From a childhood marked by fear in West Jackson, Mississippi, Christina Dent developed a deeply rooted belief in being “tough on crime.” Growing up hearing gunshots and sirens, and witnessing the aftermath of violence, she associated drug use with community problems, convinced that locking more people up was the only way to find safety and peace. This early framework, born from a desire for a secure home, shaped her perspective for years, creating a fixed idea of justice and accountability.
But sometimes, life’s unexpected turns open doors to profound change. As Christina and her husband embraced foster care, welcoming vulnerable children into their home—including a baby born prematurely and exposed to drugs—her long-held assumptions about crime, addiction, and motherhood began to unravel. Her personal, transformative journey from fear to empathy would challenge everything she thought she knew, revealing a powerful story of connection and understanding that transformed her world, right here on Our American Stories.
📖 Read the Episode Transcript
Speaker 1: This is Our American Stories, and now a story from our own Monty Montgomery, about one woman’s transformative journey.
00:00:20
Speaker 2: Christina Dent grew up in the capital of Mississippi.
00:00:26
Speaker 3: I grew up in West Jackson in a wonderful, happy home. I grew up in a Christian home and just had a really happy childhood. My mom homeschooled me and my brothers all the way through high school. And I grew up in a community that had a lot of crime in it. I would lay in bed at night and hear ambulances and gunshots. Of the two sounds I remember hearing. I went through a lot of anxiety as a child because of that. Our neighbors were held up at gunpoint while we were home, and our neighbors didn’t have a phone, and so they came over right after it had happened to use our phone to call the police. And that happened when I was about eight or nine, and that set off for me a lot of even deeper anxiety than I kind of already had, and that was hard. I begged my parents to move out of state. I thought maybe if we went somewhere else I would feel safer. I thought that was just how it was, and there wasn’t really anything we could do to change that. I grew up always thinking tough on crime was a way to go, so I got there by saying, there’s crime in my community, and I don’t like that, so we need to be tougher on crime to make that crime go away. And I associated anything related to drugs in with that. Just be tougher. If we can just get tougher, if we can just lock more people up, then I wouldn’t hear these gunshots. I wouldn’t hear these police sirens. That was my framework, and I never really knew much about it. I wasn’t politically involved. I was always voting, felt like that was really important to do, but never really understood what was happening or what maybe could be different for me and for kids like me.
00:02:14
Speaker 2: After getting married, Christina and her husband had two children of their own before deciding that they wanted to start adopting, and they knew they did taking their chances on two toddlers. But while that door closed, another one would open.
00:02:32
Speaker 3: I had never been interested in foster care, even in my interests with adoption. I wanted nothing to do with foster care, but now that door had kind of been opened, and we had to consider, you know, if we were willing to take those two kids in, why couldn’t we be willing to take another kid or two from somewhere else in. And so we ended up deciding we were going to foster through the state, and we would just kind of see where that went. Maybe it would end with the children going back home, maybe it would end in adoption. We were open to either possible ability and just thought that would kind of be a temporary thing that we would participate in. And so we went through about a year of getting certified, and then we got a call out of the blue from our licensure worker, and she said, “Congratulations, Mrs. Dent, you guys are licensed to be a foster family.”
00:03:20
Speaker 2: Thank you.
00:03:21
Speaker 3: And she followed that right up with, “We have a baby that we need a foster family for. Can we bring him over now?” And we were completely unprepared for that because we had been slogging through the licensure process for so long. We thought it would be months before we still were even approved to foster, much less actually had a child coming to our home. We went home and we got everything ready, and we’re texting our family and saying, there’s this baby coming this afternoon. And they brought this little boy over to our house, and we became his foster family, and that was the beginning of four and a half years of foster care for us. My husband got a call about eighteen months after we had taken that first baby, and he called me and said, “They have another baby they need a foster family for, and I really feel like this time we need to say yes. I just feel like God has this child for our home.” And I said, “Oh, I don’t know, this feels really overwhelming. I already feel overwhelmed. I homeschooled my children, and I just thought, ‘I don’t know that I can do this again with an eighteen month old, with two older kids at homeschooling, and a new baby.’ This would be crazy.” But I thought, “You know, my husband really feels strongly about this, and it’s never gonna seem like the best time to have another child in your home. So, okay, we’ll do it.” And they brought this new little baby over. He had just been released from the hospital after his birth. He was born premature, and so he was he was just about five and a half pounds.
00:05:02
Speaker 2: He was also the son of a mother who used drugs during her pregnancy, and.
00:05:08
Speaker 3: The social worker brought him to our house, and she said, “Oh, it was so sad.” When I left the hospital with him. It was like a funeral. His mom was there, the NICU nurses were all there with her. Everyone was crying. And I felt this shift of something inside of me, this feeling of, “Wait a second, that’s not right.” Because a mom who would use drugs while she was pregnant couldn’t love her kids. How does that work? So here you’re telling me this child was removed from her custody because she used drugs prenatally, but she’s also crying as he’s taken away from her at the hospital. That does not fit what I think about moms who would use drugs while they were pregnant. But through that experience, I met the mom of one of our foster sons.
00:05:57
Speaker 2: And her name was Joanne.
00:06:01
Speaker 3: He was at our house for a couple of weeks, and then we had his first visit with her. So I hadn’t met her at this point, but we had the first visit with her at the local child welfare office in Canton, and so I had drove up there with our other children and our new little foster son, and I popped his car seat out of my van, and I turned around in the parking lot, and across the parking lot is sprinting this woman with tears streaming down her face. And she runs up to me, and she just starts kissing the baby, who I’m just kind of standing there awkwardly holding his car seat, and she’s talking to him. And I felt this shift again of what is going on here, because this isn’t what I thought was real. Now, I admittedly knew nothing about addiction. It had never come close to me, and so I only had what I had kind of picked up from our cultural narrative about addiction, which is bad people use drugs, bad people become addicted to that, and we should be suspicious. And so that’s what I thought, and I did feel very suspicious. I thought, “Maybe, maybe she’s just putting this on.” “Maybe she just wants to make me think she’s a great mom and loves her son, so that somehow I’ll put a good word in with the social worker, and that’s gonna, you know, make things better for her.” And so she got to spend her one hour of a lot of visitation time with her son in the little side meeting area with one couch and a couple of toys in it. And I went to the local park and played with my kids to give her some privacy while she was with her son for that time. And then I came back and picked them up, and we went back to our house, and Joanne left for impatient drug treatment a couple hours away in North Mississippi. But she would call me from treatment. She would call about once a day. They would, you know, allow her to make a phone call, and she would call me and she would say, “Can you put me on speakerphone?” And I would, and she would sing to her son over the phone. And again, this growing sense of something is not right, because what I’m seeing here is a mother who loves her son deeply and is also struggling with a complex, serious health crisis. But what I believe is that moms like her don’t love their children. And I could start to follow those dots and say that belief is part of what I have to believe to support moms like her being put in prison, which I know is happening every day, not just moms, but moms, dads, sons, daughters, brothers, sisters. There are people using drugs and struggling with addiction that we’re arresting every day. And I knew that. And so the more that I got to know Joanne, the more I saw her love is real. Her love for her son is real. When she asks me to let him sleep with a particular little animal, blanky, because she wants him to still be able to smell to her, and she had had that with him in the hospital, that’s real. She cares for him, she loves him, she wants him to remember his mom. She’s working hard so that she can regain custody of him and parent him and raise him. I could see as I looked at what would this do to Joanne and to her son. What would it do if we put her in prison for ten years while her son grew up without a mom, if he lost the ability to have a future relationship with his mom? With Joanne and treatment, we had the potential for a positive outcome. And we know that not everyone who goes to treatment is able to stay sober. Not everyone who goes to treatment and is sober is necessarily able to parent. But I could see that the only way that that could happen for Joanne and for her family is if she wasn’t in prison. In prison, there’s no opportunity for a positive outcome there. It is the nuclear option on a family. We grew up in the Eighties together. We’re almost exactly the same age, where both that white women in our thirties, in middle class families. We both were homeschooled kindergarten through high school. We made some different choices, and those choices led to different outcomes. But I could see more and more as I got to know Joanne that really those choices were choices I could have also made, and they my life could have had very different outcomes. And it wasn’t a difference in fundamentally who I am and who Joanne is. That is the difference in where we are now. We’re the same kind of person, and I saw Joanne as a mom like me.
00:10:35
Speaker 1: Christina Dent’s story, a beautiful one, a Mississippi story, too. Here on Our American Stories.
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