March 31, 2025 • 10 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, Christina Dent shares how her life was forever changed after she became a foster mother.
Support the show (https://www.ouramericanstories.com/donate)
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is our American Stories, and now a story from
our own, Monty Montgomery, about one woman's transformative journey.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Christina Dent grew up in the capital of Mississippi.
Speaker 3 (00:26):
I grew up in West Jaxon in a wonderful, happy home.
I grew up in a Christian home and just had
a really happy childhood. My mom homeschooled me and my
brothers all the way through high school. And I grew
up in a community that had a lot of crime
in it. I would lay in bed at night and
(00:50):
hear ambulances and gunshots. Of the two sounds I remember hearing.
I went through a lot of anxiety as a child
because of that. Our neighbors were held up at gunpoint
while we were home, and our neighbors didn't have a phone,
and so they came over right after it had happened
to use our phone to call the police. And that
happened when I was about eight or nine, and that
(01:12):
set off for me a lot of even deeper anxiety
than I kind of already had, and that was hard.
I begged my parents to move out of state. I
thought maybe if we went somewhere else I would feel safer.
I thought that was just how it was, and there
wasn't really anything we could do to change that. I
grew up always thinking tough on crime was a way
to go, so I got there by saying, there's crime
(01:34):
in my community, and I don't like that, so we
need to be tougher on crime to make that crime
go away. And I associated anything related to drugs in
with that. Just be tougher. If we can just get tougher,
if we can just lock more people up, then I
wouldn't hear these gunshots. I wouldn't hear these police sirens.
That was my framework, and I never really knew much
(01:56):
about it. I wasn't politically involved. I was always voting,
felt like that was really important to do, but never
really understood what was happening or what maybe could be
different for me and for kids like me.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
After getting married, Christina and her husband had two children
of their own before deciding that they wanted to start adopting,
and they knew they did taking their chances on two toddlers.
But while that door closed, another one would open.
Speaker 3 (02:32):
I had never been interested in foster care, even in
my interests with adoption. I wanted nothing to do with
foster care, but now that door had kind of been opened,
and we had to consider, you know, if we were
willing to take those two kids in, why couldn't we
be willing to take another kid or two from somewhere
else in. And so we ended up deciding we were
going to foster through the state and we would just
(02:53):
kind of see where that went. Maybe it would end
with the children going back home, maybe it would end
in adoption. We were open to either possible ability and
just thought that would kind of be a temporary thing
that we would participate in. And so we went through
about a year of getting certified and then we got
a call out of the blue from our licensure worker
(03:13):
and she said, congratulations, missus Dent, you guys are licensed
to be a foster family. And I said, oh, this
is great.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
Thank you.
Speaker 3 (03:21):
And she followed that right up with we have a
baby that we need a foster family for. Can we
bring him over now? And we were completely unprepared for
that because we had been slogging through the licensure process
for so long. We thought it would be months before
we still were even approved to foster, much less actually
had a child coming to our home. We went home
(03:42):
and we got everything ready, and we're texting our family
and saying, there's this baby coming this afternoon. And they
brought this little boy over to our house and we
became his foster family, and that was the beginning of
four and a half years of foster care for us.
(04:08):
My husband got a call about eighteen months after we
had taken that first baby, and he called me and said,
they have another baby they need a foster family for
and I really feel like this time we need to
say yes. I just feel like God has this child
for our home. And I said, oh, I don't know,
this feels really overwhelming. I already feel overwhelmed. I homeschooled
(04:30):
my children, and I just thought, I don't know that
I can do this again with an eighteen month old,
with two older kids at homeschooling, and a new baby.
This would be crazy. But I thought, you know, my
husband really feels strongly about this, and it's never gonna
seem like the best time to have another child in
your home, So okay, we'll do it. And they brought
(04:53):
this new little baby over. He had just been released
from the hospital after his birth. He was born premature
and so he was he was just about five and
a half pounds.
Speaker 2 (05:02):
He was also the son of a mother who used
drugs during her pregnancy, and.
Speaker 3 (05:08):
The social worker brought him to our house and she said, oh,
it was so sad. When I left the hospital with him.
It was like a funeral. His mom was there, the
nick you nurses were all there with her. Everyone was crying.
And I felt this shift of something inside of me,
this feeling of wait a second, that's not right. Because
(05:30):
a mom who would use drugs while she was pregnant
couldn't love her kids. How does that work? So here
you're telling me this child was removed from her custody
because she used drugs pre natally, but she's also crying
as he's taken away from her at the hospital. That
does not fit what I think about moms who would
use drugs while they were pregnant. But through that experience,
(05:53):
I met the mom of one of our foster sons.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
And her name was Joanne.
Speaker 3 (06:01):
He was at our house for a couple of weeks
and then we had his first visit with her. So
I hadn't met her at this point, but we had
the first visit with her at the local child welfare
office in Canton, and so I had drove up there
with our other children and our new little foster son,
and I popped his car seat out of my van
(06:21):
and I turned around in the parking lot, and across
the parking lot is sprinting this woman with tears streaming
down her face. And she runs up to me and
she just starts kissing the baby, who I'm just kind
of standing there awkwardly holding his car seat, and she's
talking to him. And I felt this shift again of
(06:42):
what is going on here, because this isn't what I
thought was real. Now, I admittedly knew nothing about addiction.
It had never come close to me, and so I
only had what I had kind of picked up from
our cultural narrative about addiction, which is bad people use drugs,
bad people become addicted to that, and we should be suspicious.
And so that's what I thought, and I did feel
(07:04):
very suspicious. I thought, maybe maybe she's just putting this on.
Maybe she just wants to make me think she's a
great mom and loves her son, so that somehow I'll
put a good word in with the social worker and
that's gonna, you know, make things better for her. And
so she got to spend her one hour of a
lot of visitation time with her son in the little
(07:25):
side meeting area with one couch and a couple of
toys in it. And I went to the local park
and played with my kids to give her some privacy
while she was with her son for that time. And
then I came back and picked them up and we
went back to our house and Juanne left for impatient
drug treatment a couple hours away in North Mississippi. But
(07:47):
she would call me from treatment. She would call about
once a day. They would, you know, allow her to
make a phone call, and she would call me and
she would say, can you put me on speakerphone? And
I would and she would sing to her son over
the phone. And again this growing sense of something is
not right, because what I'm seeing here is a mother
(08:10):
who loves her son deeply and is also struggling with
a complex, serious health crisis. But what I believe is
that moms like her don't love their children. And I
could start to follow those dots and say that belief
is part of what I have to believe to support
moms like her being put in prison, which I know
(08:33):
is happening every day, not just moms, but moms dads, sons, daughters, brothers, sisters.
There are people using drugs and struggling with addiction that
we're arresting every day. And I knew that. And so
the more that I got to know Joanne, the more
I saw her love is real. Her love for her
son is real. When she asks me to let him
(08:53):
sleep with a particular little animal, blanky, because she wants
him to still be able to smell to her, and
she had had that with him in the hospital, that's real.
She cares for him, she loves him, she wants him
to remember his mom. She's working hard so that she
can regain custody of him and parent him and raise him.
(09:14):
I could see as I looked at what would this
do to Joanne and to her son. What would it
do if we put her in prison for ten years
while her son grew up without a mom, if he
lost the ability to have a future relationship with his mom.
With Joanne and treatment, we had the potential for a
positive outcome. And we know that not everyone who goes
to treatment is able to stay sober. Not everyone who
(09:35):
goes to treatment and is sober is necessarily able to parent.
But I could see that the only way that that
could happen for Joanne and for her family is if
she wasn't in prison. In prison, there's no opportunity for
a positive outcome there. It is the nuclear option on
a family. We grew up in the eighties together. We're
(09:57):
almost exactly the same age, where both that white women
in our thirties, in middle class families. We both were
homeschooled kindergarten through high school. We made some different choices,
and those choices led to different outcomes. But I could
see more and more as I got to know Joanne
that really those choices were choices I could have also made,
(10:17):
and they my life could have had very different outcomes.
And it wasn't a difference in fundamentally who I am
and who Joanne is. That is the difference in where
we are now. We're the same kind of person, and
I saw Joanne as a mom like me.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
Christina Dent's story a beautiful one, a Mississippi story too.
Here on our American stories
This is our American Stories, and now a story from
our own, Monty Montgomery, about one woman's transformative journey.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Christina Dent grew up in the capital of Mississippi.
Speaker 3 (00:26):
I grew up in West Jaxon in a wonderful, happy home.
I grew up in a Christian home and just had
a really happy childhood. My mom homeschooled me and my
brothers all the way through high school. And I grew
up in a community that had a lot of crime
in it. I would lay in bed at night and
(00:50):
hear ambulances and gunshots. Of the two sounds I remember hearing.
I went through a lot of anxiety as a child
because of that. Our neighbors were held up at gunpoint
while we were home, and our neighbors didn't have a phone,
and so they came over right after it had happened
to use our phone to call the police. And that
happened when I was about eight or nine, and that
(01:12):
set off for me a lot of even deeper anxiety
than I kind of already had, and that was hard.
I begged my parents to move out of state. I
thought maybe if we went somewhere else I would feel safer.
I thought that was just how it was, and there
wasn't really anything we could do to change that. I
grew up always thinking tough on crime was a way
to go, so I got there by saying, there's crime
(01:34):
in my community, and I don't like that, so we
need to be tougher on crime to make that crime
go away. And I associated anything related to drugs in
with that. Just be tougher. If we can just get tougher,
if we can just lock more people up, then I
wouldn't hear these gunshots. I wouldn't hear these police sirens.
That was my framework, and I never really knew much
(01:56):
about it. I wasn't politically involved. I was always voting,
felt like that was really important to do, but never
really understood what was happening or what maybe could be
different for me and for kids like me.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
After getting married, Christina and her husband had two children
of their own before deciding that they wanted to start adopting,
and they knew they did taking their chances on two toddlers.
But while that door closed, another one would open.
Speaker 3 (02:32):
I had never been interested in foster care, even in
my interests with adoption. I wanted nothing to do with
foster care, but now that door had kind of been opened,
and we had to consider, you know, if we were
willing to take those two kids in, why couldn't we
be willing to take another kid or two from somewhere
else in. And so we ended up deciding we were
going to foster through the state and we would just
(02:53):
kind of see where that went. Maybe it would end
with the children going back home, maybe it would end
in adoption. We were open to either possible ability and
just thought that would kind of be a temporary thing
that we would participate in. And so we went through
about a year of getting certified and then we got
a call out of the blue from our licensure worker
(03:13):
and she said, congratulations, missus Dent, you guys are licensed
to be a foster family. And I said, oh, this
is great.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
Thank you.
Speaker 3 (03:21):
And she followed that right up with we have a
baby that we need a foster family for. Can we
bring him over now? And we were completely unprepared for
that because we had been slogging through the licensure process
for so long. We thought it would be months before
we still were even approved to foster, much less actually
had a child coming to our home. We went home
(03:42):
and we got everything ready, and we're texting our family
and saying, there's this baby coming this afternoon. And they
brought this little boy over to our house and we
became his foster family, and that was the beginning of
four and a half years of foster care for us.
(04:08):
My husband got a call about eighteen months after we
had taken that first baby, and he called me and said,
they have another baby they need a foster family for
and I really feel like this time we need to
say yes. I just feel like God has this child
for our home. And I said, oh, I don't know,
this feels really overwhelming. I already feel overwhelmed. I homeschooled
(04:30):
my children, and I just thought, I don't know that
I can do this again with an eighteen month old,
with two older kids at homeschooling, and a new baby.
This would be crazy. But I thought, you know, my
husband really feels strongly about this, and it's never gonna
seem like the best time to have another child in
your home, So okay, we'll do it. And they brought
(04:53):
this new little baby over. He had just been released
from the hospital after his birth. He was born premature
and so he was he was just about five and
a half pounds.
Speaker 2 (05:02):
He was also the son of a mother who used
drugs during her pregnancy, and.
Speaker 3 (05:08):
The social worker brought him to our house and she said, oh,
it was so sad. When I left the hospital with him.
It was like a funeral. His mom was there, the
nick you nurses were all there with her. Everyone was crying.
And I felt this shift of something inside of me,
this feeling of wait a second, that's not right. Because
(05:30):
a mom who would use drugs while she was pregnant
couldn't love her kids. How does that work? So here
you're telling me this child was removed from her custody
because she used drugs pre natally, but she's also crying
as he's taken away from her at the hospital. That
does not fit what I think about moms who would
use drugs while they were pregnant. But through that experience,
(05:53):
I met the mom of one of our foster sons.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
And her name was Joanne.
Speaker 3 (06:01):
He was at our house for a couple of weeks
and then we had his first visit with her. So
I hadn't met her at this point, but we had
the first visit with her at the local child welfare
office in Canton, and so I had drove up there
with our other children and our new little foster son,
and I popped his car seat out of my van
(06:21):
and I turned around in the parking lot, and across
the parking lot is sprinting this woman with tears streaming
down her face. And she runs up to me and
she just starts kissing the baby, who I'm just kind
of standing there awkwardly holding his car seat, and she's
talking to him. And I felt this shift again of
(06:42):
what is going on here, because this isn't what I
thought was real. Now, I admittedly knew nothing about addiction.
It had never come close to me, and so I
only had what I had kind of picked up from
our cultural narrative about addiction, which is bad people use drugs,
bad people become addicted to that, and we should be suspicious.
And so that's what I thought, and I did feel
(07:04):
very suspicious. I thought, maybe maybe she's just putting this on.
Maybe she just wants to make me think she's a
great mom and loves her son, so that somehow I'll
put a good word in with the social worker and
that's gonna, you know, make things better for her. And
so she got to spend her one hour of a
lot of visitation time with her son in the little
(07:25):
side meeting area with one couch and a couple of
toys in it. And I went to the local park
and played with my kids to give her some privacy
while she was with her son for that time. And
then I came back and picked them up and we
went back to our house and Juanne left for impatient
drug treatment a couple hours away in North Mississippi. But
(07:47):
she would call me from treatment. She would call about
once a day. They would, you know, allow her to
make a phone call, and she would call me and
she would say, can you put me on speakerphone? And
I would and she would sing to her son over
the phone. And again this growing sense of something is
not right, because what I'm seeing here is a mother
(08:10):
who loves her son deeply and is also struggling with
a complex, serious health crisis. But what I believe is
that moms like her don't love their children. And I
could start to follow those dots and say that belief
is part of what I have to believe to support
moms like her being put in prison, which I know
(08:33):
is happening every day, not just moms, but moms dads, sons, daughters, brothers, sisters.
There are people using drugs and struggling with addiction that
we're arresting every day. And I knew that. And so
the more that I got to know Joanne, the more
I saw her love is real. Her love for her
son is real. When she asks me to let him
(08:53):
sleep with a particular little animal, blanky, because she wants
him to still be able to smell to her, and
she had had that with him in the hospital, that's real.
She cares for him, she loves him, she wants him
to remember his mom. She's working hard so that she
can regain custody of him and parent him and raise him.
(09:14):
I could see as I looked at what would this
do to Joanne and to her son. What would it
do if we put her in prison for ten years
while her son grew up without a mom, if he
lost the ability to have a future relationship with his mom.
With Joanne and treatment, we had the potential for a
positive outcome. And we know that not everyone who goes
to treatment is able to stay sober. Not everyone who
(09:35):
goes to treatment and is sober is necessarily able to parent.
But I could see that the only way that that
could happen for Joanne and for her family is if
she wasn't in prison. In prison, there's no opportunity for
a positive outcome there. It is the nuclear option on
a family. We grew up in the eighties together. We're
(09:57):
almost exactly the same age, where both that white women
in our thirties, in middle class families. We both were
homeschooled kindergarten through high school. We made some different choices,
and those choices led to different outcomes. But I could
see more and more as I got to know Joanne
that really those choices were choices I could have also made,
(10:17):
and they my life could have had very different outcomes.
And it wasn't a difference in fundamentally who I am
and who Joanne is. That is the difference in where
we are now. We're the same kind of person, and
I saw Joanne as a mom like me.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
Christina Dent's story a beautiful one, a Mississippi story too.
Here on our American stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
New Heights with Jason & Travis Kelce
Football’s funniest family duo — Jason Kelce of the Philadelphia Eagles and Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs — team up to provide next-level access to life in the league as it unfolds. The two brothers and Super Bowl champions drop weekly insights about the weekly slate of games and share their INSIDE perspectives on trending NFL news and sports headlines. They also endlessly rag on each other as brothers do, chat the latest in pop culture and welcome some very popular and well-known friends to chat with them. Check out new episodes every Wednesday. Follow New Heights on the Wondery App, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to new episodes early and ad-free, and get exclusive content on Wondery+. Join Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And join our new membership for a unique fan experience by going to the New Heights YouTube channel now!
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.