> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://clintbetts.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # To Give a Chance Is Love - URL: https://clintbetts.com/chance-nation/chapter-1/ - Published: 2026-10-10T18:49:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-10T23:41:03.000Z - Description: "Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things." — 1 Corinthians 13:7 - Author: Clint Betts - Tags: Chance Nation, #chapter I've always had a complicated relationship with chance. I spent the first years of my life in foster care and, after adoption, lived my adolescence in constant fear of being abandoned once more. I was angry at my biological parents for giving me up. Angry at myself for not being worth keeping around. I'm from Spanish Fork, Utah. 84660\. It's where I was dropped off the day I was adopted. It's where I grew up. Back then, the streets were tractor-churned — a highfalutin way of saying it was farm country. Cowboy country. I once wore a cowboy hat for a grade school picture, but I wasn't a cowboy or a farmer. I was adopted. That was my identity. My father was a high school janitor; my mother taught preschool in our basement. Memories from those days don't come without the garage in our backyard. It was made of cinder block. It could hold two vehicles, had one of those rectangular holes for Dad to change his oil, and had a worn-out basketball hoop above the entrance. There wasn't much to it. I'd go out back with my mitt and baseball, wearing an ill-fitting cap, and throw that rawhide against those blocks of cinder. As hard as I could. I'd aim at a fading chalked strike zone, imagining myself on the mound at Dodger Stadium. Bottom of the ninth, two outs, game on the line. It wasn't easy keeping that daydream in my head. Probably easy for other kids. Wasn't fair. Cal Ripken would be at the plate, wondering what pitch I'd ship, when the repressed memory of being dropped off out front would surface. The day I first laid eyes on that garage. Tears would fall. My showdown with baseball's Iron Man suspended on account of boy-made rain. That memory isn't mine alone. My brother Chad shaped it. He had two years on me and remembered more than I did. We spent our first years in foster care together. Most of that time, we were with a woman we called Grandma Olive. I've seen a picture of me blowing out the candles of my first birthday cake at her house. Think I had my second and third cakes there, too. "Don't let them see you cry," Chad whispered as we got out of Grandma Olive's car to meet our new parents. I don't know whether they saw me cry. I just remember Grandma Olive pulling out of the driveway with Chad's arm around my shoulders. I met my biological mother at a Sizzler in Provo, Utah, when I was 15 years old. Something like that doesn't just happen. You have to ask an adult first. Then you have to attend state-mandated counseling to ensure you're mentally capable of processing such an event. After a few sessions, I told my therapist I felt like the Israelites must have felt right before they crossed the Jordan River into the Promised Land. I was ready. I'd been preparing for this day my whole life. I had so many questions, but, in all fairness, they were just variations of "why." Why did you do it? Why did you give Chad and me up? Why didn't you love us? The long-awaited meeting took place in a small booth near the salad bar, with all-you-can-eat cheese bread and slabs of chicken. I was prepared to face a monster, but Andrea Mower didn't fit the bill. Not even close. She was a small, thin woman, with the look of someone who'd been through it. I don't exactly recall how that conversation went. We must have talked about our parents, the sports we played, what she'd been up to, how school was going… things like that. The one thing I do know is that I never asked her why. It wouldn't have been appropriate. Turns out she'd struggled with addiction to the point she'd been institutionalized for a spell. Anger disappears when confronted with something like that; it can't survive in such an environment. Chance is complicated. One moment you think it's cruelty that happens for no reason at all, and the next you're sitting in a booth at Sizzler, coming to terms with your ignorance. Andrea didn't give me up. She gave me a chance. We loved her from that day on. We'd get our parents to drive us up to Pocatello, Idaho, to visit her in her small apartment. As we grew older, we stayed in touch and tried to visit her wherever she was living. Chad even lived with her in Alaska for a year or so. I was married with kids of my own when I learned she'd been placed in hospice. A hard life caught up with her. A couple of years earlier, she'd lost her voice box to a lifetime of smoking. Conversation didn't come easy after that. At the end, when Chad and I visited her bedside to say goodbye, I couldn't stop thinking about chances. The chances I'd be blessed with a mother who loved her boys enough to do the impossible — to give them a chance at a better life. The chances I'd get an older brother by my side so I didn't have to chance it alone. As Andrea took her last breath, with tears streaming down my cheeks, I took her hand and whispered in her ear, "Thanks for the chance, Mom."