The cashier who let her son go and stayed in his life

The second chapter of Exodus opens with a mother hiding a baby. Pharaoh has ordered every Hebrew boy thrown into the Nile, and she hides her son for three months, until she can't anymore. So she coats a basket with tar and lays him in the reeds, with his sister watching. Pharaoh's daughter finds him and takes pity on him, and the sister offers to fetch a Hebrew woman to nurse him. She comes back with his mother.

On October 19, Macon's 13WMAZ told a story from a gas station in Jackson, Georgia. Katelyn Sparks worked the register there, about 33 weeks pregnant and unsure she could raise the baby. A regular, D'Amber Davis, noticed one day that Sparks "looked a little big," and Davis's son, who happened to be along, said, "Mama, we gotta get that baby." The next day Davis asked if she could raise him. The choice was Sparks's to make, and she said yes.

Davis understood what that yes cost. "I knew deep down she didn't want to give him up," Davis wrote on TikTok. "But for the best she did what she had to do." Sparks had gone without prenatal care until Davis found her a doctor, and Nolan was born healthy, 7 pounds 8 ounces. The two women still spend time together with their kids, and Sparks calls Davis "more or less like my big sister." The bond has even helped Sparks find her way back to her own mother.

Read Exodus with Sparks in mind, and the mother in the reeds is the one who made the choice the whole chapter turns on.

She couldn't keep her son safe, so she built the basket. Then she is called to nurse him, for wages. The chapter never says whether Pharaoh's daughter guessed who she was, but the reader is told plainly that the hired nurse is his mother, paid to feed her own son.

Exodus 2:10The child grew, and she brought him to Pharaoh's daughter, and he became her son. She named him Moses, and said, "Because I drew him out of the water."

Nobody pulls him out of her arms. She walks him over herself, and after that the chapter says nothing more about her. Exodus gives her those nursing years and that last walk, and no more. Sparks was promised more than that. Davis took Nolan knowing, in her words, "she would still be able to see him," and she has said that as he grows, "we'll talk openly about his story." So Nolan will grow up knowing the woman who carried him, and that letting him go was her choice, made for his sake.