Never pray about something unless you want the real answer.
I was born in Neosho, Missouri, in the southwest corner of the state. My dad was a purchasing agent for the local electric cooperative. My mom was a hairdresser. Both of them worked.
They didn’t think they’d have more children. So they decided to try to adopt.
They didn’t qualify for private adoption. Back then, if the mother worked, you weren’t a candidate. So they went through the state.
I was six when the call came. My mom was off work that day, and I was home with her. I remember a lot of commotion. She called my dad and he came home immediately. She ran to the store and bought a diaper bag, some diapers, and a couple of sleepers. Then we all got in the car. The baby was three days old.
Everyone in town knew. My mom worked, and then one day she had a baby boy with her. People talk. It was never a secret. But it was also never a subject.
She found out she was pregnant when I was ten. Now I have two brothers.
I met Philip when we were young. We were born in the same hospital in Neosho, though we didn’t know each other growing up. His dad worked for the phone company and they moved around a lot, so he went to a small private school.
My friend Becky was dating Philip’s brother, Paul. She thought the two of us should meet. So one day Paul, Philip, and Becky all came out to watch me play softball, and that was it. That’s how we were introduced.
He was still figuring out what he wanted to do with himself back then. We got married, and he worked while he tried to find his path. We had our three kids, Chelsea, Chase, and Christian, a new addition every four years.
When Chelsea was eight, Chase was four, and Christian was one, Philip decided he wanted to go to medical school. He didn’t have the science background for it, so he went back to school in Joplin. Days in class, nights working as a phlebotomist. We hardly saw him. He got into MU, and the five of us packed up and moved to Columbia.
You can’t work while you’re in med school. There’s just no room for it. So I did, and we survived on food stamps and Medicaid for the kids. We lived in a mobile home. It was warm. It was dry. We had two house payments for a year because we couldn’t sell our old house. We borrowed money to manage it. We kept tithing. That’s what we believed we were supposed to do, and we were always able to, by the grace of God.
I remind the older kids of that all the time now. None of us are too good for where we came from.
Chelsea grew up to become a lawyer, and never wanted to make money doing it. She’s a public defender. Chase went off on a soccer scholarship, got a fine arts degree in acting, worked in California for a while, and just finished medical school himself. Thirty eight years old, starting his residency. Christian did sound production and stage work until Covid ended live events, then went back to school for nursing. He wants to go into psychiatric care.
I was a hairdresser, like my mother, and I did that for about eighteen years until we moved to Lebanon. After that, I focused on being a mom and running everybody around. Managing the house was its own job. Once the kids were grown, I went back to school and got my own degree, just to prove to myself I could.
When our youngest turned four, I felt something I didn’t expect. Sadness. There wasn’t another baby coming. My kids were always four years apart, so I was almost trained on a timeline of what to expect next. I didn’t consider it a possibility at that point. So, I tried not to give it much more thought.
Philip and I converted to Catholicism. We had gone on a pilgrimage with the Sisters of Mercy to Ireland, to see where their ministry started. We sat and had tea with sisters in their eighties, and they were some of the most joyful, genuine people I’ve ever met.
Not long after, we took a trip to Italy. We ended up at the Vatican on Pentecost Sunday. While there, we somehow ended up somewhere we weren’t supposed to be. Close enough to the Pope that the guards questioned how we were able to get there.
Philip will tell you, if it hadn’t been for all of that, we never would have been open to what came next.
A call came. There was a baby. He needed a family. He was four and a half months old.
We talked about it. It was scary. We prayed about it, and I’ll tell you, never pray about something if you don’t want the real answer.
We met with a CASA worker, and then with the people from the state. They brought us into a room, and there he was, playing on the floor. It was like we’d already known each other. He just took right to us, and we played with him, and that first hour went by fast.
We went back several times after that before anything was final. It had to become real in pieces. There was mediation. Eventually the paperwork.
And then he was ours.
Our older three are grown, with kids of their own. The age gap isn’t the usual kind. They’re closer to aunts and uncles to our son than brothers and sister. He’s an uncle himself, to two little girls.
He knows he’s adopted. That’s never been a secret in our house. What he doesn’t know is the rest of it, and there are people out there who do.
I’m asking plainly to let that stay ours to tell, and his to hear, in our own time. Not anyone else’s.
Nobody can prepare you for any part of life, but especially these parts. He is my son, full stop. But there are things about him I don’t know, things I can’t know, and some days that catches me off guard.
You wonder about certain behaviors. Is that genetic. There’s a lot to be said for nurture over nature, but some things still surface, and I don’t always have a way to explain them. I can tell you why he has blue eyes. I can’t always tell you why he does the things he does.
But I have more patience now than I did the first time around, raising three kids on food stamps and borrowed money. Raising him isn’t competing with anything else the way it once did. It’s just him. Helping him find his place in the world, that’s what I get to do now.
We never planned any of it. Not Ireland, not Rome, not him. But God. He is so good. The Lord has been my guide through every bit of it, and I’ve learned that if you let Him, He’ll lead you to something you didn’t even know to ask for.
Sheila Mitchell
adoptive parent
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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