Leslie: Night of Hope Changed Our Lives
Carolina RamirezTwo years ago, Leslie and her children attended Night of Hope at South Euless Elementary. She was mere weeks removed from a cesarean section, and still recovering from the operation. Her newborn child had his first Christmas in the halls of his siblings’ elementary school. Strangers selected and purchased gifts for the entire family that year. And, for the first time in months, the family of eight got to stop worrying.
For Leslie, Night of Hope wasn’t about the gifts. Like many parents in our community, she and her husband spent weeks marinating in the stress of the holidays. They felt guilty just thinking about skipping Christmas to save money. But the alternative was unthinkable, too: skip a bill. Pay rent late. Maybe face eviction again.
Even with both parents holding down good jobs, the budget was uncomfortably tight. That’s where you stepped in.
One Big, Happy (Blended) Family
Leslie’s first husband passed away shortly after the birth of their son, and she came to think that the two of them would struggle through life alone. She feared that it would be impossible to find a partner who would treat her child like his own, but she embraced the challenge of life as a single mother and promised to give her son everything she could. Then she met a man who was raising four children, two of whom weren’t related to him by blood.
“Here you have this single mom, who wants nothing more than a man to accept a child that isn’t his own, who [finds a man who] already knows how to do that,” Leslie said of her husband, whose name has been left out of this report for the sake of anonymity, “That’s the very first thing I loved about him. He loved someone he didn’t have to. And that was a huge deal for me.”
The couple married and set about the hard work of knitting their families together. Their youngest son was born in 2016, and the kids now range in age from seventeen to two. Their eldest daughter helps to keep the house in order.
Leslie, a graduate of L.D. Bell High School, settled in this area because she wanted her children to grow up in the district that raised her. They’re spread across three schools now: South Euless Elementary, Euless Junior High, and Trinity High School.
To tackle the logistics of their blended family, Leslie and her husband work alternating shifts; she takes the family car to work at 7:00 am and returns home at 4:00 pm to watch the kids. Her husband lingers just long enough to check in with each of them, then heads to work at a local church. They live in a carefully controlled rhythm.
“You go to bed, and you fall into the bed, and then you start over the next day,” Leslie said.
Making Ends Meet
Even with two parents working, the budget is tight in Leslie’s household. She’s kept her job at a local mortgage company for over a decade. She loves the work and the way her managers let her build her schedule around her family’s needs. But the company is struggling. They laid off four people the day before our interview, and Leslie confided that she now expects every day to be her last.
Between the uncertainty of their future and the cost of raising six kids — two of whom are teenage boys, notorious for their constantly shifting size and voracious appetites — the family knows that fiscal responsibility is essential. But tight purse strings don’t prevent emergencies, and they certainly don’t recognize holidays.
“Every single dime that we have come in is absolutely accounted for,” Leslie said. “My first of the month check, I don’t even see a dime. None of it. It all goes straight to rent and then, of course, everyday living expenses.
“Any little thing throws you off. Needing an oil change. Somebody had to go to the doctor, and you have to get a prescription now… There is no catch-up. There’s a steady, and there’s a behind. And things like Christmas are really difficult. They’re really, really difficult. It’s something that your heart wants to do, but you don’t have the financial means to back it up.”
Sometimes, no matter how much you want or need something, the money just isn’t there.
Reaching Out
Leslie has visited the New Hope Center twice, and she still struggles to talk about the pain of realizing that she wouldn’t be able to feed her family on her own. But she also smiles when she thinks about the kindness shown to her at every step; from the volunteer who answered her phone call to the counselor who prayed with her and the woman who helped her children “shop” for clothes. In those moments, she said, you could forget the fear and shame and just have fun.
“Here I was, broken, feeling just ‘how did this happen?’ And my kids are excited because they’re walking around shopping,” she remembered. “I have had just the most fantastic experiences with the people that work for 6 Stones and the people that volunteer. I don’t know the difference, to be honest with you… every volunteer is kind. They’re patient — and you have to be patient with a family my size, you really do — and they are joyous. You can feel the love inside of them.”
As wonderful as our programs are, few families walk into them free of emotional burdens. Leslie’s positive experience with volunteers at the New Hope Center helped her get up the courage to accept support through Operation Back 2 School. And, months later, to attend Night of Hope.
“No parent wants to have that feeling. They just don’t,” Leslie said. “No parent wants to not know where Christmas is going to come from… and with 6 Stones, it’s an automatic: ‘This is going to be fine. This is going to be great.’”
The Real Gift
Christmas was magical again in 2016. Leslie and her husband could hardly contain their excitement as they combed through their numbered trash bags to see what gifts their children would receive. But she didn’t list a specific toy or game when asked what the night meant to her.
“My children are older,” she said. “They know that it is a gift from a total stranger. What an amazing gift to give them, that somebody out there who doesn’t know who they are, specifically, cares enough to do that. That’s a huge gift and a huge life lesson for my kids.
“I didn’t have to work extra hours. [My husband] didn’t have to pawn something. We didn’t have to beg somebody… it was just a gift. My husband and my family, we’re all believers. So we believe that was God’s gift to us.”
It didn’t take long for her kids to start looking for ways to pass that gift along.
Night(s) of Hope
The next year, Leslie’s church group offered to provide Christmas for her. She called 6 Stones and had her kids removed from the Night of Hope list so that another family could take their place. Then, she had an unexpected conversation with her teenage sons.
“When I told my boys — and my boys are 15 and 14, all they care about is football, basketball, video games — but when they found out that we weren’t going to be participating with Night of Hope, they came to me on their own and said ‘can we volunteer?’ To me, that speaks volumes. That my boys were so moved by Night of Hope that they wanted to volunteer to be there.
“You are changing who they are. You are instilling in them something that they are going to carry with them into adulthood… it’s changing how they see the world. It’s changing who they are going to be. And prayerfully, when they’re older, they will be able to give abundantly to 6 Stones, to Night of Hope. They will be able to bless other people. And they can sit there and say ‘hey, you know what? I’ve been where you’ve been.’”
There’s no greater gift in this life than the knowledge that you’ve changed a life for the better. We’re working to give thousands of families that gift this year. We hope you’ll join us.