Well so much for a timely series on becoming a foster parent. If you missed it, here is Part 1. So heres the thing; parenting is fairly time consuming. So much so that its taken me (gasp!) almost 8 months to put together this next post. Sorry for the awkward silence on the subject. Here goes…
We spent most of 2010 preparing to be foster parents. We took a lot of classes and filled out endless paper work. We got a room ready for our would-be kids. Our best friends even threw us a kids shower. We felt loved by our community and ready to get in this thing. We prepared a room for a group of siblings, possibly sisters or brothers, we weren’t sure. We knew we wanted our home to be open so siblings could stay together. It seemed crazy to have two+ kids at once but it felt right, ridiculous or not.
One week after our license went though we got the first call, a sibling group of three. Yikes. We were scared. It seemed too much for us, so we said no. There was a lot of guilt in saying no but one thing we learned in all our classes is that you have to know your own limitations. If you say yes to a situation thats over your head, you’re not just hurting yourself, you could be hurting the children as well. They need stability not more chaos. The next day we got another call, sisters, 2 and 4yrs old, just for respite care. Respite is weekend care so foster parents can have a weekend off a month. The catch, they were looking for an adoptive home for these young girls. They were currently living in a great foster home, but the foster parents were older and unable to adopt. We said yes.
But we didn’t just say yes to the weekend, in our minds, it was like saying yes to adopting them without ever meeting them. There was so much time, energy, worry, stress, planning all leading to this one weekend with these two girls that Ben and I practically exploded. I had a break down the night before over what we would feed them, what we would all do together. We were a total mess. We knew that we may adopt through the foster system, but it wasn’t the end all goal. Suddenly it felt like it was happening so fast and we were both scared to death.
The girls arrived, and it felt like a babysitting job that would never end. 48 hours of babysitting. It. was. awful.
I could almost cry right now thinking about that weekend. The girls went back to their foster home, then started the agonizing over-analyzation. All those plans, our hopes of being foster parents, possibly adopting. What if parenting was like an eternity of babysitting? Why didn’t we feel a connection with these girls? What if as a mother, I won’t ever be able to connect with a child? What is wrong with us? We cried together. We freaked out together. Then we started talking to people.
Over the course of the next few weeks we had some amazing conversations with friends about parenthood. The main themes: every child really is different. Every parent connects to their child in different ways. And the most important, not every parent connects to their own flesh and blood right away. It takes time. We felt…relief. It wasn’t just us. We were not freaks, at least not completely.
So after three weeks, we gave it another shot…with the same sisters.
*More to come on this story, and I promise it won’t take 8 more months! Thanks for reading and supporting us, love you all. Peace friends, rw.
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