Mended futures for every family.
I am a wife, a mom to 12, a grandmother to 15 (and counting), and a leader in child welfare. None of our kids are biologically related to us, but they are family in every way that matters.
My husband, Bart, and I began this journey the day after our honeymoon when we mailed in our foster care application. Less than four months later, our first child, a 20-month-old boy, moved in. Three months after that, we took in a nine-month-old baby. The next year, we briefly fostered two teenagers, 12 and 14. They were only with us for 28 days, but we saw how stability we provided for that short time made a difference.
That experience made us rethink everything. We saw firsthand how kids in the system struggled, and in 1997, we learned the statistics about what happened when they aged out—homelessness, incarceration, teen pregnancy. The numbers were heartbreaking. That’s when we decided we wouldn’t just foster. We would commit to becoming lifelong family for kids who needed it.
At one point, we had ten kids living at home at the same time. Our grocery bill hit $3,000 a month, and we went through three gallons of milk a day. Laundry never stopped—seven loads a day, six days a week. But our home was full of life.
The dinner table was our anchor. My husband loves to cook, and meals became a way to connect. Friends of our kids often stayed for dinner, sometimes experiencing their first real family meal.
It wasn’t always easy. We had legal issues, unexpected pregnancies, and moments where we felt like we had failed. But we kept showing up.
One of the hardest times in our parenting journey came when one of our daughters became pregnant at 16. For many reasons, we were questioning our ability to parent well. Around the same time, my husband attended a conference where the speaker talked about old 45 records—how everyone listens to Side A (the hit song) but ignores Side B. The message was: What if what you think is your main purpose isn’t the real story?
My husband came home and said, Maybe our grandchildren are our Side A.
That stuck with us. All 12 of our kids came from foster care or an orphanage. Not one of our grandchildren has. Seeing them grow up in stable, loving homes is the greatest sign that what we did mattered.
When you’re in the middle of parenting—especially parenting kids from hard places—it’s tough to know if what you’re doing is working. It takes years, even decades, to see the impact. Now, nearly 30 years later, we see it in how our kids parent their own children, how they support each other, and how they’ve broken cycles of instability.
It wasn’t smooth sailing. There were times when we barely heard from some of them. But instead of taking it personally, I had to learn not to take distance as rejection. I learned to reframe it. Instead of thinking, They don’t care, I told myself, Maybe they’re doing well. Maybe they don’t need me in crisis mode anymore. That shift helped me focus on the bigger picture.
Reframing didn’t just help me survive those uncertain years—it gave me the peace to trust in the seeds we had planted, even when we couldn’t yet see the harvest.
As someone who has worked in the family welfare space, I’ve learned that success isn’t about finding the “perfect” child for a family or vice versa. It’s about commitment.
Every child will struggle. Every family will face storms. But our children always knew this: You will always be our child. You may not always be able to live in our home, but we will never stop being your family.
During the hardest years, my phone’s ringtone was a song with lyrics that became our anthem:
“We live, we love, we forgive, and we never give up.”
It reminded me daily of how we wanted to love our children—unwaveringly, relentlessly, without condition.
People ask if I would do it all again. The answer is yes, but not because we did everything perfectly. I’d do it again because it changed me.
We started this journey believing we were stepping in to save these kids. In the end, they gave us something far greater.
They challenged our definitions of love and belonging. They taught us to see beyond circumstances, to hold space for complexity, to love without reservation. They taught us to see people differently, and to see them more like Jesus does.
People sometimes say we had a special calling. I disagree. I believe everyone is called to stand in the gap for vulnerable children in some way. Not everyone is meant to foster or adopt, but whether through fostering, mentoring, supporting families in crisis, or simply being part of a child’s village, everyone can do something.
If I had to sum up our journey, I’d say this: It was the hardest, best thing we ever did.
It was full of struggles and uncertainty. But now, looking at our children and grandchildren, I see the impact. We didn’t just build a family—we helped change futures.
And that made all the difference.
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