Mending Hearts

Scissors, what do they do? Scissors cut, they can divide, they can also prepare and alter. Scissors can help create something new and they can also help mend.

Imagine you are an eight-year-old girl sitting on the grass in front of a campfire with many other children. The air is cool but you wrap yourself up in the beautiful blanket you were given. Your camp-counselor told you it’s called a quilt and that someone made it just for you. Someone is telling a story while you are looking down at the quilt, studying the various fabrics. There are so many different designs that you keep finding new ones. Some have flowers, one of your favorites has butterflies. How many times had you longed to be a butterfly, to fly out of your room so you did not have to hear your mom and her latest boyfriend fighting? You are not a butterfly, you did not fly out of your room, you were taken out by police and sent to live with strangers, your foster family. The police officer did not let you take many things from your home and everything in your new place belongs to this other family. Yet, here you are at a special camp for foster kids snuggled up in your own quilt. All of these kids around you have their own story. Most of them brought their own quilt off of their bunk, as well. Unlike the kids at school who have a mom and a dad, these kids also know what it’s like to want to fly away. During this short time at camp, you feel almost normal, you might even feel a bit like you belong and for this time around the campfire, you don’t want to fly away. You are content. You are safe. You might even be happy.

Or maybe you are a sixteen-year-old girl that just spent hours at the police station with your baby sister while caseworkers called around trying to find someone to give you both a bed for the night. You end up in the home of a single-woman. You arrive in the evening and will be picked up the next day before school where you will spend the day pretending that everything is alright. Your sister cries in the bedroom while you talk with this woman who will be your foster-mom for one night, maybe more if they can’t find a family member to care for you. She notices your pants are torn and sends you off to get into your pajamas while she gets out her scissors and her sewing machine. She fixes your favorite pants, the ones that you got from your mom. She also gets a needle and thread and sews a new button on your pants. You don’t have to wear that shoestring for a belt any longer. This foster-mom sends you off the next day with pants that are mended and prayers that you and your sister find a safe place where your souls can mend.

I write this from the experience of being a quilt-coordinator for a foster kids camp. I had the job of collecting the quilts from the beautiful and generous donors. Knowing that foster kids don’t get to own many things, the camp wanted to send them home with treasures to call their own and the chance to start school in the fall with happy memories to share with the other kids.

I write this from the experience of that foster mom who only had a few hours to speak into the lives of these girls and was glad to be able to mend the pants to send them off slightly more intact than when they arrived.

Most foster kids never know who all of the people are that fight for them. Most will never know how many people worked for months to finance and plan the camp or the committed trainers that helped their foster parents get licensed. They often don’t know the tears that were shed for them, and other times they do because they are shed by someone who sat down on the floor and cried with them. These kids will never know the dear woman that gathered together her sewing machine, lots of brightly colored fabrics and her favorite scissors to make a quilt for a child she’ll never get to meet. The woman with the Fiskars and all of these others kind souls knows it’s not about being known but about the chance for a child to mend, to be whole and to one day fly.