Amber Kula

My mother didn’t want me. The loss of her first daughter was too much to bear and mental healthcare wasn’t what it is now. When she found out she was pregnant again and that it was another girl, she didn’t want me.

I traveled back and forth between my mom and my grandparents for years. Often being left with random family members or even just people my mom had just met.

When I was young, one of my mom’s boyfriends abandoned us on the side of a road in New Mexico. The sheriff picked us up. Family scraped together enough money to get my mom a plane ticket back to Arizona. One ticket. She left me with my cousin and his wife, Gloria, in a single-wide trailer where there were already three girls sharing one bedroom.

Everyone told Gloria to call Child Services and turn me over to them. She couldn’t afford another mouth to feed. But Gloria kept me.

I was there for months before my mother came for me, with the same boyfriend who had abandoned us there in the first place. I begged to stay with Gloria, because she actually cared for me.

Gloria will always hold a very special place in my heart. Her daughter now is a Child Services caseworker.

I went from home to home to home and eventually gained some sort of stability when my grandparents got guardianship of me.

I was a terrible teenager. I ran. I was with boys I shouldn’t have been with. I overdosed three times in a year.

When I got pregnant at sixteen, nobody really knew what to do with me. I certainly was in no position to be a mother, but I kept her, vowing to be better than my mother ever was.

It was just the two of us for a long time, until I met Ross in 2014.

Ross’ friend signed him up for Farmers Only without telling him. I had some horse legs, wrapped in trash bags, in my trunk, meant for my grandpa to use as yard decorations. Ross looked like the kind of guy who might know what to do with them. He knew enough to write me back and then we just never stopped talking.

That’s how it started.

Ross doesn’t talk about his childhood the way I talk about mine.

He was eight when a judge asked him where he wanted to live. His mom changed men the way most people change shoes. He chose his dad. His two older brothers went with his mom and mostly just roamed. His middle brother has seven kids. Every one of them is in foster care or been adopted. His brother is still on the streets in California, still in his addiction. The last time Ross heard from him was a collect call from San Francisco County Jail. Eight years of silence and then a phone number on a screen.

When his brother’s first kids went into care, Ross and his dad tried to take them. His dad wasn’t working. Ross was still in high school. He thought food in the fridge and rent getting paid ought to count for something. Those kids got adopted by a family that decided they wanted no contact with the biological side. Ross tracked down the oldest when she turned 22. Left his number. Told her biological mom if they ever want to find him, they can.

He’s never stopped thinking about those kids.

That’s the thing about Ross. He works hard at stable because he never had it. He knows what it means when nobody shows up.

We bought a house in Phoenix in 2018. Then covid hit and everything came apart. I lost my job. Ross kept testing positive with no symptoms, back when a positive test meant you couldn’t go back to work until you cleared three weeks of clean tests. He never cleared. They demoted him when he finally came back. He quit the same day.

Phoenix was unraveling around us anyway. Curfews. Riots downtown that you could find on Google if you want to know what I mean. One night a gang war broke out on our street. Two kids with AR-15s walked out from both ends of the block and shot up every house. Our house was the only one they didn’t hit. The minivan wasn’t so lucky. A bullet came through the back glass and lodged right above the passenger sun visor. We drove that van until 2021 and I told that story every time somebody asked how we ended up in Missouri.

We sold everything. Bought a camper. Short sold the house. We were looking for wherever we could survive, so Ross searched diesel mechanic jobs with no location filter and Springfield kept coming up. He had interviews lined up before we even crossed the state line. We just didn’t know where we were going to sleep.

We called every campground we could find within driving distance of Springfield. A man named Joe answered the phone at an RV park out on Highway 64 and told us he was closing for winter and couldn’t help us. About 45 minutes later he called back. He said he didn’t know what we were doing for God, but God had just told him we needed to come. We pulled in two days later.

We lived in that camper for two and a half years, trying to build a life here.

Then a rental house. Then a bigger rental house. Then last summer we bought a place with four bedrooms that we filled very quickly.

We had a kid before we were officially licensed. We had done all the training and were just waiting on finalization. I was working at Project 360 The Sound House and one of the teen girls needed a place to go. We told Children’s Division to hurry up and license us because we were taking her regardless. That was our first placement.

We’ve had twelve kids since then. Mostly teenage girls. Not because we planned it that way. It’s just what kept coming, and at some point we stopped pretending we didn’t know why. God is sending us these kids for a purpose, even if it’s just for a little while.

We don’t have a lot. Some months we’re down to almost nothing in the bank and we tell the kids that, we don’t hide it. Ross says we’re living off hope and prayer right now and then somehow there’s always food. We’ve made enough family in this community that there’s always somebody to call. God makes a way.

We take the kids to church three times a week. We go to Refuge, a recovery program held by Heritage Baptist Church, and they get to sit in a room full of adults who’ve been exactly where their parents are. People who were in addiction and came out the other side. Fat and happy and showing up to volunteer on a Sunday.

For a lot of our kids that’s the first time they’ve ever seen proof that the story can change. That their parents could still change.

There are things I understand about these girls that I can’t always explain.

I was abused as a child. I was raped. I’ve done the work to carry that without letting it carry me. But I know what these girls are holding before they say a word.

I know why a girl gravitates toward older men. I know what it looks like when survival gets dressed up as a choice. I know because somebody needed to fight for me the way I fight for them, and for a long time nobody did.

I’ve done my own work. The kind you have to keep doing, not just once and then you’re fixed. Ross and I both know what it means to lose the community that was holding you up. We watched it happen to people during covid, watched them relapse because the thing that was keeping them steady just disappeared one day.

You can’t let that be your whole foundation. You have to keep building it, keep showing up, keep letting people grab you by the scruff of your neck when you start to drift.

I’m still working on myself. I’ll always be working on myself.

But when one of our girls looks at me and says you don’t understand, I don’t argue with her. I just know that I do. More than she knows. More than I’ll say out loud in that moment.

Every kid who has come through our house has heard the same thing before they leave.

You can always come back.

We’ve had kids go home, go to family, age out, run. We’ve had missing posters for kids we used to feed dinner to. We’ve had some come back once. Some twice. We might have a third return coming this week.

We do it for the Lord. Period.

We’re not the right house for every kid. But for the ones who land here, we want them to know that the door doesn’t close. You can come back and get a meal, get a shower, figure out your next move. You can call. You can show up. Whatever you need.

We came to Lebanon with a bullet lodged above the sun visor and nowhere to sleep. Somebody called us back and said come anyway.

That’s all we’re doing.

Foster Parent