After fostering dozens of kids and adopting 9, she’s not done being a mom
In 1997, Evelyn Reid’s two boys had grown and moved out, leaving her alone in a quiet, empty west Charlotte house with a tug in her heart.
She wasn’t done being a mom.
She was divorced and unable to have more children, so she applied to provide respite care for foster parents in need of a little break.
One day, a social worker said there were five boys in need of a temporary home. Could Reid help? Sure, she said.
The boys stayed six months. Then there were two girls who came to stay, but had no families to go back to. Reid loved them, and later adopted them.
Throughout the next two decades, Reid would foster 43 children and adopt nine.
Today, the 64-year-old has five adoptive children between the ages of 5 and 15 still at home. Four are siblings whom she adopted because she couldn’t stand the thought of them being split apart. She doesn’t take in foster children anymore because there’s simply no more room.
Reid is a home health care nurse while her kids are in school, taking shifts caring for an 84-year-old woman. She receives financial benefits from the government because she’s an adoptive parent, but her budget is stretched thin.
So this Christmas season, Reid turned to the Salvation Army’s Christmas program for help with gifts for her four youngest children, 12-year-old Nyquez, 10-year-old Shaniya, 8-year-old Sierra and 5-year-old Miracle.
This year, 6,542 children were registered to receive toys and clothes through the Salvation Army’s Angel Tree program, which matches children in need with anonymous donors who buy the gifts. Some 1,547 senior citizens also received gifts this Christmas. And 925 gift cards will be distributed to agencies serving foster children and children and adults with disabilities.
In cases where donors don’t step up, Charlotte Observer readers cover the expense by giving to the Empty Stocking Fund. Money raised by last year’s Empty Stocking Fund allowed the Salvation Army to purchase 11,541 toys and 590 gifts for low-income seniors, in addition to the 925 gift cards.
This Christmas there will be bikes under the tree for Nyquez and Sierra, and toys, clothes and other goodies for Shaniya and Miracle.
“It just helps tremendously,” Reid said of the Christmas assistance. “I don’t know what I would do without it.”
Looking on the positive side
Reid traces her passion for providing children with stable homes and a loving heart to her own childhood.
She suffered from medical conditions that caused paralysis and was unable to walk until age 7, she says. But thanks to a loving family with supportive siblings, she was able to thrive and later have a physically active childhood.
The children who have come to stay with her don’t have the physical ailments she had, but sometimes they have come with profound emotional scars that required extra tenderness.
“If they get lots of love and nurturing, then they can survive. I have to show them that they have a home here, and I don’t care where they came from or what their background is,” Reid says. “We have to always look at the positive side of everything.
“I show them a lot of love, and let them know it’s not the end of the world that they had to come to foster care.”
It’s a cramped, busy life in the three-bedroom, two-bathroom blue ranch house off Beatties Ford Road in Charlotte, but Reid couldn’t imagine it any other way.
“I could be by myself. I could be doing any number of other things,” Reid said on a Friday afternoon as she prepared to get her kids home from school and off to a Christmas party. “But I choose to do this.”
Tradition
Reid has a tradition for the way she greets a new child who comes into her home. She doesn’t ask a lot of questions right away because she knows the child may have been exposed to domestic violence or parents struggling with substance abuse.
First, Reid introduces herself to the child, and asks them to introduce themselves to her.
“Then I say, ‘Let’s pray.’
“They don’t open up to you the first day,” she says. “I let them feed into me. Once they start talking about it, I let them know that everything will be all right and I give them a hug. I tell them, ‘You can always come to me.’ ”
When a child doesn’t want to close the bathroom door, she lets them know it’s OK to use her master bathroom, so they can have privacy but don’t have to close the door. If someone is afraid of the dark, there’s always a nightlight close by.
“One thing I learned with foster care is there’s a lot of stuff in the back of kids’ minds and we might not ever know exactly what happened,” she says. “The best thing we can do is comfort them.”
‘People look up to her’
With five kids at home, Reid is a scheduling master.
There’s school schedules to adhere to, homework to help with and Nyquez’s basketball practices and games to get on the calendar.
She makes monthly shopping trips to Sam’s Club for frozen food and the non-perishables they’ll need. She runs the washer and dryer every day, and has taught her kids how to do chores, from taking out the trash to sweeping up, vacuuming and doing dishes.
They take turns caring for the family pets: four aquariums full of guppies and Nyquez’s two hermit crabs that joined the family during an annual trip to Myrtle Beach.
Shaniya, 10, is especially good at pitching in. “She sees what needs to be done, and I don’t even have to ask,” Reid says.
Raising young children keeps her young, especially bringing up 5-year-old Miracle, whom she brought home from the hospital to join her biological siblings. But Reid is not blind to the reality that she’s a senior citizen and won’t have as much time with them as younger parents would.
“I try to tell them all the time, ‘I’m not going to be here forever.’ They need to have life skills, and to know what’s going to happen when I’m not around.”
Once a month, she takes everyone out to Cici’s Pizza or Golden Corral to celebrate good grades.
She leans hard on her faith, she says, by keeping herself and her kids active at Clement Memorial AME Zion, where they worship every Sunday and attend Bible study on Wednesday nights.
Reid oversees the “culinary ministry” at church, volunteering almost every weekday from June through August to help feed children who come to eat a hot lunch provided by the school system. She also volunteers to cater events at the church, like last week’s Christmas breakfast.
“People look up to her,” says Pastor Sheila Herron.
“She has such a love for children,” Herron says. “Her children are mannerly children, sweet kids, and you can tell Ms. Reid has done a fine job with them.”
On any given Sunday, Herron says she can count on Reid’s children to be in their seats at Bible study or helping during the worship service. They sing in the church choir, and on Palm Sunday of 2020, they’ll all be baptized.
“They love the Lord, these kids,” Herron said.
Christmas love
This Christmas, Reid’s kids will get up early and run to the tree to open gifts. One will be missing: the eldest, Elise, is in Brooklyn, N.Y., spending time with her biological grandparents.
After opening gifts and eating a big breakfast of eggs, waffles, grits and sausage, Reid and the children will head to the home of one of Reid’s sisters and eat heavy hors d’oeuvres, then come home and see some special visitors: three children whom Reid fostered years ago, who want to spend time with her at Christmas.
She still keeps up with many of those she’s helped through the years.
Every time a child has left her home, she’s written down her phone number, pressed it into their hands, and told them that they can always call, and can always come back.
“It all comes down,” she says, “to being a mom.”
How to donate
To donate to the Empty Stocking Fund online: EmptyStockingFundCLT.org.
To donate by mail, send checks to: The Salvation Army of Greater Charlotte, P.O. Box 31128, Charlotte, NC 28231. Make checks payable to The Salvation Army of Greater Charlotte and write “Empty Stocking Fund” in the memo line.
Questions concerning your donation? Call 704-716-2769.
We’ll publish all donors’ names.
This story was originally published December 24, 2019 at 12:00 AM.