‘Be my Mommy!” the CVS window cried out from its display of surplus Baby Emma dolls. It was the fifth day of Christmas, and one of the petitions during Mass, which I’d attended shortly before stopping to pick up prescriptions, was for those who are struggling to have a happy, peaceful Christmas. We prayed for the sick, the grieving, the lonely. We didn’t pray for the orphans, though, I thought during Mass. I did, in my heart, but the Baby Emmas reminded me again.
Over a number of Christmas days, as it happened, I was in Omicron semi-quarantine (having been exposed but testing negative) and then on account of food poisoning. It was not what I had planned, and I wasn’t entirely happy about it (particularly the second). But I’m grateful because it got me thinking in a deeper way about people who are actually in a graver and more long-term isolation, and in particular the actual anguish of children in foster care who don’t have warm memories of love and security and joy — who don’t have memories of a mother and a father who love them and care for them.
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