At T-Mobile, our critical mission is providing unparalleled 5G coverage for when connectivity is mission critical. Introducing T-Priority, America's best 5G network experience for first responders, even in times of congestion. More capacity, faster speeds, better coverage. T-Priority from T-Mobile, built for tomorrow's emergencies, ready today. Discover more at T-Priority.com.
For qualifying organizations on eligible rate plans, coverage is not available in some areas that may be impacted by emergencies. At Designer Shoe Warehouse, we believe that shoes are an important part of, well, everything. From first steps to first dates, from all-nighters to all-time personal best.
From building pillow forts to building a life. For all the big and small moments that make up your whole world, DSW is there. And we've got just the shoes.
Find a shoe for every you from brands you love at brag-worthy prices at your DSW store or DSW.com. This is Nikki Glaser from the Nikki Glaser podcast. On a more serious note, I'm still thinking about that commercial with Tom Brady and Snoop Dogg hating on each other. Because when you listen to the reasons for hating someone or something, you realize just how stupid they really are. There is too much hate in this country and it's got to stop. So join us at iHeart and standing up to it. If you see hate, speak up. Call it out. And you can learn more by following at What's Up With Hate.
This is Matt Rogers from Lost Culturesis with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. Have you ever felt that uneasy anxiety when the 4 p.m. hour strikes? The creeping meal-related distress that happens when you don't quite feel prepared? You know, dinner dread?
Let's get rid of that unpleasant feeling forever with one word. Stouffers. No matter what happens, you'll have a dinner plan that everyone loves with stouffers. Some chicken enchiladas are a cheesy chicken and broccoli pasta bake is always welcome whether it is plan A or plan D. Delicious. Not gonna lie, I eat the lasagna once a week and that's a fact. When the clock strikes dinner, think stouffers.
Shop now for family favorites. Hi, this is Shirley Strawberry and you know sometimes you just need to slow down and enjoy the good things. And they don't get much better than the all-new 2025 Nissan Murano. I mean it's literally designed to help you relax and re-energize which is so important. Between the 64 color options of the Murano's ambient mood lighting and the Bose premium sound system playing your favorite music, it's like your own personal oasis. Drive the all-new 2025 Nissan Murano today.
Ambient lighting and Bose are optional features. This is our American Stories and now a story from our own Monty Montgomery about one woman's transformative journey. Christina Dent grew up in the capital of Mississippi. I grew up in West Jackson in a wonderful happy home. I grew up in a Christian home and just had a really happy childhood. My mom homeschooled me and my brothers all the way through high school and I grew up in a community that had a lot of crime in it. I would lay in bed at night and hear ambulances and gunshots as the two sounds I remember hearing. I went through a lot of anxiety as a child because of that our neighbors were held up at gunpoint while we were home and our neighbors didn't have a phone and so they came over right after it had happened to use our phone to call the police. And that happened when I was about eight or nine and that set off for me a lot of even deeper anxiety than I kind of already had and that was hard.
I begged my parents to move out of state. I thought maybe if we went somewhere else I would feel safer. I thought that was just how it was and there wasn't really anything we could do to change that. I grew up always thinking tough on crime was the way to go so I got there by saying there's crime in my community and I don't like that. So we knew that there's crime in my community and I don't like that. So we need to be tougher on crime to make that crime go away. And I associated anything related to drugs in with that just be tougher if we can just get tougher if we can just lock more people up then I wouldn't hear these gunshots.
I wouldn't hear these you know police sirens. That was my framework and I never really knew much about it. I wasn't politically involved.
I was always voting. I felt like that was really important to do but never really understood what was happening or what maybe could be different for me and for kids like me. After getting married, Christina and her husband had two children of their own before deciding that they wanted to start adopting and they nearly did taking their chances on two toddlers. But while that door closed, another one would open. I had never been interested in foster care. Even in my interest with adoption, I wanted nothing to do with foster care. But now that door had kind of been open and we had to consider you know if we were willing to take those two kids in, why couldn't we be willing to take another kid or two from somewhere else in? And so we ended up deciding we were going to foster through the state and we would just kind of see where that went. Maybe it would end with the children going back home. Maybe it would end in adoption.
We were open to either possibility and just thought that would kind of be a temporary thing that we would participate in. And so we went through about a year of getting certified and then we got a call out of the blue from our licensure worker and she said, congratulations Mrs. Dent. You guys are licensed to be a foster family. And I said, oh this is great.
Thank you. And she followed that right up with, we have a baby that we need a foster family for and can we bring him over now? And we were completely unprepared for that because we had been slogging through the licensure process for so long. We thought it would be months before we still were even approved to foster, much less actually had a child come into our home. We went home and we got everything ready and we're texting our family and saying there's this baby coming this afternoon. And they brought this little boy over to foster family, over to our house and we became his foster family. And that was the beginning of four and a half years of foster care for us. My husband got a call about 18 months after we had taken that first baby. And he called me and said, they have another baby they need a foster family for and I really feel like this time we need to say yes. I just feel like God has this child for our home. And I said, oh I don't know this feels really overwhelming. I already feel overwhelmed. I homeschooled my children and I just thought, I don't know that I can do this again with an 18 month old, with two older kids with homeschooling and a new baby. This would be crazy. But I thought, you know, my husband really feels strongly about this and it's never going to seem like the best time to have another child in your home.
So okay, we'll do it. And they brought this new little baby over. He had just been released from the hospital after his birth. He was born premature and so he was tiny.
He was just about five and a half pounds. He was also the son of a mother who used drugs during her pregnancy. And the social worker brought him to our house and she said, oh it was so sad when I left the hospital with him. It was like a funeral. His mom was there. The NICU nurses were all there with her.
Everyone was crying. And I felt this shift of something inside of me. This feeling of, wait a second, that's not right. Because a mom who would use drugs while she was pregnant, couldn't love her kids.
How does that work? So here you're telling me this child was removed from her custody because she used drugs prenatally. But she's also crying as he's taken away from her at the hospital.
That does not fit what I think about moms who would use drugs while they were pregnant. But through that experience I met the mom of one of our foster sons. And her name was Joanne. He was at our house for a couple of weeks and then we had his first visit with her. So I hadn't met her at this point. But we had the first visit with her at the local child welfare office in Canton. And so I drove up there with our other children and our new little foster son. And I popped his car seat out of my van and I turned around in the parking lot.
And across the parking lot and across the parking lot is sprinting this woman with tears streaming down her face. And she runs up to me and she just starts kissing the baby who I'm just kind of standing there awkwardly holding his car seat. And she's talking to him and I felt this shift again of what is going on here because this isn't what I thought was real. Now I admittedly knew nothing about addiction.
It had never come close to me and so I only had what I kind of picked up from our cultural narrative about addiction which is bad people use drugs, bad people become addicted to them, and we should be suspicious. And so that's what I thought. And I did feel very suspicious. I thought maybe she's just putting this on. Maybe she just wants to make me think she's a great mom and loves her son so that somehow I'll put a good word in with a social worker and that's going to make things better for her. And so she got to spend her one hour of allotted visitation time with her son in the little side meeting area with one couch and a couple toys in it. And I went to the local park and played with my kids to give her some privacy while she was with her son for that time.
And then I came back and picked him up and we went back to our house and Joanne left for inpatient drug treatment a couple hours away in north Mississippi. But she would call me from treatment. She would call about once a day.
They would, you know, allow her to make a phone call and she would call me and she would say, can you put me on speaker phone? And I would and she would sing to her son over the phone. And again this growing sense of something is not right because what I'm seeing here is a mother who loves her son deeply and is also struggling with a complex serious health crisis. But what I believe is that moms like her don't love their children and I could start to follow those dots and say that belief is part of what I have to believe to support moms like her being put in prison which I know is happening every day. Not just moms but moms, dads, sons, daughters, brothers, sisters.
There are people using drugs and struggling with addiction that we're arresting every day and I knew that. And so the more that I got to know Joanne the more I saw her love is real. Her love for her son is real.
When she asks me to let him sleep with a particular little animal blankie because she wants him to still be able to smell to smell her and she had had that with him in the hospital that's real. She cares for him. She loves him.
She wants him to remember his mom. She's working hard so that she can regain custody of him and parent him and raise him. I could see as I looked at what would this do to Joanne and to her son. What would it do if we put her in prison for 10 years while her son grew up without a mom if he lost the ability to have a future relationship with his mom. With Joanne and treatment we had the potential for a positive outcome and we know that not everyone who goes to treatment is able to stay sober. Not everyone who goes to treatment and is sober is necessarily able to parent but I could see that the only way that that could happen for Joanne and for her family is if she wasn't in prison.
In prison there's no opportunity for a positive outcome there. It is the nuclear option on a family. We grew up in the 80s together. We're almost exactly the same age.
We're both white women in our 30s and middle class families. We both were homeschooled kindergarten through high school. We made some different choices and those choices led to different outcomes but I could see more and more as I got to know Joanne that really those choices were choices I could have also made and they my life could have had very different outcomes and it wasn't a difference in fundamentally who I am and who Joanne is that is the difference in where we are now.
We're the same kind of person and I saw Joanne as a mom like me. Christina Dent's story. A beautiful one. A Mississippi story too.
Here on Our American Stories. Okay so we all need to get away from the world sometimes. Well in the all-new 2025 Nissan Murano you don't even have to go anywhere. The Murano is the getaway.
Just picture it. The Bose premium sound system plays your favorite music as the Murano's massaging leather appointed seats melt away your stress. Yeah that's a real getaway. Drive the all-new 2025 Nissan Murano today.
Bose and massaging leather appointed seats are optional features. The Unshakeables podcast is kicking off season two with an episode you won't want to miss. Join host Ben Walter CEO of Chase for Business as he welcomes a very special guest, Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon. Hear about the challenges facing small businesses and some of the uh-oh moments Jamie has overcome.
Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Chase mobile app is available for select mobile devices. Message and data rates may apply. JPMorgan Chase Bank N.A. Member FDIC.
Copyright 2025. JPMorgan Chase & Company. Famous Smoke has been dominating the cigar game since 1939 with the best prices on the best cigars.
Need a smoke for the big game or a big win? Famous has you covered. Head to Famosmoke.com with promo code Nightcap to score $20 off your order of $99 or more. Million of cigars are in stock and ready to ship all stored in the massive humidor and guaranteed fresh.
Trust the name that's been in the game for 85 years. Go to Famosmoke.com use code Nightcap. Underage self-prohibited.
Website restricted to age 21 plus tobacco consumers. When things get intense stress sweat can't be far behind. So let Dove Men Plus Care Antiperspirants help you stay calm when life gets a little uncomfortable. Like when you're sitting in the front row and an insult comic starts working the crowd.
All you can do is smile and laugh along with the comedian. Dove Men Plus Care Antiperspirants help tackle stress sweat and odor-causing bacteria so you can get comfortable with the uncomfortable. Fight back against stress sweat with Dove Men Plus Care Antiperspirants available at Walmart, Target and Amazon. Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Aruba and the Bahamas. Offer ends April 1st. Go to CheapCaribbean.com to start saving.
