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Stranger Care: A Memoir of Loving What Isn't Ours Hardcover – May 4, 2021

by Sarah Sentilles (Author)

4.6 223 ratings

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NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE • “A powerful, heartbreaking, necessary masterpiece.”—Cheryl Strayed, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Wild

The moving story of what one woman learned from fostering a newborn—about injustice, about making mistakes, about how to better love and protect people beyond our immediate kin

May you always feel at home.

After their decision not to have a biological child, Sarah Sentilles and her husband, Eric, decide to adopt via the foster care system. Despite knowing that the system’s goal is the child’s reunification with the birth family, Sarah opens their home to a flurry of social workers who question them, evaluate them, and ultimately prepare them to welcome a child into their lives—even if it means most likely having to give the child back. After years of starts and stops, and endless navigation of the complexities and injustices of the foster care system, a phone call finally comes: a three-day-old baby girl named Coco, in immediate need of a foster family. Sarah and Eric bring this newborn stranger home.

“You were never ours,” Sarah tells Coco, “yet we belong to each other.”

A love letter to Coco and to the countless children like her, Stranger Care chronicles Sarah’s discovery of what it means to mother—in this case, not just a vulnerable infant but the birth mother who loves her, too. Ultimately, Coco’s story reminds us that we depend on family, and that family can take different forms. With prose that Nick Flynn has called “fearless, stirring, rhythmic,” Sentilles lays bare an intimate, powerful story with universal concerns: How can we care for and protect one another? How do we ensure a more hopeful future for life on this planet? And if we’re all related—tree, bird, star, person—how might we better live?

Editorial Reviews

Review

“In prose so gripping it reads like a thriller, Sentilles describes the choices that led to the moment when she and her husband are on the phone with a social worker, saying yes to fostering a three-day-old girl. . . What makes this book so powerful is that by experiencing motherhood through the lens of fostering, Sentilles is able to look at the wrenching and worn-out topics of parenting in a new way.”—San Francisco Chronicle

“A heartbreaking memoir that, if you let it, will change the way you understand love and loyalty and family and caretaking and belonging.”—Chicago Tribune

“An astonishing account of motherhood experienced through the complex lens of foster parenting.”—Shelf Awareness

“Beautiful, harrowing, and profound . . . With sensitivity and insight, Sarah Sentilles takes readers with her on her tender and wrenching path to motherhood while grappling with the complexities, contradictions, and injustices of a system meant to protect the most vulnerable. I love this book so much it hurts.”—Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild

“This is a memoir for anyone who has ever loved a child—or a whale or a bird or a tree, or indeed any part of this hard, beautiful world we all share, which is to say everyone. It is a memoir for everyone.”—Laurie Frankel, author of This Is How It Always Is

“Stranger Care is an illuminating and heart-wrenching look at the foster care system in America, which includes half a million children and disproportionately impacts parents and kids of color. It is a transformative revelation.”—Piper Kerman, author of Orange Is the New Black

“Stranger Care is a book about loving a child without boundaries, without bloodlines, without limits. This is the only book about parenting that I would recommend to anyone, because it strikes at the essential, complicated, and heartbreaking core of what parents do every moment of every day: love, love, love, love. No matter what.”—Emily Rapp Black, author of The Still Point of the Turning World

“Stranger Care is a gripping and beautiful memoir. Sarah Sentilles shares a personal story that is also a story about how we live in America today—and why we must find new ways to love and care for one another.”—Ben Rhodes, author of The World As It Is

“Stranger Care is a work of radical moral philosophy as much as a memoir of one family’s journey through the foster care system. Their story has changed me—it broke my heart wide open in the best possible way—and I don’t think I’ll ever be same.”—Lacy M. Johnson, author of The Reckonings

“Sentilles uses the sheer power of her writing to lift their story above the failures of flawed adults and to remind us of the human heart’s limitless capacity for hope.”—BookPage (starred review)

“Essential reading for those hoping to be foster parents.”—Library Journal (starred review)

“Memoir lovers and book groups will be enthralled.”—Booklist (starred review)

About the Author

Sarah Sentilles is the author of Draw Your Weapons, Breaking Up with God, A Church of Her Own, and Taught by America. A graduate of Yale University and Harvard Divinity School, she lives in Idaho’s Wood River Valley.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

trailing spouse

I always imagined myself a mother. I kept a list of possible names for my future children, pictured myself pregnant and listening to fast fetal heartbeats, looking in wonder at the image on the screen. But I had reservations. I’d absorbed the messages in the cultural ether that framed motherhood as both holy work and trap. My ambivalence grew.

When Eric and I married in 2004 we agreed we’d eventually have a child, but we were busy doing other things—writing dissertations, writing books, chasing academic jobs around the country—and by the time we started talking in earnest about becoming parents, I was in my midthirties, and Eric was close to forty.

We moved to Southern California in 2007 and lived in a townhouse subsidized by the university where we both taught. Eric had been hired for his first tenure-track faculty position in a graduate school of education, preparing teachers for public school classrooms. I was the “trailing spouse,” language that reminded me of the signs along some California highways that show an adult holding the hand of a small child who appears to float in the wind, feet not touching the ground.

Eric liked our life as it was. He liked our freedom, the ease of escaping to the Sierras to backpack and to the Alabama Hills to climb, the unfettered time for activism, for work that might make a difference. We could turn our attention and our resources toward all children, he reasoned, not just our own.

“You’re enough for me,” he said. “I’m okay if it’s just the two of us.”

My friends had desperately wanted to be pregnant, and many had been willing to do anything to make pregnancy possible—take hormones, give themselves shots, find egg donors, buy sperm, endure IVF procedure after IVF procedure, go into debt, hire surrogates. Their certainty threw my uncertainty into relief.

“I don’t know what I want,” I said.

“Figure out what you want,” he said, “and we’ll do whatever you decide.”

I’d struggled for most of my life to name my desire, separate it from other people’s expectations. To know my answers to even the smallest questions—pizza or burrito, hike or bike ride, comedy or documentary—I had to meditate, write in my journal. And when I did manage to figure out what I wanted, it was hard for me to say it. I didn’t trust my knowing. Especially when someone else wanted something different.

Eric does not suffer from indecision. He knows what he wants, and he isn’t afraid to say it. For him, this isn’t about control. It’s about integrity and honesty. It’s about not making other people read your mind. He says what he needs, and he trusts I will do the same.

But I didn’t do the same. When it was time for us to figure out if we wanted to have a baby, I hadn’t been saying what I wanted for years. And Eric was always so sure. If I didn’t know what I wanted for dinner, then why not eat what he wanted to eat? Why not watch what he wanted to watch? Why not hike where he wanted to hike?

These little deferrals accumulate.

I imagine it feels good to be married to someone who accommodates, especially if you don’t know that’s what’s happening. It makes it easier to say “We’ll do whatever you decide” because past experience indicates we always agree.

Until we didn’t.

Until I wanted a baby, and he did not.

the biggest gift

I wanted a baby, but I’d also swallowed whole the story that being a mother would ruin my writing, ruin my life. If I have to play with trains for one more second, a friend texted me, I’m going to shoot myself. Everyone I knew who had kids complained about it. There wasn’t enough money. There wasn’t enough sleep or sex or play. There wasn’t enough time to paint or write or read. There wasn’t enough time alone or time off or time, period.

“Work, kids, marriage, health,” Eric said on repeat after he read some article in some magazine about parenthood and its demands. “Choose three.”

I didn’t believe that scarcity narrative, but I couldn’t point to anyone’s life where it wasn’t true.

Sometimes when we shopped at Target, we’d see tired parents wheeling carts filled with plastic through the aisles, kids running behind them. “Why do you want to be a mother?” Eric would ask me while a toddler screamed and threw himself on the floor next to shelves and shelves of detergent.

“Because I want to” was all I could muster.

Eric didn’t want to have a baby because of the stress parenthood would bring, but there was a deeper resistance, too. Eric loves the earth and hates what people do to it. He follows me around the house turning down heat, turning off lights. “When did you two become vampires?” a friend asked when she came over for cocktails and walked into our dark kitchen. The environmental argument against making another human was a logical one for him to make, an ethical extension of his worldview. “We’re a cancer,” he said and emailed me article after article about overpopulation and melting ice and the great Pacific garbage patch and how much an American child consumes compared to a child born somewhere else. “The biggest gift I can give to a planet under stress is not creating another human,” he said.

Knowing that Eric thought having a baby would cause the earth harm made it harder for me to admit my longing for one. How do you pit personal desire against planetary destruction?

the wisdom of mother trees

In the forest, underground, there is another world. In a single footstep, hundreds of miles of fungal networks are buried in the soil. The ecologist Suzanne Simard studies how trees use those networks to talk to each other, to communicate their needs and help their neighbors. These pathways connect trees, allowing the forest to behave as if it were a single organism. Through the fungal threads, trees share carbon. They send warnings and distress signals to one another. And they look for kin.

Scientists have mapped those underground grids, which look like our brain’s neural networks. The trees are the nodes and the fungal highways are the links. The busiest nodes are called hub trees or mother trees. A mother tree might be connected to hundreds of other trees. She nurtures her young, the new growth of the understory.

Simard wanted to know if mother trees could tell the difference between their seedlings and seedlings from other trees. And if they could, did they favor their offspring? She did an experiment. She grew mother trees alongside both kin and stranger seedlings. And it turned out mother trees knew their offspring. They colonized their kin with bigger mycorrhizal networks than they did the stranger seedlings. They sent them more carbon. They even reduced their own root competition to make room for their young. And when the mother trees were injured or dying, they sent carbon and defense signals to their seedlings, messages of wisdom that increased the resistance of their young to future stresses.

But trees also help strangers. They cooperate and share. As the climate changes, as the earth heats up, ponderosa pine, a lower elevation species, will replace Douglas fir. In a greenhouse, Simard and her team grew Douglas fir and ponderosa pine seedlings. They then injured the Doug fir that was acting as the mother tree. When the mother fir was injured, she gifted her carbon to the ponderosas. She also sent them a warning, information that gave the ponderosas an advantage as they took on a more dominant role in the ecosystem. She shared what she knew about the warming world with the trees that would take her place.

brave enough to have your heart broken

Eric and I met in divinity school in 1999. I was studying to become an Episcopal priest; he was studying to confirm that if people think they know God it is not God they know. Radical agnostic read the bumper sticker on his car. I don’t know and you don’t either. In school, instead of Does God exist? we were taught to ask What do our ideas about God do? Whom do they harm? Whom do they help? We learned to engage not whether someone’s belief about God is true—because how could you prove it?—but rather the ways faith affects people’s lives. That can be measured, observed, evaluated, changed.

Humans play a crucial role in creating the world in which we find ourselves, its beauty and its terror—about this, Eric and I agree. We understand that the world is made and believe it can be unmade and remade to be more just and life-giving for the most vulnerable among us.

But Eric thinks humans, as a species, will never choose to do that.

And I think we might.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Random House (May 4, 2021)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 432 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0593230035
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0593230039
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.73 x 1.3 x 8.48 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,022,007 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #816 in Adoption (Books)
- #851 in Sociology of Marriage & Family (Books)
- #29,816 in Memoirs (Books)

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4.6 223 ratings

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P.D.P.

I’m weeping. A love letter to Coco a foster daughter

Reviewed in the United States on May 13, 2021

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I found Sarah Sentilles through the A Cup of Jo blog. I read Sarah's "My Foster Daughter's First Birthday" and cried three times while reading it. It spoke to me so deeply and moved me so much I immediately looked her up on Instagram and pre-ordered her book.

My youngest child is 6 months old, so I haven't slept much or showered much in the last 6 months. But every night, for the hour or so I have to myself, I will curl up on the couch and read this book. I got it on May 6 and tonight on May 12 I finished it.

I have 2 beautiful, biological boys and I work part time at a nonprofit. Since I was very young, I've always thought about adoption and recently, I've been thinking more and more about adopting through foster care.

We don't get to "meet" Coco until we're well into the book, probably half way. She details the entire process that she and her husband Eric, go through to become certified foster parents in the state of Idaho. I appreciated all the details she included, the conversations with the social workers, the rollercoaster of emotions during this often frustrating and tedious process, the gut-wrenching placement calls, the check-ins with her therapist....I'm so glad she had the support of family, loving friends and a therapist. I can't imagine doing this without a support system.

I thought her writing so brave and so honest...I admired her ability to love Evelyn, Coco's bio mom, despite enemy lines being drawn. It was hard to finish the last 50 pages of this book because I knew what was coming and I couldn't bear it. I had to pause from all the weeping. I didn't want to let Coco go. Oh, I felt the pain physically in my stomach. I felt the visceral palpable love of a mama bear desperate, clawing and clinging to get to her daughter. Where is Coco?! Why can’t we get her out of the trailer with no electricity and no running water?! Why can’t all these people who know what’s going on, not intervene? I wasn't only crying with Sarah, I was crying for all the children in the world like Coco, who don't get to laugh and to giggle and play because they're so busy worried about keeping safe, protecting themselves from danger.

I will go to bed crying tonight for Coco, but I will pray for her. I will pray that wherever she is, she will know she is loved.

7 people found this helpful

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Chantal Forfota

You will not be able to put it down

Reviewed in the United States on June 9, 2021

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This is an absolutely beautiful book. It is a meditation on the act and meaning of love. Who do we love? How do we love? Who do we take as kin? Sentilles takes us through her journey caring for a newborn through the foster system. Her skill as a writer brings you right into every moving and heartbreaking moment. She weaves these experiences with Coco and the foster system with meditations on diverse kinship patterns in the natural world, which offer a wider perspective, relief, and instruction. She lets the reader draw her own conclusions.

Sentilles' writing is honest, clear-eyed, and brave. She explores and shares her struggle with her path to motherhood. She critiques the foster system, while respecting the noble and thankless work that so many are doing within it. She is deeply humane and understanding of the trauma that so many within the system face - the bio parents who have kids removed, the children in care, the social workers, the foster parents who open their homes and hearts to children in need.

Also, this is a page-turner. It hooks you from the very first page, and you will not be able to put it down. The reason it is so gripping is that you are welcomed into Sentilles' gigantic heart. You feel her capacity for love and her longing for it. You feel her courage in facing pain and injustice, her own fear of loss, and her mind's attempt to resolve these things by doing the right thing. This is a book that challenges our notions of love, how we draw lines about who and what we love and protect, and asks us why, and why not more love? This is a book for everyone who wants to love more. This is a book for everyone.

2 people found this helpful

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d bhatt

Brought my reading life back to life

Reviewed in the United States on May 14, 2021

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I am a tired, burned out, pandemic mom of 2 small kids. I used to be an avid reader but over the past year particularly, I can barely eek out a few sentences of a book before losing track.
This book brought me back to life. I needed to hear about another mom struggling for different reasons. I needed to remember why I value cherishing small moments of joy with my kids. I needed to remind myself of all the racial, social, and political injustices happening to children constantly and why I became a social worker in the first place. I outright sobbed a few times during this book. I was instantly connected to Sarah and Coco. I read this book in 2 days. Full stop. I haven't read a book in 2 days since before I had kids 7 years ago! Beautiful, heartbreaking, enwrapping, joyful, bitterly sorrowful. I cannot recommend this enough.
This is an important way to start a learning journey about our foster & adoption system in the US, along with Child Protective Services.

6 people found this helpful

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pat

Real life drama

Reviewed in the United States on May 29, 2021

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Great story well written filled with emotion and love. I thought the story would end differently but it was uplighting

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Melissa G.

"Stranger Care" is heart-expanding as much as it is heart-wrenching

Reviewed in the United States on July 9, 2021

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I just finished the breathtakingly beautiful "Stranger Care" by Sarah Sentilles. She writes that "love might transform us." Reading will, too. She writes, "my heart expanded." As did mine. She writes, "You [foster daughter Coco] were never ours, yet we belong to each other."

Thank you, Sarah, for making me likewise belong, as a reader. For bringing me into the fold and making me care about and root for the girl who held your pinky finger and didn't let go. Who held, and still holds, your heart. Who, someday, God- and DHW-willing, you will bring back home.

Readers -- please pick up this gorgeous book. I promise: it will move you, deeply.

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Top reviews from other countries

ELAINE CONNELLY

Eye opening journey through trying to adopt through the foster care system

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 23, 2021

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Beautifully written story about one couples journey within the foster care system in the USA. Highly recommend

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