Our children's parents are not beyond hope. God can save them. God can change them. He loves them deeply—not for who they could be, but as they are, right now in their lostness. He created them and adores them, despite themselves. Just like He does you and me.
I don’t know how long this little one will be with me, and I don’t know if he’ll have memories of me. But I know that his brain and body will remember my nurturing care, and it will change his life forever.
I prayed “break my heart for the things that break yours,” but I pretty much had my mind made up about what those things were: kids.
Triggers aren’t meant to be avoided (forever). They reveal places that are broken, so that healing can take place. When our kids are ready, triggers can be opportunities—to process, to grow, to heal.
Getting attached to a child who will most likely leave means living in tension. It means freely releasing your heart–where you love and feel and connect–but holding the reigns on your mind–where you plan and hope and daydream.
Being ok with “the best I can do” is actually a way that I live by faith. My sight tells me that I need to do everything and do it perfectly, or my people will suffer. But my faith leads me to surrender to Him and focus on faithfulness rather than “the best.”
His mercies are new every morning. Adoption is forever, and there's always tomorrow. God's grace is bigger than my sin. God fills in the gaps of my failed parenting. Jesus died to forgive me and he is transforming me.
This command to not grow weary isn’t a call to just be better and stronger. It’s not even really a command at all. It’s a promise, a reminder, a hold-on-tight-to-it truth.
I struggle with the mundane of motherhood. Long days at home with kids, the same good and bad and sweet and hard over and over again, each day on seeming repeat. Sometimes I wonder what exactly it is I’ve chosen to do with my life.
Foster parenting will wreck you.
In the very best of ways.
Attachment is worth working towards, connection is worth fighting for, because our kids are worth it.
To the maybe-one-day, eventually, or in-training foster parent, the best thing you can do right now to prepare yourself for foster care: befriend a foster family.
Being available to your kids, prioritizing connection, seeing & meeting the needs behind behaviors, and leading with compassion and love—as parents, we do the work, but we never arrive.
Let’s drop the whole “special” thing. It burdens foster parents with both a credit and a pressure we don’t deserve and shouldn’t have to carry. And it allows everyone else to exclude themselves with the admission that they’re not “special.”
The love I have and was acting in, I began to feel again, and I whispered in her ear, “I love you, little girl. I will love you always and forever. Nothing will ever change how much I love you.”
Your impact is immeasurable. Which means, at once, that it can feel like nothing—you can’t even measure it—and also be everything—you can’t even measure it.
Now I understand the mission differently. Now I would cry those same tears as fiercely over a child needing me in the first place. The loss of a mother, a father, a family is the heartbreak that placement represents. I grieve the need for my role at all.
My fight for restorative & redemptive foster care begins before the child even enters my home.
It’s easy to have sympathy when a child is sad or scared or suffering. But when they’re just basically “annoying?” It can be so hard to have compassion on this “attention seeking.” That’s when I have to remind myself what I explained to my ten year old: She’s not attention seeking, she’s attachment seeking.
But then I remember. The God who’s brought me here, who’s carried me before and carries me still, who despite it all and by it all has blessed me deeply. And I get up & stand again on the promises I own in Him. I re-place my trust, refocus on the mission, rejoice in all I have. And I rediscover, again, the great joy of this life I get to live.
