Tracy’s Room

I was one month out from placement. The paperwork was finished, the home study complete, the bedroom to come… 

My heart was open. I was about to step into the calling I had carried for most of my adult life… to be a foster mom.

And then love came. 

He told me he wanted me. That he would stand with me. That he would love the daughter I hadn’t met yet… And I believed him. I said yes to us, trusting I wouldn’t have to say no to her. I thought within months I would still serve my purpose. I thought the two could coexist. I thought I could have both.

But that wasn’t the truth…

After living through the first few of the required months of marriage to welcome a teenage girl into my home, it became clear that my home wasn’t safe for her. The very man who promised he would love her was already showing me sides of himself that I couldn’t risk exposing her to. She had already been wounded by too much rejection, too much instability, too many promises unkept. I could not, and I would not, add to those wounds. 

So I laid it down… my hopes and dreams of raising a young girl who I didn’t give birth to, yet I loved as though I did…

Not because I didn’t want her.

But because I loved her too much to bring her into harm.

I know it was the right choice. But it broke me… And it breaks me still…

For years I carried this empty space like a secret. I even quit going places because I would see teenage girls in the grocery store and wonder if one of them might have been mine. I would hear stories of foster placements and wonder what kind of life she ended up with. Did she have someone steady? Someone safe? Did she have anyone who looked her in the eye and said, “I want you here. You belong to us”?

YoungLives came soon after, and I poured myself into it. I mothered young moms who were still children themselves. I did all the planning and prepping. I took all the phone calls and answered every text. I cooked meals, rocked babies, listened to tears. And it mattered. It mattered so much. It still does…

But it wasn’t what I had been called to. It wasn’t the foster daughter who should have had my last name written into her story…

I am still left with that void. Still left with the ache of the daughter I never got to meet. Still left with the version of myself I never got to become.

But I also know this:

The ache is holy.

The love is still real.

And the choice I made was not failure… It was genuine protection for a little girl who was supposed to be mine… 

And still is…

I will always be the foster mom who never was. But I will also always be the woman who loved a young girl enough to protect her, even from the shadows in my own home.

And maybe that, too, is sacred…