Adoption and the Afterlife: Part 2 (Foster Care)

 When you decide that you are going to become a foster parent, it is fun to talk about. There is a certain excitement that you are going to be joining the ranks of those that are, "doing something". Now everyone will know that you are "doing something". There is a little swell of pride in the beginning, when the conversation delves into your state of sacrificial giving of self that others "couldn't do". You are ready to open your arms to those poor needy and abused children, to defend them against the world and their parents. Because, although you would never explicitly say it, implicitly you believe you truly are a better parent. Because children in foster care are there for a reason.

Go ahead, watch me fall off that pedestal. Get your shovel out and help me dig my hole, it's gonna get worse.

It took about a year of being a foster parent for me to begin feeling physically ill when people would glorify my temporary parenting of other people's children as if it were heroic and the last step before sainthood. Even when we step into places of need, we never leave OURSELVES behind. Our learned bias, our shame, our pride, our fallibility and humanity. It is a continual learning process to realize that this is my biggest weakness, but when it is in the light and acknowledged, it becomes the primary place of relational strength. 

Enough of that sermon and back to my story.

The hubs and I went through the 9 weeks of once weekly training classes that our state requires in order to move forward in being licensed as Foster Parents. I don't recall now many of the particulars about what was covered in those classes, but I remember them being quite thorough with an emphasis on understanding that children who come to your home via foster care have unavoidably been exposed to significant trauma in their lives, even if they are straight from the hospital newborn nursery. As they were saying things like, "don't expect gratitude", and "negative behaviors that you don't understand will come", and "the goal is REUNIFICATION with their bio-families", I solemnly nodded my head in understanding and 100% believed that was not how the story would turn out for us. After all, GOD gave ME a burden for adoption, so it would happen and it would be wonderful. Eye roll.

No class could ever help me understand the disequilibrium that comes with a child being placed in your life suddenly, with no plan or pathway beyond the moment that you are currently in together. It is like starting a complicated Netflix series on Season 4, episode 7. Your mind tries to automatically fill in what you missed with what it knows, your own past experience. But you just don't know what you don't know and the only guarantee is that every assumption you will make is based on your own standard of normal: yourself. Which is, of course, so entirely not anyone else's 'normal'. The bias in myself, that I saw as a few spots here and there that could easily be expunged and wouldn't hurt anyone, were revealed to be actually just a few spots of non-bias breaking through a worldview I didn't even realize was so narrow. Lord have mercy, because I was so embarrassingly blind it is hard to have mercy on myself.

We were finally officially licensed, for 1-2 children under the age of 3 (or was it 2?). My bio kids, two girls, were 3 and 2 years old at the time. We waited and waited. Several weeks that felt like a lifetime and failure and unfair and scary and.... At the time I was working night shift (as a nurse in a local emergency department) and of course our first call came at 5 pm on a night I was scheduled to be in at 7pm. My hands got sweaty and my stomach flipped, the same way it had anytime an unknown number popped up on my caller ID over the past several weeks. The case worker on the other end asked if we could take two white boys, 9 months and 18 months. I tried to remember all the things I was supposed to ask about them that I learned in the licensing class (you learn later that this is generally useless information as it is often misinformed, answered with an 'I don't know' or just completely wrong). We said yes. I called work and asked if I could come in 2 hours late. (I want to smack my younger self for not calling off, it would have been WAY wiser, but....work ethic!)

So they arrived, having been left alone in a hotel room with pacifiers taped in, in their ill fitting diapers, one sock between the two of them and wrapped in some hospital delivery blankets. I was so focused on adjusting to the newness of the situation myself, that I didn't even see them really. I mean, I saw their bodies, but not their humanity, not their fear, not their history, not their missing parents, not their future. Just me, and what I already knew about life, and how I was going to rearrange me and mine to make them fit. It takes experience (or a supernatural gifting of empathy and wisdom) to be able to start with them, where they are, and move yourself in their direction, rather than mashing them into what works for you. And so it came to be that my husband and I were therefore deemed, by the state of Missouri, capable of parenting 4 children under 4 years old at the mature age of 24ish.

They stayed with us only six weeks, but it was an era for us. They were introduced to extended family members, they were talked about endlessly. Their past and future and parents were slathered with the opinions of the uninformed and fearful, of which I was chief. 

Their story continued (and we remained remotely involved by the sweet invitation of more mature adults than myself) beyond their departure from our home, but never included reunification with their bio parents. 

Shortly after they left, we were called to take a newborn boy, removed from a teenage mother over the weekend, who stayed with us for a week and then was returned to his mother. The day he left, we picked up a 9day old African American girl from the hospital. Two days after that, we were asked if we could take the baby boy, that we had just returned, back again. We told them that we had already taken another newborn, to which the response was, "that's okay, you can still take this baby back". Ummm... Obviously we still had a lot to learn about the way this cookie crumbles. 

I'll just be honest here. Did I want to take baby#1 back? Yup. Was it because I cared deeply about him and his story? Maybe a little. But somewhere inside, the same dynamic that drew me to emergency nursing, to pushing yourself beyond what others would see as a limit, was at play. I wanted to take him back because I like to live on the edge of the cliff. That's the place where people can only see the extreme of your life so you never feel in danger of them ever making it all the way in to the hidden parts. You are so busy talking about all the anomalies and abnormalities about your life that everyone wants to know about that your self, your small elemental core self, is missed and never known by anyone. 

Maybe that is not everyone's story that embarks on the foster care journey. But we aren't talking about everyone here, just me. And I'm just being honest, with the hope that you will feel more free to be as well.

To be continued...