PART 1
The phone rang at 8:43 on a Tuesday night.
My wife and I were already in bed.
We had spent almost a year preparing to become foster parents. We had imagined a toddler running through our house, maybe a four-year-old who could tell us what he needed.
We never imagined our first placement would be a two-month-old baby fighting through withdrawal in a hospital.
“Are you still available for an emergency placement?” the woman on the phone asked.
I sat up.
“Yes.”
She hesitated.
“There’s a baby.”
I looked at my wife.
She was already sitting beside me.
“How old?”
“Two months.”
Something in the woman’s voice made my stomach tighten.
“What’s wrong?”
Another pause.
“He’s in the hospital.”
My wife reached for my hand.
“How sick is he?”
The woman took a breath.
“He was exposed to methamphetamine before he was born. He’s going through withdrawal.”
Neither of us spoke.
Then she added something that made the room feel suddenly colder.
“He also has a broken leg.”
My wife covered her mouth.
I stared at the floor.
A two-month-old baby.
Withdrawal.
A broken leg.
And now someone was asking whether we could take him.
“Would you be willing to meet him?”
My wife looked at me.
I looked back at her.
“We’ll go,” she said.
Three hours later, we walked through the doors of the children’s hospital.
The halls were almost empty.
The fluorescent lights hummed above us as a nurse led us toward the neonatal unit.
Then she stopped.
“Before you go in,” she said quietly, “I need you to understand something.”
We waited.
“He may cry a lot.”
“We can handle crying.”
“It’s more than that.”
She lowered her voice.
“He may shake. He may struggle to sleep. Feeding can be difficult. Sometimes he’ll seem completely overwhelmed by being touched.”
My wife’s eyes filled with tears.
“Okay.”
The nurse opened the door.
And there he was.
5
He was tiny.
Far smaller than I had expected.
A monitor blinked beside him.
There were wires across his little chest.
One leg was secured carefully because of the fracture.
He looked exhausted.
Not sleeping.
Not peaceful.
Just exhausted.
My wife stepped closer.
“Can I hold him?”
The nurse nodded.
She carefully lifted him and placed him into my wife’s arms.
For a few seconds, he was quiet.
Then his face tightened.
He began to cry.
My wife pulled him gently against her chest.
“It’s okay.”
His little body trembled.
She looked at me.
I could see the question in her eyes.
How could anyone let this happen to him?
I didn’t have an answer.
The nurse handed us a thick folder.
Medical instructions.
Medication schedules.
Feeding instructions.
Appointments.
Warnings.
Everything we needed to know.
I looked down at the baby.
Then back at the folder.
Suddenly, the seriousness of the decision hit me.
This wasn’t the healthy newborn we’d once imagined bringing home.
This baby had already been fighting for his life before he could even say a word.
My wife kissed his forehead.
“What is his name?”
“Jett.”
She smiled through her tears.
“Hi, Jett.”
For one brief second, he stopped crying.
And somehow…
that was enough.
We knew we were taking him home.
We just didn’t know yet how much he was going to change our lives.
