By: Dar Downling
The detail that most distinguishes Christina J. Donato’s thinking about Foster Freddy Wants a Family from the story the book appears on its surface to tell is this: she has been in contact with local foster and adoption groups to get copies of the book into their hands. Not because Freddy’s story is a metaphor for the foster care system. But because she believes a child navigating that system might find in Freddy’s story something they can talk about when talking about their own story feels too hard.
An older or medically challenged child who hasn’t found their forever home yet can see, through Freddy, that not having found the right fit doesn’t mean nobody is working to find it. It just takes longer sometimes. And a child might be able to talk about how they feel by talking about how Freddy must have felt. That parallel was not the book’s original purpose. It became impossible for Christina to ignore as she wrote.
Why It Couldn’t Be a Children’s Book
Christina initially planned to tell Freddy’s story for children. She struggled to make it simple enough. There was too much sadness, too much pain, too much heartache. Too many children live with those things already, she reasoned, and for the ones who don’t, she didn’t want to interrupt their innocence with so many cold facts of life. So it became an adult memoir instead, one that carries the emotional weight of what the experience actually cost without the protective softening that children’s literature requires.
That decision freed her to be honest in ways the book absolutely depends on. She is honest about her initial disappointment in Freddy’s looks. She is honest about being too soft with him, about losing control of the situation before she tried to regain it, and about the guilt she carried when he was moved to experienced foster trainers. She is honest that she was a lifetime dog mom who was overconfident in her abilities going in, and that the experience dismantled that confidence in productive and necessary ways.
What the Foster System Needs People to Understand
Christina’s message to someone sitting on the fence about fostering an animal is direct. Wanting to avoid giving away a dog you’ve fallen in love with is not a good enough excuse. Shelters across the country are facing unprecedented overcrowding and foster shortages. The need is real and urgent. And most fosterings, she is careful to note, do not last as long or carry the complexity that Freddy’s did. Most foster dogs are young and healthy. Freddy was the exception, not the rule.
But even Freddy’s story, with all of its medical complexity and behavioral challenge and nearly three years of care across multiple foster homes, ended well. That is the point she most wants readers to take forward. There is hope even in what seems hopeless. There is a Walter out there for the difficult ones. The work of getting a foster animal ready for that Walter matters, even when it is exhausting, even when it doesn’t feel like it.
The Life Freddy Lived
When Christina learned that Freddy had passed and tracked down Walter to ask about his final years, what she received back was the confirmation she didn’t know she needed. Walter called Freddy his favorite among all eight of his beloved beagles. The dog who arrived lopsided and medically fragile and behaviorally complicated had become someone’s absolute favorite. Everything Christina and Mandy and Donna had poured into him had contributed to a dog capable of being loved that completely.
Her time with Freddy wasn’t wasted. Walter’s words made that undeniable. And the book she wrote from that realization is the best evidence she has that telling a hard story honestly, all the way through to the happy ending, is exactly the right thing to do with it.
For anyone thinking about fostering an animal, or a child, Foster Freddy Wants a Family by Christina J. Donato is available now on Amazon. The hard ones are worth it.
