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Why Foster Further?

Theo and I nearly became foster care parents about five years ago. There was a child in my classroom who was in foster care and I felt this deep burden to bring him, or others like him, into a true home with a real family not a semi-group home with a sharp divide between the "real" kids and the "foster" kids as I knew was the case for this boy.

I told my husband that we could do it better. So we started the process. And then quit. Because we weren't ready to do it better. We weren't mature enough, our marriage wasn't strong enough, our kids were too young.

On the first night that the girls were with us I sent a panicked, rambling voicemail to their social worker, repeating and spelling out letter-by-letter my name and the girls' names three times (because we got the girls before we even met their worker since they came from another agency), begging her to please call their mother and tell her that they were okay. The realization that another mother out there did not know where her children were nearly sent me into my very first panic attack. I absolutely needed that mother to know that her children were safe and sleeping soundly. If I'd had her phone number I would've called her myself.

(This still bothers me. It makes me feel like a kidnapper. I had her children and she did not know where they were. It's horrifying. I don't care what you've done. It's a mother's worst nightmare and I was forced to play a role in it.)

The social worker never delivered the message and later told me it was the first time any foster parent had done such a thing. She called it: refreshing. I heard what she really meant: naive.

During the five years that we prepared to do this for real we had hundreds of hours of conversations. We decided to foster further--be more than the group home, or, worse yet, the it's-a-ministry-we-feel-called-to home (no child wants to be a ministry project) because foster care is just the prologue. It is not the whole story. We committed to fostering them today in such a way that would be careful with all their tomorrows.

Last month I ran into a women I'd once been friends with while our eldest sons were in preschool together. I hadn't seen her in nearly a decade. I had the two girls with me and she joked, "Don't tell me you've expanded your family further?" I smiled and said, "Well, yes, we have. These are my foster daughters." Her face froze in that horrified smile I'm sure I've had on my face while I replay my words, wondering if I've just stuck my foot in my mouth. She hadn't. It was an innocent question and I was happy to introduce them.

The conversation we had was then a repeat of every conversation I've ever had with every single person who learns we're fostering. She said, in this order:
  1. How long have you had them?
  2. How long do you expect them to stay?
  3. Are you planning on adopting?
  4. Do they have visits with the family?
  5. I could never do that! You must be a saint!
I'm sure I said those exact same things before I lived this experience but now, from the other side, I hear a host of deeply personal of questions with a slew of assumption attached. What she was really saying was:
  1. Have they adjusted to you and forgotten their family yet?
  2. Are you making sure you don't bond with them in case they leave?
  3. How quickly can you get rid of the birth family?
  4. Is it weird to rub shoulders with those kinds of people? And, is it weird when the kids call someone else mommy right in front of you?
  5. Lady, you are either bat-shit crazy or delusional. I'd never ruin my kids' lives by bringing strangers into our house. What kind of a sick need is this filling for you?
I answered her questions as best I could but the thing that I could not convey to this women in the three minutes we chatted across our shopping carts was that the foster care system that this woman envisioned, that most people envision, isn't what is real to these two girls.

Because they do not know they are foster children.

They are Jane and Kate. We are mom and dad. Along with another mom and dad who will always, always, always be mom and dad. Even from jail. Even with legally terminated parental rights. Even while strung out and homeless and out of communication for months. They will always, always, always be mom and dad. We know that; we own that reality; and we're choosing to move into that heart-breakingly difficult space anyway.

My friend's statement with the jokey/judgy "Don't tell me you've expanded your family further," seared onto my brain and it's where I drew inspiration for the title of this blog. So simple; yet, so encompassing.

Because, why yes. Yes, we have. We are expanding our hearts and our lives further into the love and need and fear and loss and attachment and minute-by-minute lives of two little girls.

We are fostering past the prologue. We are, right now, the main characters in the children's book of their lives even while they're too young to know it's being written. And as the current guardians of their books we are fiercely vigilant about including all the main characters: birth mom and dad and grandma and aunt and uncle and cousins. We don't have the right to write them out of the story. Now or ever.

We are fostering beyond the surface questions everyone asks and the horror stories everyone tells. We are momming and dadding to two little girls, even when that means we have to parent their grandmother to help her choose healthy boundaries so that she can continue to be a part of their lives.

We are fostering further. We are fostering for their forever.

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