When a Mom Needs Help, Does Anyone Show?

‘T he flames rose. So did our people.”

Instead of sleeping in on Saturday morning, Darcy Olsen and her four children woke to find their attic on fire. And her people immediately rushed to assist her in practical ways. Complete with an all-important Diet Coke. (Hear us out before your report us to RFK Jr. and the Make America Healthy Again movement.) They are the best of civil society, and they demonstrate love for one’s neighbor.

Darcy founded the Center for the Rights of Abused Children, which makes sure that kids in foster care have legal representation. All too often, the child-welfare system is about adults. Even when the system has the best intentions, the children can be secondary concerns. At one beautiful adoption event in Washington, D.C., in recent years, I listened as a celebrity talked about how her adopted children completed her. Many couples look to adoption and foster care because they are struggling with infertility. Perhaps their attempts at in vitro fertilization have failed. Maybe they object morally or don’t have the money for heart-wrenching medical experimentation and the destruction of embryos. Or perhaps a single woman has given up on finding the one and has decided to go for motherhood on her own. It still takes a village, as they say. But that village has got to be about the children. And it isn’t always.

Darcy’s people are well trained, having walked with her on her journey through fostering and adoption. When she tells her story, it tends to begin with the fact that she never planned on being a single mother, never mind one by adoption. But once you realize that there are children, even babies, at times, sleeping in government facilities, you must do something. An irrevocable part of her experience is the knowledge that one of the children she had loved over the years wound up dead while in the custody of her birth mother. Drugs are that pernicious. And in some cases, if, say, meth is the addiction, the village’s law needs to be heartless toward the birth parents. Even the mother–child bond sometimes can’t break the stranglehold of addiction.

“You seem so calm,” Darcy recalls someone commenting the morning of the fire. I even got that sense over text message. She’ll admit now that she wasn’t. “But if I wanted the kids to really believe that ‘things are just things,’ I had to hold it together,” she later reflected to friends on social media. Helping her keep up appearances, someone handed her a Diet Coke. Small though such gestures were, they somehow showed the gratuitous love of God at a time when Darcy could have legitimately been feeling sorry for herself — and even bitter, frankly. She’s trying to do all the right things, and then a fire happens.

In the wake of the fire, she has been overwhelmed by gratitude for the response from neighbors, strangers, and friends. “In an instant, an army of firefighters — sons, brothers, fathers — stood before us, ready to risk their lives for strangers,” she remembers. “When I called to ask which station we could thank, I learned that men from four stations and two battalion chiefs had responded.”

Among the chaos of that morning, her daughter’s cat was “too scared to breathe,” and someone had to rescue it. And when her eight-year-old Michael volunteered to help, someone found a way to make him feel like a legitimate part of the rescue.

“Then came the volunteers from the American Red Cross, funded by people like you and me. I didn’t want to say yes. But we needed help.”

We all do at some point. Sometimes more obviously than others. Darcy couldn’t help but to accept it. Sometimes we need to have the humility to ask.

One of the reasons her whole family situation works is because her church community is an active part of her life. She made sure they were aware of what was going on, texting: “We’ve had a fire. I think I need some hands.” And: “They came. One after another. After another. After another.”

“Some were dressed for the Easter pageant,” she remembers now. “Didn’t matter. They came as they were — with food, water, hugs, and jokes. They salvaged. They shoveled. For hours. They searched for a tiny red elf named Candy because Michael was in tears that she’d been separated from her husband elf, Charlie. She mattered to him — so she mattered to them.”

She and her kids were overrun with food. A friend found a place for them to stay — complete with a pool for the children. Someone lined up “chef-prepared dinners for the week” — “We’re suddenly very fancy,” Darcy jokes. One mom insisted that she’d “love to help with laundry!” and another with soccer duty: “practices, games, carpools. However long you need.”

Later on the day of the fire, she had her breakdown moment when she cried on the phone with her father, who lives on the East Coast. Stress is stress. She was also overwhelmed by the love she and the children were being shown. As she says: “We don’t have a house right now. But we have a mansion. Not made of walls — but of people.”

When the fires rise, will we rise? Easter and Passover. Weddings and funerals. Births and graduations. We have many rituals, especially this time of year, that have religious connotations. But do the sentiments of faith bleed — and radiate — into our everyday emergencies and inconveniences? And if we do the right thing, do we attend to the doll who needs a reunion and a mom who clearly needs a Diet Coke? Are we who we say we are? Darcy happens to be a thanker and has platforms for expressing her gratitude. Many others in crisis situations won’t. Will we show up anyway? Even when the only credit is with the God who made us for moments like these, and for loving one another in every other one?

This column is based on one available through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association.