When people tell me I can’t do something, I think, well, could I?
I grew up in Neosho, Missouri. Sports were my life.
I played three sports a year all through high school. It was fun, but it was also my outlet. Whatever frustrations I had, that is where they went.
I loved basketball enough that it was pretty much the only reason I could see myself going to college. I just wanted to keep playing.
My high school team didn’t have a winning record. I didn’t play AAU ball. I didn’t go to camps for recognition. In the days before social media, you had to do those things and I didn’t have those tools available to me. I still managed a full ride to junior college for a year, then was gifted the opportunity of a lifetime to transfer to College of the Ozarks.
We were national runner ups one year. We lost by just seven points. We made the final four another year.
I always say those were the best years of my life. I was doing what I loved. I was falling in love with my now husband, and I was surrounded by people who believed in me at the college.
I’d actually met Chance years before at church camp. I was eighteen and he was sixteen, and we became friends. Then we ended up at the same college. I didn’t even know he was going to be there.
We started dating, and got married when I graduated. Chance still had two years of school left, so I worked for the college until he finished. Then his job took us to Jefferson City, then St. James, and eventually Lebanon.
Leaving College of the Ozarks was harder on me than I expected. I loved the community there so much that I actually got pretty depressed for a while.
Then I got pregnant.
Once you’re a mom, you’re a mom forever. I took that very seriously.
Chance and I had always talked about fostering and adoption. For me, that conversation had started years before we ever met.
When I was sixteen or seventeen, my church did mission work in Honduras. I went two or three summers. The kids would cling to us. I had really blonde hair back then, and they loved to touch it.
Every time we went, somebody would say, “If I could just put one of these kids in my bag and take him home.”
I knew I couldn’t put a kid in my bag and take him home.
But when people tell me I can’t do something, I always think, well, could I do it?
Maybe I can’t.
What if I could?
I was seventeen. I didn’t understand how big any of it was. I just knew there were kids here too.
So when Chance and I started dating, we talked about fostering and adoption. For me, it was non negotiable. If the person I was with didn’t want to do that, that was okay. He just wasn’t for me.
Chance had a heart for it too.
We didn’t have all the answers. We didn’t even really have a plan. We just knew it was something we wanted to do someday.
We had our first daughter, and I had a terrible birth. I was pretty sure I was gonna be a one and done. Chance really wanted a second child, so a couple of years later we tried again.
While I was pregnant with our second, we started taking the classes to become foster parents.
We had people who watched our daughter for us on the nights we went to class. I remember how weird it felt dropping off your baby at somebody else’s house so you could go learn how to take care of someone else’s.
That’s how we were able to do it. There have always been people who stepped into our lives and made it possible for us to keep going.
We tried not to make the decision bigger than it had to be. If we took the classes and decided fostering wasn’t for us, fine. We took the classes. We tried.
If we had a child for one day and realized we couldn’t do it, that was okay too.
If someone had told me then that more than twenty kids would eventually come through our home and we’d end up with six kids permanently carrying our name, I would have said “No, that’s not on my bingo card.”
Our second baby was born, and not long after that, the calls started coming.
One was a little girl who was only about a month old and hadn’t gained any weight. I called Chance and told him I would love to take her, but I couldn’t do the nights. I was already up breastfeeding our baby. If we said yes, he was going to have to do every nighttime feeding.
So he did.
To this day, we remember her as Chance’s baby. She eventually went to live with her aunt.
Another call was for two girls, seven and four. They were the sweetest girls in the world, but they had trouble walking very far, so everywhere we went, I pulled them in a wagon.
At home, I had a two and a half year old and a new baby. We were also working at a church camp at the time, so I was pulling those girls around in that wagon everywhere we went.
After just giving birth, and starting to heal from that, I took on too much pulling those babies everywhere and my healed areas started to bleed again.
That was the only time we ever called a caseworker and said we couldn’t keep a placement. There was nothing wrong with those girls. My body just wasn’t ready.
I hated it.
But that experience gave us a question we’ve asked ourselves with every call since.
Can we do it?
And can we do it without sacrificing what we have?
That doesn’t mean we aren’t going to sacrifice. Of course we are. It means we have to know the difference between something being hard and something being truly harmful to our family.
About a year into fostering, we got the call for siblings.
The oldest was one year old and already in care. The baby was four days old and still in the hospital. Their cases had been put together, and both were already headed toward adoption.
They told us pretty plainly that if we weren’t open to adopting, we probably weren’t the right home.
Adoption had always been part of what we knew fostering might eventually lead to.
We just weren’t thinking two at a time.
So there we were with a two and a half year old, a one year old, another one year old, and a four day old baby.
Four kids under four. Four car seats.
We scrimped and saved and bought what I thought was my dream Suburban. It was beautiful. It was also a lemon. That was fun.
I remember leaving church one Sunday morning with everybody tired, and I was desperate to keep everyone awake until we got home so they would all nap at the same time.
There were banana peels in the car from somebody’s snack, so I started throwing them into the back and yelling, “Catch!”
Nobody caught them.
But they stayed awake.
If I could get everybody home and asleep at the same time, I might get an hour.
It was wild.
Eventually the siblings became ours, and we thought we were done.
We closed our foster license. Four kids was a full house. We moved to Lebanon during that time, and we were happy as a family of six.
Then their biological mom had another baby.
He was about a year old when we got the call.
That was probably the hardest yes we ever made.
The house was full. We were tired. We thought our family was complete.
I remember asking Chance, can we say no and feel good about it? Can we sleep at night and not wish and wonder?
We couldn’t.
So he came home too.
A few years later, there was another call.
Another baby.
Four days old.
We had promised our kids we were done by then. I told Chance maybe we should just go meet him.
Chance said, “If you go meet that baby, you’re going to bring him home.”
He was right.
But this time it wasn’t just our decision.
The kids were old enough to understand what adding another child would mean. So we sat them down and told them the situation.
What do you think?
How do you feel about it?
Every one of them said yes.
We had to go get him.
Because of the COVID rules, none of them could come into the hospital with me. My whole family sat in the car while I went inside, met this four day old baby and finished the paperwork.
They met their new brother in the parking lot.
Things don’t always look the way you think they will.
If I could have written my story out perfectly years ago, there are things that probably would have gone differently. We’ve detoured all over the place. It’s been sloppy and messy. There are things we’ve looked back on and thought, boy, we did not handle that well.
You figure out what works for your family. You figure out your boundaries.
And you find your people.
We couldn’t have done any of this without ours.
Today, four of our six kids came from the same biological mother. My kids know who she is. They know that if she is ever safe, we want them to know her.
There are parts of their story I can’t change.
I tell my kids their mom loves them.
The problem is addiction can be stronger than love.
For a long time, I stayed home with my kids. When we moved to Lebanon and they started public school, I started subbing occasionally. I wanted to get a feel for the schools and get to know people in the community.
Once they figured out I was comfortable in PE and in the chaos of the weight room, that’s mostly where they put me.
Eventually I went back and got my master’s degree in teaching. I did the work during my planning time, before school and after school. I had one rule. If I was going to do it, I wasn’t taking it home.
Home already had enough going on.
Now I teach, and the weight room is still one of my favorite places to be.
I get to pour into kids in a completely different way there.
The boys usually love the weight room like I do. With the girls, I get to show them that they can be confident in who they are and in their bodies. They don’t have to look like the person next to them. They can take up space.
What are your goals?
What are you shooting for?
That’s really what I want for my own kids too.
I have biological kids and adopted kids, but I don’t want any of them growing up feeling like one got opportunities the others didn’t. They’re all different, so I don’t treat them exactly the same.
But I want every one of them to know they had every opportunity I could give them.
I don’t know exactly how many children have come through our home over the years. Somewhere between twenty and thirty.
I kind of like that I don’t know.
It was never about the number.
Some stayed a few weeks. Some stayed months. Some went back home. Some went to relatives. Four stayed.
When we started out, we tried to make fostering as low pressure as possible. Take the class. See what happens. Take one child. See what happens. Give a kid one day of unconditional love if one day is what you can give.
I still tell people that.
If you’re even asking yourself, could I do this, you’re already doing more than most people.
Maybe you think about it and decide you can’t.
That’s okay.
Maybe you become the best support a foster family ever had.
We’ve had people like that in our lives. People I never would have guessed would be the ones who came out of the woodwork and became some of our biggest supports.
You don’t have to know what the whole thing is going to look like.
Sometimes you just have to be willing to ask the question.
Could I?
Lindsy Bailey
foster mom, adoptive mom, biological mom, and Lebanon R-III educator
Voices of Hope
Every person in this community carries a story worth telling. Voices of Hope features the real people of the Missouri Ozarks who show up for children and families, foster parents, caseworkers, volunteers, survivors, and neighbors who simply refused to look away.
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