The power of the mother and the need of the child

MEMOIR
Stranger Care: A Memoir of Loving What Isn’t Ours
Sarah Sentilles
Text, $34.99

Early in American writer Sarah Sentilles’ memoir a two-week-old baby boy is pulled out of rubble alive. “This baby was stronger than barrel bombs, stronger than collapsed ceilings, stronger than everything,” says his rescuer, a member of Syria’s White Helmet volunteers.

In reality, babies are only as strong as the love we give them. Without love they are the most vulnerable beings of all — porous to the afflictions and addictions of the adults around them. Written with Sentilles’ characteristic sensitivity, Stranger Care is a deeply moving story about our capacity to love those children who don’t belong to us, but who so desperately need us.

In Sarah Sentilles’ book she includes a series of poignant vignettes about mother-like attachment in all its forms, across all species. Credit: iStock

As Sentilles and her husband Eric wrestle with whether to have their own child, she quietly aches for a baby, and he grieves for the future of Planet Earth. “The biggest gift I can give to a planet under stress is not creating another human,” he says.

When they decide to adopt a child instead, they are catapulted into a parallel universe of child protection, community services, courts, home assessments, foster carer training — and finding out far too much about the horrific things people do to children.

Sarah Sentilles evokes the tree as a mother figure in a poignant motif.Credit:

“What about kids who have been sex trafficked,” one community worker asks about who they are prepared to accept. “We get lots of broken babies,” says another.

Eventually three-day-old Coco lands in their lives. Her mother Evelyn is living chaotically, her father is in prison. Sarah and Eric are aware of their state’s policy to reunify children with their biological parents, even when it seems improbable, but they still hope to adopt Coco.

As their love for Coco deepens — though we only get a fleeting sense of their relationship with her, much of the story is occupied with their bumpy ride in Idaho’s foster-care system and their relationship with Evelyn — so too does their desire to fight for her.

Sentilles reckons with the torrid history of taken children — Black and Native American children ripped from their mothers’ arms by slave traders or state authorities; and the thousands of migrant children recently taken by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at the Mexican border. She is co-founder of Alliance of Idaho, which fights for the rights of immigrant families.

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Ironically, as foster parents, Sentilles and her husband find themselves as much a part of this history of dispossession as saviours of a child in need. “I became more complicit, by the day,” writes Sentilles, as she starts to resent Evelyn and a system she believes prioritises the needs of biological parents over the needs of children.

At a deeper level, Stranger Care is about all forms of mothering — the mother tree for its seedlings, Mary Magdalene for her otherworldly offspring, the German woman who welcomes a refugee into her home, the robin feeding its hatchlings in the nest, the Kenyan zookeeper caring for the last remaining male northern white rhino.

“Kinship was everywhere I looked,” says Sentilles.

Interleaved with her story is a series of poignant vignettes about mother-like attachment in all its forms, across all species. Sentilles collects these scenes like a magpie and as if to make sense of her experience of mothering in the face of inevitable loss.

But it is the evocation of the tree as a mother figure that is perhaps the most striking motif. Science shows us that trees help strangers in the forest — gifting their carbon to unrelated species. Trees share nutrients and water with those adjacent to them, and with young saplings finding their roots in the shade of the canopy above.

And it is to Nature that Santilles ultimately turns to stay connected with Coco when she’s taken away from them.
“When you kiss Coco, you kiss the earth, I hear in a dream. I kiss the grass in our front yard … I kiss the sky … I kiss you.“

The suffering of family-abuse survivors from childhood into adulthood is the silent pandemic of our times. We all have a role to play in preventing it. This is not Other People’s story. This is all our story. “Be the tree.”

Natasha Mitchell is presenter of the ABC Radio National program and podcast Science Friction.