The Road to Backpacks for Foster Kids And Beyond

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After I got a tour of the place where I’d be volunteering for the day, which included a detailed explanation of the complicated logistics, I was placed into my first role at Comfort Cases, a non-profit organization that creates backpacks filled with essentials for children entering the foster care system.

It was not an hour into my work, and already the tears were like a hot river that I didn’t seem to mind. They were what I figured should be for such a revelatory experience — a rite of passage into a reality I’d only had a hint of all these years.

I was destined to cry desperate tears for these kids. The alternative would mean I was a pile of inanimate gravel — dusty, lifeless, clueless. I’m not that.

I know you would cry. I know it for a fact.

That’s not as much an indication of who you or I are as it is the sad truth of these kids.

My first task required back-straining, hyper-focused diligence. I oversaw the third count of a big order for a big company. The way it works, typically, is that companies will purchase a set of all the things these backpacks contain, plus the backpacks. Then they’ll host a company event where their employees assemble the pieces and send the finished batch of bags off to a social services agency somewhere in the US.

The counting is meticulous to ensure the correct set of things arrives seamlessly at the door of the donors. Perfect is the goal. I like details. It was up my alley. Maybe I should work on core strength for the future, though. A lot of heavy boxes flow around that office.

The walls of the Comfort Cases space are lined with information, awards, photos of public appearances, and imagery of what the foster system might be like. I tried to take it in amidst my work, stunned with each next image. Mostly, my head was bent, counting.

The mission of this nonprofit is to eliminate the use of a trash bag as luggage for a homeless child entering the system. The backpack has not only essentials — toiletries, t-shirt, socks, dental hygiene items — but also comforting things like a stuffed toy, book, handmade bookmark, a journal, and art supplies. Things are wrapped with bows to indicate this is a gift. No information about the nonprofit can be present in the bag when it’s transferred to the child. This tries to eliminate the sense that the recipient is a number in a system.

When you hold a child’s size 7 shirt as you do your counting, first you imagine the body it will clothe, then you imagine the person it will shock. Brand new things meant just for them are not part of that person’s experience. When you count and re-pack onesies for newborns and babies six months to 18 months, you begin to imagine a tiny body without a mothering embrace being shuttled around to different temporary homes.

These kids come alive to you as you count, wrap, pack, and verify numbers on a list.

These are some of the many reasons why a hot river of tears flows so easily through that office.

I was introduced to the guy who started Comfort Cases by one of my longtime soccer mom friends. I told her I was writing my first novel. She asked, “What’s it about?” I told her, a homeless kid who lives in a tent. She said, “I have to hook you up with my friend, Rob.” She did, and the rest is history. Now I hope to drive the hour north into Maryland to work at the Comfort Cases office once a month if I can.

I’m amazed how easily and organically one road leads to the next in our lives, and how the roads seem so impossible to predict, though maybe they aren’t. Live life, they say. It’ll take you where you were meant to be. I’d like to see the math on that. Not to disprove it, but to be awed at how this might well be true.

From my (very) rudimentary understanding of how our brains work, I know everything that resides in the background of our consciousness constantly directs us based on the best guess and top desires of the moment. Why did I choose to write about a homeless kid? I think it’s because I want the foundation of the story to be about surviving to the point of thriving and then to the point of giving back. It reflects my own hardships (not by a long stretch as tough as being homeless) and how they led me to want to give back — a common human story.

This road led to opening my mouth to my soccer mom besties, which led to Rob Scheer, which led to Comfort Cases. It also led to a few books I’m reading on the foster care experience, research on homelessness, and constant contemplation on the subject.

Now my life is flooded with this new awareness of a slice of humanity, and it’s changing me. All because I wanted to write a book, signed up for a novel-writing cohort with my friend, Susan, and sat my butt in a chair in the corner of my bedroom most days to get on with the project.

One road led to the next.

The road will continue to meander as I choose from the options in front of me, every single second.

I’m scheduled for my next Comfort Cases packing/counting gig in September. Because of the horrendous commuter traffic where I live, I’ll leave before dawn to get ahead of it, then hang out at a Starbucks in Maryland and write. If that sounds like privilege to you, it does to me, too. I have the luxury of augmenting a volunteer shift for traumatized children with a fun coffee shop writing session.

And maybe this is where the road presents itself. I could opt to write about anything under — and beyond — the sun. What if I chose something that might change the road for the better for others? It doesn’t have to be a giant change, just something canted in a more positive direction.

What do they call it? Seeds of change? Believe it or not, that’s another brain mechanism so useful to leverage. I might as well take advantage of it if I can. And that right there is opting for one of the roads in front of me. So far, I like my choices.

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Have a nice week, my friends. :-)