocks. Rivers. Moon. Stars.” What isn’t mentioned is that there is also Sentilles, an unlikely foster mother, caught between her desire to adopt her infant foster daughter and the knowledge that the foster care system is designed for biological reunification. 

Sentilles explains in a naïve and noble offer that rather than have a biological child, she and her husband, Eric, wanted to shelter and love a child in need. As she writes, “There are nearly half a million children in the foster care system in the United States on any given day. Eric and I wanted to share our home with a child who needed one.”  But, as is repeatedly explained to her, the goal of foster care is reunification with biological parents, not adoption. Sentilles underestimates the importance of this warning and instead “made a list . . . of the situations that would make the adoption of a baby in foster care a more likely outcome than reunification.”

Sentilles and her husband did not set out to become foster parents. They arrived at their choice to foster (with the hope of adopting) only after a convoluted process involving therapy, a vasectomy, and Sentilles’s deep yearning to mother. These decisions initially seem at odds with one another but eventually intersect to allow a new version of what it means to become a family. “I always imagined myself a mother,” Sentilles writes. “I kept a list of possible names for my future children . . . but I had reservations. I’d absorbed the messages in the cultural ether that framed motherhood as both holy work and trap.” 

As a biological mother to four children, I share Sentilles’s hope and hesitation about motherhood. Even with caring community and familial support, parenting is exhausting work. I’ve likened it to pouring myself into my children while fitting myself into ever-smaller vessels. I have a deep love for my children, and I parent with all my heart, just like Sentilles and her husband, Eric, do when Coco, their newborn foster daughter, arrives. The difference is that foster care comes with governmental oversight, a list of rules, and multiple family members, including birth parents, who have conflicting desires about who should have access to and custody of the child. 

Despite warnings that adopting an infant through foster care is unlikely, Sentilles and Eric embark on the serpentine path to become state-certified foster parents. Lessons include how to install a car seat, secure child safety locks inside the home, and avoid any exterior bedroom door locks. On intense instruction from an overscheduled social worker who inspects their home, they lock away their laundry detergent, toilet bowl cleaner, and medications. They complete pages of forms. They answer personal questions. They agree to more home inspections. When Sentilles complains to her husband about the invasiveness of the home study, he replies, “The state is entrusted with a child. Don’t you think they should be as invasive as possible?” For another type of person, these challenges might have been enough to change course. For Sentilles, it only magnifies her desire to become a foster mother. She channels her energy into becoming “overprepared for every social worker visit” as she imagines welcoming their future child. 

The book is organized into chapters and subchapters, which allow Sentilles to return to philosophical questions of love, family, and belonging as she gains a new perspective and faces new challenges as a foster parent. Some of these subchapters share the same title as their parent chapter, such as “Maternal Impression” and “A Tale of Two Mothers.” Within the chapter “Maternal Impression” is a two-page story of Mary Toft, also titled “maternal impression.” In 1726, Toft so desperately wanted to be pregnant following a miscarriage that she inserted dead animal “parts inside herself and feigned labor.” As a literary-minded mother always looking for symbolism in art and in life, I can’t help but think that Sentilles teetered on the edge of a yearning as intense as Toft’s as she took her foster care journey. 

Other subchapters reprise topics in later chapters to provide new information about the relationship between history, nature, and Sentilles’s situation. This structure of interspersed meditations, repetition of themes, and extrapolation of ideas mimics the nature of parenting where we evolve, reflect, and grow to meet the needs of our growing, changing children. These interspersed deliberations act as both an exploration of universal motherhood concerns and as palate cleansers between intense courses that make up the main narrative.

In one series of philosophical ponderings, Sentilles takes readers to the forest to consider what it means to be a mother. She explores trees, mother trees, family trees, tree branches, tree networks, and tree friends. In the first chapter, “Show Yourself to Be A Mother,” Sentilles includes a two-page section titled “the wisdom of mother trees” that describes underground networks that trees use to communicate with one another: “Mother trees [can] tell the difference between their seedlings and seedlings from other trees.” In the one-page section titled “tree friends,” Sentilles describes the process of humans thinning “the forest, believing we’re helping individual trees by removing competition. But we’re wrong.” Ominously, she reports the researcher’s conclusion that “the remaining trees are bereft.” In another subchapter, titled “upbringing,” Sentilles describes the maternal presence of older trees caring for their saplings. In the forest, “young beech trees wait under their two-hundred-year-old mother trees . . . before it’s their turn to rise through the canopy. To make the wait time bearable, the young trees’ mothers pass along sugar and other nutrients through their root systems.” Trees nurture and care for their young, just as humans do. 

As Sentilles contemplates the nature of mother trees, she is also preparing to become a mother. But she learns that the foster care system she wants to be a part of is racist. The system contends that “Native American and African American children are the most at risk for abuse and neglect,” despite the fact there is no statistical, legal, or social proof of this misperception. In the foster parent classroom, she is distraught to learn that even though “Black parents don’t abuse or neglect their children more than other parents,” their children are removed “from their families at rates higher than children of any other race.” Sentilles, Eric, their foster daughter Coco, and Coco’s birth parents are all white, but Sentilles feels that talking about the racism present in foster care is part of our collective responsibility to change systemic racism and bias. In an interview with Katie Couric in 2021, Sentilles said of her foster parent experience, “The bureaucracy was incredibly challenging for me to navigate, and I am a white overeducated woman with money. What does that system do to poor people? To people who identify as BIPOC? To queer folks? To people struggling with addiction? The more people who witness what happens in this system, the better.” 

Despite the issues with the system, Sentilles and Eric choose to complete their certification. When they are finally approved to become foster parents, their infant foster daughter arrives in their home. They bond with Coco in the usual ways: They take turns with sleepless nights spent comforting her. They invite friends to meet her. They read to her, play with her, and introduce her to baby foods. But they must also meet with Coco’s biological mother, attend court hearings, and send Coco to state-required, unsupervised visits with her birth mother. Coco’s birth mother has substance abuse issues. The social worker has declared her a flight risk. She has another child in foster care in a neighboring state. Her boyfriend (Coco’s biological father) is in prison. But she’s trying to overcome all of this to regain custody of Coco. Sentilles says, “My heart broke for [her]. The work ahead must have felt insurmountable. But there was another part of me, a bigger part, that lifted. We’re going to get to keep the baby, that part whispered. She’s ours.” 

As Sentilles sees adoption in their future, the system’s undercurrent of birth-parent reunification threatens to flood Sentilles’s dream. Coco’s birth mother commits to “test clean, attend parenting classes, attend meetings, attend counseling, and to meet minimal parenting standards.” And Sentilles knows that “a government agency with the power to take children away from their parents is dangerous.” She knows the system is designed for reunification of biological families. She knows that she has advocated for a system that keeps biological families together. But this time it is personal. Sentilles cries to a friend, “I want to keep her. What can I do to keep her?”

This tension of wanting to keep Coco and knowing Coco’s biological mother wants her back is palpable throughout the book. Sentilles reveals deep fissures in our foster care system. She exposes what it takes to raise a child under government scrutiny and the inverse—how hard it is to raise a child without support. She also shows how interconnected families are, regardless of the label we place on caregivers. Biological mothers, adoptive mothers, foster mothers—we all give ourselves to our children. We claim them through the act of loving them. But because that is not enough to keep them safe, sometimes more is needed. Foster care intervention saves children’s lives. But what of the parents? Sentilles shows us foster care’s root structure. Sometimes the trees weep.