Mary X - Full of Grace

In this tender and powerful episode of Hope Mississippi, I have the true honor of sitting down with “Miss Mary,” a former foster youth who entrusted me with one of the most heartbreaking and hope-filled stories I have ever heard. I cannot tell you how humbled I am that she trusted me enough to share her story, and I do not take that lightly.

Mary opens up about how poverty, family instability, and a parent’s illness led her into foster care, and how placement after placement shaped the way she learned to trust, to feel safe, and to understand love. She speaks with honesty and courage about neglect, abuse, trauma, and the deep wounds left behind when a child’s voice is dismissed by the very systems meant to protect them.

But friends, this is not just a story about pain. It is a story about grace.

Mary shares how prayer became a lifeline, how surrendering her life to Christ gave her the strength to keep going, and how the Lord met her in some of her loneliest moments. After aging out of foster care without the support so many young adults depend on, she met the man she would marry just one month after high school graduation. What began in hardship became a beautiful testimony of steadfast love, faithfulness, and a 60-year marriage.

And that love did not stop with them.

Over the course of two decades, Mary and her husband opened their home to more than 100 foster children, offering safety, stability, and compassion to children who needed all three. Their story is a living reminder that God can bring healing, redemption, and purpose out of even the deepest hurt.

My prayer is that this conversation encourages your heart, opens your eyes, and stirs all of us to care more deeply for vulnerable children and the families who welcome them in.

If this episode speaks to you, please share it with someone who needs hope. Then subscribe, leave a review, and join the conversation: What would it take for more safe, loving foster homes to open their doors?

Join us for new episodes on the 1st and 15th of each month as we continue sharing stories of transformation from across Mississippi. Each story reminds us that when we contribute our unique gifts, Mississippi rises together.

Hope Mississippi's Mission: The sobering reality remains: one in four Mississippi children lives in poverty, and one in five experiences food insecurity. These statistics aren't just numbers—they're our collective challenge. Through these conversations, we discover that Mississippi's transformation occurs through individual commitments to mentor, encourage, and be present for others. The small acts of hope accumulate into the broader "miracles" we celebrate.

Transcript

Poverty Stats And A Welcome

SPEAKER_00 0:10

One in four kids live in poverty. One in five.

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Build collaboration and build hope with those who are struggling.

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Hope, Mississippi.

How Mary Entered Foster Care

SPEAKER_03 0:34

Welcome to Hope, Mississippi, where we celebrate the power of faith in action. I'm Dawn Beam, and this podcast is a space for conversation, collaboration, and calling. I am so excited to share with you a friend I recently met, Miss Mary. Miss Mary is a former foster child with just a wonderful success story of how God took a life that was very difficult and has brought people and love and hope into her life. Welcome, Miss Mary.

SPEAKER_04 1:12

Well, I'm glad to be here.

SPEAKER_03 1:14

So you live in the Pine Belt area, and you and I recently got together and we started talking about your experience as a foster child. So can you just tell us a little bit about that?

SPEAKER_04 1:26

I need to kind of go back a little bit as how I got into foster care, if that's okay. See, I was from a family of eight. I was number four on the list. And apparently my daddy had gotten sick and was bedbound. And my mother was young when she married and then had eight kids. So she wasn't able to take care of us. So what we called the welfare then, which is DHS, is now, decided to pick us up and try to find us better living conditions. That worked out okay for a time being. My sister, being that she was 16, she was able to go ahead and get married with my father's permission. And my 12-year-old sister and I, between five and six years old, went into our first foster home.

SPEAKER_03 2:22

Can I stop you right there and just make the point that children that end up in foster care, there are a lot of times where it's not abuse. It's just the fact that bad things happen to good people and your dad got ill, your mother couldn't take care of the all of you. And so that's how you got in foster care, not because they did bad things.

Abuse And Punishment In Care

SPEAKER_04 2:47

Right. I don't remember ever being abused, malnourished, whipped, anything. I just know that me being around five, there was four other children behind me. So you can imagine these ages. And the youngest one from what I know was three months old, which the last two were born in the same year, one in January and one in December. So I can see where my mother had a hard time, but also it was my 16-year-old sister that was trying to take care of us while mom and dad were partying, drinking, and they weren't always there as parents should be. So we I went to the first foster home, and I'm originally from Colorado, and I went up into the mountains and stayed with this first family for five years. In the first few years it was it was good, but I always wanted to go home. I kept wanting to go home and we were told that we can't go home. And but then when we all left, they told us that we'd be back home soon, which didn't happen, of course, but eventually there was eight of us, seven foster children, mostly teenagers. I was the only young one. And some of them had aged out and went on their way. But at that time, my foster mother m must have been going through a time in her life she was very abusive to me. I think because I was a littlest and could say the least, she took out whatever anger she had on me. Well, if it hadn't been for one of the other foster girls telling the social workers, because we never did see social workers. They never came, they never called. If they did, they didn't talk to me, which I wish they would have done that. I think I could have been saved a lot of hardship if the social workers would have had the time. But living way up in the mountains, I imagine it took a while to drive up there and and take care of other kids that were needing care. So anyway, it ended up because of that abuse that I was moved to another home. I stayed there for two years. And again, I don't know how to say it, uh I wasn't necessarily abused, but the other girls, which we were all teenagers, they were whipped and we were forced to do unusual things for punishment, such as we were graded on it like a s a scale. If we got more than thirty check marks in a month making our bed, doing our chores, our behavior, our class, our our schooling, whatever she decided to put on that sheet for grading. Finally, after a very lengthy time, I ended up with thirty-one check marks, which meant her husband was going to use a razor strap on us. For some of you that may not know what a razor strap is, it's where a barber shop has this strap hanging on his chair, and you run your blade back and forth, back and forth to sharpen it. Well he happened to have one of these belts, and I had seen what happened to one girl on the back of her legs was extremely blistered up and very red. We weren't asked to tell anybody who was gonna tell that this was happening. Well anyway, it did come to my time, and I told her, You're not gonna abuse me out in front of everybody by whipping me. It's not gonna happen. And she says, What, you think you're too good? I says, I don't know if I'm too good or not, but it's not gonna happen. She says, Well then you can go ahead and push the peanut with your nose. Pushing the peanut with our noses was another punishment we s received for not Behaving Behaving, yeah. Which I had seen the girls go to school with scabs on their nose. Let me tell you a little bit how this works. You choose your peanut. If she didn't have a peanut, then it was a button, and we had to do it on a sidewalk. You know, the sidewalk is kind of rough, so when you're pushing it with your nose, you're so close that you can't really see where the peanut or the most of the time it was the peanut is, and you'll end up scraping your nose on the cement sidewalk. I told her I wasn't doing that either. And she said, You just think you're just too good for anything. And I said, No, I just don't believe that at my age, which at that time I was probably 13, I I really have lost a lot of time because there's so many things that happened through the years. And so she said, Well, you just wait until Albert gets home. Albert was her husband. He didn't use the razor strap on me, but he used a hairbrush. And I had to lean across this man's lap and he whipped me with a hairbrush, and I was determined I would not cry. It really hurt a lot, and it was very painful.

SPEAKER_03 8:02

And uh the third home I went to We just say this because I I know some people that are listening think, oh my goodness, I can't believe that happened. There are times where we don't supervise foster homes and terrible things can happen. And so it's what CPS does and what those social workers do every day, and teachers are our eyes and ears to make sure that that evil does not abound and that everyone is treated in an appropriate manner. We're not saying that children don't need to behave, but we're saying that there's a way to lovingly guide one and what you experienced unfortunately, and what many kids have experienced in the past can leave irreparable trauma and harm. So I'm sorry that you have have endured that. It's important that we have good foster homes. Go ahead and tell us because I know you've got a happy story in the end.

SPEAKER_04 9:00

In my first foster home, I came across uh a foster sister, Barbara, and she used to tell me about Jesus, and she taught me how to pray and I'll of course being six or maybe seven, I didn't quite understand this imaginary person in the sky that I'm praying to or talking to. It didn't make sense. But I have to say later on in life, looking back at it, it made a whole lot of sense because it started coming together like a puzzle. And each place I'd go to, I would pray to this God that I didn't know where he was, because at least it felt safe. And she told me that it may seem like he's not listening, but he's always listening. I was able to grasp some faith as a young person. We didn't really go to church while I was growing up. After all that abuse in that second home, I went on to my third home. They wanted a baby, they wanted to adopt, and here I was, you know, twelve, and I wasn't adoptable anyway. It was put in my papers in the beginning that the four younger ones would be taken care of in foster care. The four younger ones were adopted out, and I didn't see them for many, many years, thirty-eight years afterwards. I think sometimes being that I was six years old, I wished I would have been adopted. Maybe there would have been a lot less stress, but who knows what would have been. So I went on to my fourth home and I was there for two years. It was a really good home. That foster mother, she cared for me more than and I always wanted to do good things. She was a school teacher, and the husband was a bus driver and a bus maintenance, and I would always try to help clean the house before she got home from school, because we did get home earlier than she did. I had issues there with one of the children that lived there, one of her sons, sexually abused me. And the sad part about that is the social worker came and talked to me about it, and she says, Well, you know he'll go to jail if you tell anybody. I said, Well, I don't want to tell anybody. And she said, Well, several people already know, so you're gonna have to say something. But she said, I'll take care of it. Well, what she put in my records was that I enticed a 23-year-old guy, foster brother, into an arrangement that was not good. I had no idea what it was all about. I he said he loved me, he was gonna marry me, and he wanted to take care of me. I just went along with it. But once they found out, they immediately moved me and he never served a day in jail because they is in my records it showed I was very active that way, which I wasn't. I didn't even know what it was about. I was 12 years old. In fact, at twelve, back in the early 60s, we didn't talk about that stuff. We didn't know what uh I I I just can't go on knowing that I I felt stu stupid now that I should have known something. But anyway.

SPEAKER_03 12:16

But that's not at all unusual in foster care. In this particular case, it was her ch her child, but it's not unusual for children that are in the same household to somebody that has been exposed to a sexual relationship then explores on other children and causes further trauma. That's why it's so important. I'm gonna plug this for foster care in Mississippi, that we have more foster homes because the more kids you pile into a house, the more experiences that they've had that can end up impacting folks' lives, experiences with sex and and just other negative experiences. So I'm sorry that you had to deal with that, Miss Mary, at such a young age.

Aging Out And Finding A Husband

SPEAKER_04 13:04

I feel like all of these things are a learning experience, and I can go through life letting it traumatize me, or I can learn from it. And I wouldn't say that in some ways that it's helped me to go forward. That woman was so good to me and actually went back many years later with my husband and my first child and visited Werther and her family, and it was wonderful seeing her again because she really cared so much about me. And I'm just saddened that I had to be the one to take the fall for it, but it's done and it's over. And then I went on to my fifth home. These people were good Christian people. I was the problem. I didn't want to connect with them. I didn't want to love them. Everybody that I had ever come in touch with, I thought they loved me, but they didn't. It was always, well, if you don't behave yourself, we're gonna call the welfare and tell c tell them to come get you. Well, you see, you weren't permanent. You wasn't a real person there. You were just there. They thought they were doing a good deed, but you don't. I feel like I was putting more harm than I was at my real home, because I didn't get all this abuse from them, but yet here I got it all through the my life. But this uh last home, she taught me about God and being a Christian, and I think that that's where my life started turning to the better side. We didn't get along, I didn't get along with the woman. She was trying to force this religion down into me, and I was fighting it for all I was worth. But in August 16th of 1965, I committed myself to Christ and I said, I'm gonna do the best I can for what I have. And I have tried and I've backslid many times, but I've always been able to come out of it stronger than what I was before. It got to the point at the very end that I turned eighteen in March of 1966, graduated in May of 1966, met my husband in June 1966, and got married in July 1966. I really grew, but I prayed real hard. I said, you know, God, bring me someone. I can't do this for myself anymore because I've had aged out of foster care. They didn't help you afterwards.

SPEAKER_03 15:41

Let's slow down just a minute and talk about the idea of aging out. In Mississippi, generally we think of an 18, but between 18 and 21. 21 is the age of emancipation, but oftentimes, just like you said, once children graduate from high school, our statistics have been terrible with aging out children. We're making some progress now, but the studies show that children that age out of foster care, they are more apt to have drug and alcohol issues. They're more apt to commit suicide, more apt to end up in prison. The statistics are not great in large part because they continue to carry the trauma and yet they don't have that fallback family because that foster parent is no longer there. Oftentimes I've seen they end up going back to that biological family that oftentimes has not changed. So you were blessed. God gave you a husband, and you were able to manage and and to be able to live, having been married with him. Remind me how you met him.

SPEAKER_04 16:53

My foster parents had wanted to go to Connecticut, where she was from. And I at the time was working as a waitress, and I really was trying to save up money so I could get on my own a little bit. And I asked them if I could stay, and she said, Well, where are you gonna stay? And I got a good friend of mine I was in school with. I asked her to ask her parents if I could come and stay three weeks with them while they were gone. My good friend's parents agreed there was not a problem. So after the three weeks was over, I mean that went real good. And after the three weeks was over with, I went back to my foster home and we had a big argument. I don't even recall what it was about. She says, Well, if you like it so well at that place, why don't you just go and pay them to take care of you? Well, I decided, what can I do? So I called my friend and told her that my foster mother was pretty much asking me to leave. And so I went back and I was praying real hard, Lord, you know, find me somebody, whether he's black, white, orange, purple, tall, skinny. I don't care. Bring somebody to help look after me because I can't do this on my own. That was June first. I met my husband June 3rd. He happened to see me walking down the road in front of his house, which happened to be right next door to where he lived, where I was staying with my friend. So here I am all the way from Colorado, moved to Mississippi, spent my last year going to the high school and graduating, and happened to meet him at just the right time. And I told him when we decided, you know, after a couple weeks, we just kind of we didn't really talk about marriage. We just assumed we was gonna get married. His little brother kept asking him, Are you gonna marry that girl? And he kept asking me, Are you gonna marry my brother? Well, we just kind of said, Yeah, yeah, you know, not thinking anything more. I told my husband then, I said, even if we got married, I don't love you today. I don't know if I'll love you tomorrow. I don't know what love is. I've never had it. I don't know what it's gonna be like. And he told me right then, he says, It doesn't matter because I have enough love for the both of us. We've been married fifty-nine years.

SPEAKER_03 19:22

That that is a God thing, isn't it? That's how he works. Yeah. I'm blessed with a wonderful husband, and I say that I've been able to do a lot of things because I have the security that no matter what I do or what happens, I can always go back home. And Stephen loves me. So you didn't love him at first, but have you grown to love him?

SPEAKER_04 19:46

Well, he got real sick a few years after we were married. He had ulcers real bad, and they didn't think he was gonna make it through it because once they operated on the ulcers, then he got adhesions, they had to open him up again. Then they thought, oh, is his gallbladder giving him trouble? So they opened him up again. He had four surgeries just bam, bam, bam. I thought he was gonna die. And I think that's when I found out I loved him. I was devastated knowing that he was gonna be there, and I would rather be the one going, not him. He didn't do anything. I'm the one that needed to go if if somebody had to die. By that time I had already had two children. If you don't know what love is, you don't know what you're looking for. You don't know what it feels like until something bad happens, like death.

SPEAKER_03 20:38

So you had experienced the unconditional love of Christ. Right. Then God provides you a husband with unconditional love for you. Then you developed that love for him once you began to understand what love was all about. Tell me 59 years did you say that's a long time. Tell me how God has provided in your life and allowed you to share hope with other folks.

SPEAKER_04 21:08

My husband and I took in over a hundred foster children during a 20-year. We started off, I was expecting a child and I needed help. I had started the daycare and I couldn't be there all the time. So I had asked DHS if they had anybody that they needed to place that wasn't necessarily foster child, but wasn't living in a home, if they had anyone like that. I would have liked an opportunity if they'd have been talking about me to go and live with somebody and pay me to live there. Well, they just happened to have a young girl that was sixteen years old and had a three year old little boy. She couldn't stay with her parents, and she couldn't live with the father of the child because they weren't married and because they were too young, so she came to stay with us. And she was there to watch the other four other kids that I had there. On days that I had to go to the doctor's office, it worked out real well. So she was able to keep her child as well as your house.

SPEAKER_03 22:12

Oh, that is wonderful.

SPEAKER_04 22:14

Yeah, that worked out real well. That's kind of my mother-in-law couldn't help me. She was had her own child and she just wasn't into taking care of the foster children at that time or any little kids as far as babies. And these were all babies I was caring for. But it provided a a decent living for me being pregnant. So that worked out very well.

SPEAKER_03 22:38

And you were also able to to give that unconditional love that you didn't receive in foster care.

SPEAKER_04 22:43

We had moved down closer to town. When I realized I couldn't stay there any longer because we had a house out in the country, we moved back to my country house, and would you believe the parents of those children liked me so much and really wanted them to stay with me? They brought their kids all the way out, which was a fifteen-mile trip to bring their children. I mean, now that might not be much, but back then I kept them as long as until they were in school age. That's wonderful.

SPEAKER_03 23:16

You also, as a Christian, try to continue. How old are you?

SPEAKER_04 23:22

I'm 78 right now.

SPEAKER_03 23:24

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 23:24

I just turned 78.

SPEAKER_03 23:25

And Miss Mary, I remember talking about even today at 78, God allows you opportunities to share hope. Tell us about that. We want to encourage folks. No matter how old you are, God's not finished with you. There's always something that you can do to encourage others.

Trust Issues Advice And Closing

SPEAKER_04 23:42

I have kind of written several little stories that put some of my thoughts on paper and and quite a few people that have read them, it has touched them. And I'd also like to say that they really are hurting for some good foster homes. I wish more people would step up. I mean, if it doesn't work out with the first one, don't give up. There's a child out there that needs you and needs to be loved. If I would have seen a social worker once or twice during the time I was in those homes, I think the things would have been different. But they'd ever got into any trouble for what they did. It was all mostly I was lying. But yet there was other people who came forward and and said, no, she's not lying. I'm telling you what happened and that's why they moved me. The day I got married, my last foster parents, I had asked him if he would give me away at the church. They said no, that they didn't want any part of it. Number one, they thought I was pregnant because I only knew him six weeks. I wasn't pregnant. Took me fourteen months to have my first child. Uh and so I had somebody else stand for me. And the thing she said on the church steps was she looked at my husband and she said, Good luck, because you're gonna need it with her. And I never gave her any cause to say that or do that on my wedding day. But it is what it is. But my husband is the one that has been there. And there was a time when I was just devastated for some reason we had had an argument of sort, and I was sitting on the bed and I was rocking back and forth, back and forth, and I said, Why don't you just tell me to get out? Why don't you just tell me to get out? He put his arms around me, and it was like his arms were burning me. I couldn't stand it. I wanted him to turn me loose. I don't want his arms on me. I never had anybody love me like that. And he said, I'm not turning you loose and you're not going anywhere. And the whole time I was just crying my eyes out because I just knew he was gonna say, Hit the door, I don't need you. I mean, he I thought he was gonna give up on me too. And he didn't, and numerous times since then I've wanted to leave and tell him, you know, that I can't do this thing. And he always said, I took off with the car one time. We had two cars at this time. I said, I'm going, I'm leaving. And I took off with the car. He right behind me with the other car. He said, I was not gonna let you out of my sight. You were coming back home.

SPEAKER_03 26:24

That is precious. You know, the same idea of not giving up on us. God never gives up on us, and we fail all the time. So we certainly thank him for that. We're on the heels of Easter and are just reminded of the wonderful hope that we have in him. We have concluded our 30 minutes, and so I thank you so much for being here with me. One word of hope to that 75-year-old out there that is thinking that that they don't have to be. Um that's thinking that they don't have anything to do in life.

SPEAKER_04 27:03

The only thing I have to say in extending this is it hasn't been the best with my kids. My husband was very good with them, very loving. I had a mother-in-law that was very loving with them, but somewhere in me there's a wall, and I guess that wall will be with me. And sometimes I let it down, but just when I let that wall down a little bit, a tragic happens. Like, you know, my grandson overdosing on drugs and little things like that will cause me to crumble, and I have to start all over building things up or or tearing down. There is tragedies that come along and continuing, but it's knowing how to handle them. I've never had any psychiatric help. My husband is my psychiatrist. So, but anyway, I'm just saying that anytime you get someone that's hard to break through, just be patient. They're in there somewhere. They just need to know that they can trust you because I don't have very much trust in very many people.

SPEAKER_03 28:11

I appreciate you trusting me to tell your story today. Thank you so much. And if you're riding along, be encouraged that there's hope in Mississippi and folks that need that out there. They need you, they need each of us to be giving and aware of the needs around us. Have a great day. And you too, thank you. Thank you for joining us with Hope Mississippi. If today's conversation encouraged you, share it with a friend, a church group, or someone looking for a way to serve. Until next time, remember Hope Rod is pulling rods together.