“It’s been the most transformative, astonishing, eviscerating, beautiful, risky, love-filled experience of my life,” Sentilles told me Tuesday by phone. “People would say that their hearts expanded when they had kids, or they never knew love like when they held their child for the first time. And that always annoyed me because I felt like it presented nonparents as deficient or not capable of a certain kind of love. But that was my experience with Coco, although it had nothing to do with biology. It had to do with the universe saying, ‘Here. Here, tend to this. Here, this is a vulnerable being that needs your care.’”
Column: ‘Stranger Care’ is a stunning love letter to the author’s foster daughter, and is Sally Field’s pandemic reading
