Closing Our License/Advice to Those Considering Fostering

Back in this post, I forgot to mention one MAJOR factor to consider when deciding whether to foster or continuing to foster or adopt:  The feelings of your spouse on the matter!  Of course, if you’re single, no worries about having to come to a consensus!

Fostering, like any other significant commitment or change, will definitely add stress to your marriage and affect any children in your home.  If both spouses are not unanimously on board, I would recommend waiting until the decision is unanimous.  This, of course, can be extremely frustrating if one spouse feels Gung-ho about it and the other spouse or partner is anything less than lukewarm.

Over the past three or four years I’ve talked my husband into renewing our foster care license for “just one more year”.   When I recently realized that I need more required training hours to complete in order to renew our license for yet another year and I asked my husband to accompany me to an upcoming training it led to a big discussion about the pros and cons of keeping our license open for another year. 

Let me explain something about how my husband thinks and makes major decisions versus how I think, which might help you to understand or imagine how our discussion went:  My husband has always been very methodical and practical.  He carefully weighs the risks and benefits before becoming to a decision.  He also has an MBA, which translates into him viewing things from a cost/benefit analysis.  Even when trying to decide on a place to go on vacation, he carefully scouts out the best deals and frequently uses the term “ROI”- which, I have learned, stands for Return On Investment.   His thinking is basically motivated by “What are we going to get out of it?  Is it worth it in the end?” 

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not one to have my head in the clouds, but I am a bit more guided by what I feel in my heart and sometimes decisions based on gut feelings can’t be explained logically- or they just don’t make much sense- at least initially.  I also admit that I have sometimes been guilty of making decisions based on the premise “What do I have to give?” rather than “What will I be getting in return?” To me it just comes down to the whole principle of “Ask not what your country or (fill-in-the blank) can do for you; Ask what YOU can do for your country (or whatever).”   Although such thinking may be considered by some to be noble and altruistic, it can also be foolish at times if one is constantly in a cycle of giving and giving without replenishing the source- and by source, I mean my own health and sanity and balance, as well as the time and energy I can devote to my own children. 

My advice to those considering fostering:

If you look at being a foster parent from a cost/benefit perspective, I can tell you with much certainty that you will give much more than you get.  If that bothers you, then you may want to look into another form of service to children and families.  However, if you are willing to sacrifice and put your own gratification on the back burner, and don’t mind giving more than getting, then go for it! Please know that you will have support from others who have walked the same road.  They can buoy you up on the hard days and listen to you vent with an empathetic ear because they “get it”- they’ve been there, too.

I also firmly believe that it is not just okay, but necessary, to take a break when needed.  Don’t be afraid to take a break through respite care or support from friends when dealing with particularly demanding or difficult placements.  And absolutely, take time to grieve and heal after heartbreaking cases of reunification.  Reach out to others who have been there, because it is a loss that not everyone can understand. 

Some cynics (or even yourself) might think, “Well, you signed up to foster- you knew there would be heartache, what did you expect?”  That may be true, but your bravery and willingness to open your heart has blessed a child or helped give a family a second chance.  That is not only commendable but courageous. 

To make a long story short, my husband and I have decided to close our license of fostering through our state after 12 years.  It was an easy conclusion for my husband to make, but not necessarily easy for me to accept.  Logically I know that I will have more time to devote to my children and to my schooling and other endeavors and I won’t have to go into a full-on adrenaline rush/panic every time I see “DCFS” on my caller ID, but I also feel like I’m giving up part of my identity and, of course, I think in the back of my mind and in my heart “But what about the children?”

In response to that question- which is not necessarily rhetorical, I have three children in my home who need me now more than any other children need me at this point in time.  And besides that, it’s not a contest to see how many children one can foster or adopt or how many years of experience one can accumulate- it’s about helping one child at a time.  Just think of it: If even half of the homes who are eligible in the United States would go through the training and foster just one child- what a difference it would make in the lives of those children!

Going back to the whole “Return on Investment” concept which I mentioned at the beginning of this post, even if our family hadn’t been able to adopt two of our children from foster care, the lessons we’ve learned, lives touched, and, I think, most importantly, the qualities and character we’ve developed, have been more than worthwhile.

Yes, I am a bit sad about not renewing our license for yet another year, but I am also starting to fill at peace about it and even some relief.  I don’t want to think of it as cutting all ties to fostering forever, but rather, taking a much-needed break and a bit of a different path.

Adoption: Heartbreak and Hope

Over the past year or so I’ve considered myself lucky if I’m able to write even one post a month on this blog.  Since there’s a few weeks remaining of November, here is my somewhat obligatory post during National Adoption Month.

Adoption has undoubtedly been a huge blessing in my life, but it’s not always necessarily a sunny subject.  I think the complexity lies within the fact that I am the beneficiary of somebody else’s grief and loss. 

I came across this quote this year and I was impressed with how many big and complicated feelings of mine it so accurately and succinctly addressed in just one sentence:

                                                  

                Mother’s Day is a bittersweet day for me for that exact reason- I am vividly reminded that I am not the only mother my children have and I feel a bit of guilt as well as awe that I am the mother who gets to raise them.  Mother’s Day also brings up pangs of sorrow and memories of the years of alienation of being a childless woman.  Seven years actually goes by fairly quickly in retrospect, but when you’re in the middle of it, waiting seems like forever.

                When I take myself and my feelings out of the equation and consider my children and their feelings about being adopted and any issues they will deal with concerning their identity and history, I can’t help but acknowledge that as loving and stable as our home is, my children lost their first families and are the only ones in the adoption triad who had absolutely no choice in the matter of being placed with our family.   I can only wonder if this will bring up anger, sorrow, or resentment for them in the future.

My pre-school aged daughter (our youngest child) has been bringing up her birth mother quite a bit this year.  Incidentally, I remember the pre-school years as being a very pivotal time for our oldest daughter to bring up questions about babies in tummies in general and specifically about her adoption and her birth mother.  I know of an LCSW who has counseled a lot of children currently in foster care or adopted from foster care and she has observed that other common ages for children to bring up questions or have issues with their first families and their identities is 9 years old and 14 years old- I thought that was interesting.

My oldest daughter expressed sadness and disappointment to me when she was a preschooler, about not being able to come from my tummy.  Fast forward six years and I had a deja vu moment when my youngest daughter was playing with her dolls (or doing some activity that made her think of babies) and she commented to me something to the effect of, “Remember when I was in your tummy?”  I had to gently remind her that she never came from my tummy.  It was so interesting for me to see two totally different reactions to the same information.  Our youngest daughter immediately became angry rather than sorrowful, as our oldest daughter did.

This year my youngest daughter seems to be trying to reconstruct her story- and not always with accuracy. I listened to her one night recount a short narrative: “My ‘other’ mom was really nice and would always feed me bottles in this house when she used to live here.”  I had to bite my tongue and was thinking to myself, “The caseworker would have to prod your ‘other’ mother to pick up her newborn baby during her supervised visits!”  Of course, I didn't say that out loud, but kept my thoughts to myself.   Then I reminded my little girl that her “other” mother never lived in our house and that I picked her up from the hospital and brought her home a couple of days after she was born.   

It’s hard to give specific answers to the question of “why?” when my kids ask about why they don’t live with their first families.  Each situation has different backgrounds but we always make it a point to let our kids know that even though they are not with their birth mothers, they are loved by them very much.  I want them to know, more than anything, that their adoptions are in no way equated with abandonment or rejection, but rather, born of great love. 

It’s a little more awkward trying to explain things to my youngest two who are birth siblings.  I try to be as age-appropriate as possible and use the word “sick” (as in having an illness) to describe why their first mother wasn’t able to care for them rather than using the word “addiction”.  As they get older I can give more details as appropriate.

My little boy, now in kindergarten, hasn’t seemed to bring up adoption as much as his sisters do.  I don’t know whether that’s because he doesn’t think about it as much or just because he doesn’t verbalize it.  I did have an experience with him recently where I was cuddling with him- at his request- and I couldn’t help but think that we were making up for lost time bonding with each other since, unlike his sisters,  I missed out on the first year of his life.  I honestly don't know the extent to what he went through in his early life. "I wish I could have been there for him from the very beginning." I thought to myself.  Although it was a tender moment it also brought up some disappointment and a little bit of anger inside of me.  Such is adoption- beautiful and miraculous while heartbreaking at the same time.