May is foster care awareness month. Your community, no matter where you live, needs foster parents. There are never enough homes for children that need them. Sometimes these kids live in group homes, sometimes in hotel rooms with caseworkers. Whatever it is, it is no substitute for a home with a family to care for them.
About 11 years ago we made a decision to become foster parents and maybe we’d someday adopt. We went through questionnaires, interviews, psychological evaluations, medical evaluations, and classes.
We were anxious to get started on the journey. The call came and we were excited to go pick up a new baby (or child, as the case may be). What we failed to realize though, was that we were walking in on one of the worst days, if not the worst, of the child’s life. A child who had been abused or neglected or drug and alcohol exposed, now facing more trauma by being removed from their family, home, school, church, etc. Most times a child is pulled out quickly, with no chance to bring beloved belongings or clothes. Most kids arrive with nothing. Once a child came with bags of dirty clothes and a pet fish. It was all she had left of the life she knew.
You bring home a new baby or a child, you have caseworkers and CASA workers in and out of your home. Dr appts, therapy, speech, OT, Babies Can’t Wait, and more. Visits with parents and maybe grandparents….. But during the day in and day out, the nights of crying, the baby shaking from withdrawal, you’re on your own. There’s no one to call in the middle of the night. If you’re fortunate you have a support system of friends or a church community to help you.
The difficult? When a screaming toddler is pulled off of you to visit a mom they haven’t seen in almost a year. Or when kids have to have weekend visits with bio family they’ve never lived with or haven’t lived with in two years. Or maybe the child cries when they have to return to the foster home and leave the biological family (mine never did this but I know many do). The worry you have that your kids aren’t safe when they are on the weekend visit. The worry that the judge will order the baby to go home. The baby who only has known you as mommy their entire life. You haven’t experienced the rawness of foster care until you’ve gone through this.
The reward? A child gaining motor skills when they were delayed. A child speaking first words when they were not. A feeling of pride when they accomplish something you were told they’d never accomplish. When you see the light click on for a pre-teen that ‘oooh, this is how families work,’ after they’ve spent days trying to figure out how your family works, why you sit together at meal time, what ‘game night’ means. The true joy when a birth family actually works their case plan and pulls their lives together, putting their demons behind them and regaining custody of their children. A family reunified, a success for the system.
If the case ends with adoption, as our last one did, well there’s joy and sadness. It’s bittersweet. Of course you love your kids, you’re happy they are safe with you, but there’s the brokenness of losing your biological family and your ‘identity’ of sorts. There’s the hard of diagnoses……..learning disabilities, fetal alcohol syndrome, and many many others. There’s therapy to deal with those issues, and the issues of simply being adopted. There’s tutoring to try to overcome your learning disorders caused by your prenatal drug and alcohol exposure. And there’s anger, because your child will always struggle with things, by no fault of their own, but because of choices that their parents made. There’s a fear of sleeping alone because you have attachment issues. There’s holding your crying child because they wonder if their birth mom is alive, safe, happy. “Did she love me?’ Oh she did, she does. She simply couldn’t parent you at the time. There’s the concern that a book will be read or something will be said that triggers a feeling of ‘less than’ because of the history.
How do we do it? Only with the help of God and support of friends who have also been in these shoes. Why do we do it? Because a child needs a family. By no fault of their own, they need someone to love them. Because if we don’t, who will? It’s not easy by any stretch of the imagination. It’s not ‘fun’. It’s worth it to give a child love and a start at life to help them for the rest of their lives. Even when they go home, you rest in the fact that you’ve given them a good start. Yes it hurts when they leave, but it’s worth that pain for a child to know love and security.
cozyandcraftingmom 