Fostering Hope

When you become a foster parent, you enter into a season of life filled with a lot of mourning. Yes, there will be mourning for a child who you have loved and given your whole life to who has been returned to a biological parent. There’s mourning at just the thought of it happening. That’s what people think of first when considering fostering: can I survive if the child I have loved goes back home?

But there are many other types of mourning that come along with fostering. They all center around one idea: the death of the life you were hoping to have. When I pictured my future as a child, my life didn’t look like how it is now. Even as adults, daydreaming about our future together, Angie and I didn’t see our family as we are now. In fact, even as we hesitantly stepped out into the fostering journey just a few years ago, we didn’t think it would be like this. You have to let the “perfect” world pictured and dreamed about die, and with any death comes a time of mourning. Unfortunately, there are countless deaths that occur monthly, weekly, and sometimes daily.

The first death is your death of freedom. When you accept a foster child into your home, you lose a sense of freedom. You are not free to parent as you wish, as you think is best, or even as studies have shown is best. You must abide by a group of lawmakers’ decisions. Sometimes, it also means a licensor’s decision or a social worker’s decision, or a tribal elder’s decision. Your opinion? No one wants it, so don’t bother sharing. You must ensure that you have safety plugs in your walls, your medication locked away in a safe --one for internal medication, one for external. You have to have an evacuation plan posted, fire extinguishers accessible, and the CPS intake number on the ready.

You have to be ready, within a few minutes notice, to have a stranger enter your home, talk with your child(ren) in private, and look through every room in your house. You must explain every oddity in your home, from a pile of laundry to a broken toy. When a foster child is injured, my first response isn’t, “Poor baby! Let’s get her a bandaid,” it’s “Great, now I have to write up a report for the social worker. Is this bad enough that we have to call CPS and report ourselves? Will this lead to an investigation because she scraped her knee playing outside?”

The second death, an often subtle and overlooked death, is the death of normalcy. It’s being able to go to Walmart without people staring, without people commenting, or without people asking stupid questions. Are these your real kids? Are they all yours? Can you have kids? What happens if you get pregnant? What happened to their real parents? Do they all have the same dad? Do you get to keep them? Is there anything wrong with them?

We don’t buy normal amounts of milk, or formula, or diapers. We are quite the scene as we all unpack out of the Explorer, every back seat filled with a carseat. We don’t get to hang out with friends because it’s too hard. Finding someone willing to watch the crew is hard (and I thank God continuously that we have a tribe of people willing and able to step up if needed). Christmas isn’t normal, as our poor family has to guess about who they should or shouldn’t buy for. They didn’t ask for this, but we have drug them into our crazy life choices and asked them to treat the kids as they would Kelly.

Even our home has lost a sense of normalcy. We have three girls in one bedroom, so there’s not much room for toys. We have dressers, bunk beds, and cribs. It looks like an ad-hoc orphanage. Even the boys’ room has bunk beds and a crib. To have a place for toys, we turned our one-car garage into a playroom. We put down carpet, got some extra furniture, and did our best to make the place look nice. So, we spend most of our time as a family in the garage. We have two highchairs at our kitchen peninsula. We could probably use a third already. We have a six-person table and a shelf that converts into a table in case someone comes to visit during a meal. Not normal.

So, yeah, there’s a lot of loss when it comes to fostering. It can be incredibly hard. Most days it takes more energy and patience than we can give. We mourn the plans we had for our kids: trips to the zoo, or to get ice cream, to play at the park, to watch family movies. We’re too busy trying to get everyone fed, changed, and to bed before a melt-down (by them or us). In all honesty, there are times when we become resentful of our situation. That’s hard to admit, but it happens. We are doing the hard work of raising someone’s child, and there’s always a chance (with the girls a really good chance) that they will go back to the person who is currently too busy getting high or sleeping through the night to actually care for their child.

Jesus says, “Whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it” (Matthew 16:25). A person must suffer death in order to lose their life. We have walked through that death spiritually in salvation, but also in putting aside the hopes and desires we had for our family. We let them die. And it hurt. It still hurts. We still grieve. We still have our moments when we lock ourselves away and breakdown. That’s because the deaths keep coming. The losses still pile up.

However, the second part of the verse from Matthew tells us that when we have these losses, we find life. It doesn’t make sense and is often hard to understand myself. But it’s in that place of brokenness and grief, with the piles of loss surrounding me that Jesus shows another way. It's hard and confusing, but ultimately so much better. It’s learning that life isn’t about the stuff we accumulate or even the image we project to others. Jesus tells us to follow Him, trust Him, and that He will show us things we can never see on our own, one with a purpose and meaning and hope.

“There’s more to come: We continue to shout our praise even when we’re hemmed in with troubles, because we know how troubles can develop passionate patience in us, and how that patience in turn forges the tempered steel of virtue, keeping us alert for whatever God will do next. In alert expectancy such as this, we’re never left feeling short changed. Quite the contrary—we can’t round up enough containers to hold everything God generously pours into our lives through the Holy Spirit!” (Romans 5:3-5)