Village Privilege

Sadie and Evan walked into the CFS office expecting a social worker to hand them a 9-month-old baby in need of a foster family. Instead, they became witnesses to the worst day of a dad’s life.  

Even as strangers looking in from the outside, Evan and Sadie’s hearts shattered as they watched Jake struggle to let go of his daughter. He wasn’t arguing or pleading. He was calmly, quietly breaking.

The couple, wanting to reassure him, did what they could to ease his mind about where his daughter would be and with whom. They shared photos of their home, of the bedroom outfitted with a nightlight, changing table and a brand-new crib just for baby LuLu. She would be safe tonight.

But much of the excitement they’d felt at the call to care for the baby they now held faded as they saw how much it cost her father to watch them leave with her.

Months ticked by, and Jake did everything in his power to fulfill the long list of requirements to get his little girl back. During that time, Sadie and Evan fell in love with little LuLu.

“It was so fun getting to see Sadie go into Mom-mode,” Evan said. “And I learned that I’m absolutely a girl dad at heart. I’d do anything for her.”

And he wasn’t the only one. Jake bent over backwards time and time again to attend every visit, make every appointment, go to every treatment and ready his home to get his daughter back.

Jake himself grew up in foster care, bearing the full brunt of childhood trauma. Jake never found the safety of a permanent family as a child and struggled through homelessness for many years as a teen/young adult. He knew what that life looked like. And he resolved never to let his own kids go through what he did.

But that was no small feat. In addition to getting himself to a healthy, stable place, his wife — LuLu’s mother — was also sick and needed intensive care. His devotion to her and to his daughter drew Sadie and Evan firmly onto his team, leaving them little room for doubt that LuLu would one day return home.

They met Jake at every visit with photos and updates on LuLu’s teething, her love of bath toys, her favorite bedtime stories. And Jake absorbed every word while holding his daughter for as long as he could before handing her back to them.

Then, just as Jake’s case seemed to be heading in one direction, LuLu’s baby sister, Maggie, arrived without warning. Evan still remembers the call he got, asking if he was sitting down.

Jake had rushed his wife to the emergency room early that morning with abdominal pain. Everyone thought her appendix had burst until a closer examination revealed she was in fact, just moments away from giving birth. Maggie joined her sister in Sadie and Evan’s home straight from the hospital.

“She was the cutest little appendix you ever saw,” Evan remembered.

Jake’s resolve to bring his girls home only doubled when Maggie was born.  

Now in love with both girls, Sadie and Evan knew heartbreak was coming for them, but they never once questioned where the girls belonged.

“Jake has impressed us every step of the way. From the very beginning of the case, it was just so evident — this guy loves his little girls. He’s an amazing dad,” Evan said.

Still the case dragged on as a global pandemic threw everything into confusion. Visits became limited. Members of the girls’ care team got sick. Appointments got delayed and cancelled. Finally, Sadie and Evan knew they needed to go to bat for Jake if the girls were to reunify. By then, they were the only ones who got to see the case from the inside. And no one wanted the girls to grow up in a state of limbo.

“We finally went before the judge and told him that the girls needed more time with Jake. LuLu was starting to talk,” Evan said, “and I worried that it was only a matter of time before she started calling me Dad.”

The court agreed. And as a new case worker joined the team, reunification moved from a distant horizon to a much more focused reality.

“He’d done everything he needed to do. It just made sense to let Jake be the dad he’d proven he could be,” Sadie said.

Finally, the day arrived. The couple pulled into the grocery store parking lot where Jake stood anxiously waiting for the moment he’d worked so hard to reach. Evan and Sadie both hugged Jake as they handed over car seats and diaper bags, expressing their pride and joy in his success.  

As he drove away, however, they feared that they would never see LuLu and Maggie again.

On the day of reunification, the couple both hugged Jake, expressing their pride and joy in his success. Inside, however, they feared that they might never see LuLu and Maggie again.

But that never happened. Since the day they reunified almost three years ago, the girls have spent nearly every Saturday with Evan and Sadie. And the couple’s relationship with Jake has only strengthened as they’ve proven their commitment, not only to the girls, but to him too.

“We realized through this whole fostering journey just what a privilege it actually is to have a village, to have a community of people there to help you raise your kids,” Sadie said. “Most birth parents trying to get their kids back from foster care don’t have that.

We’re honored to get to be that village for Jake.”