Fostering Hope

Life is just kind of hard right now.  We know that our foster daughter's time with us is wrapping up.  We've known for a long time.  And everyone is feeling the tension of trying to hold together, but also prepare to let go.  It's hard for us as adults to stick with her through this stretch of time.  But she's six.  SIX.  And we are working to prepare her to navigate a future filled with complete unknowns.  Because of the uncertainty, we really make a big deal out of the special moments we have to look forward to.  One of those was her visit with her bio mom yesterday.  For an hour and a half, every other week, she gets to see the one person she wishes she could be with in the entire world.  Looking forward to the visit was the one thing that helped her power through an otherwise emotional morning.  "You get to see your mom today!" we kept telling her.  Except, she didn't.  Due to an unexpected family situation, h...

Our six-year-old foster daughter and her sister came into my care on August 1, 2018.  At that time, we were all hopeful that reunification with her biological mother would happen relatively quickly.  But as the case moved forward, new information was disclosed that revealed that the ability to reunify the family would be much more complicated than we originally thought.  This was really hard news for us to absorb.  I became interested in foster care because there is a real need and I had the resources and space in my home to support that need.  I also wanted to support the efforts a biological family made to recover from whatever tragedy and trauma led to the separation of parent and child.  Because while adoption can be a beautiful thing, it is not the natural order of things.  And it doesn't occur without significant grief and loss. A couple months in, the question was raised whether I'd be interested in adopting the girls.  Early on in the ...

Mother's Day is one of those problematic days that sounds completely nice, but is packed full of opportunities for disappointment or hurt.  When you're dealing with a kiddo that is experiencing separation from their biological mother, the pain of having a day to celebrate mothers can be pretty overwhelming.  Add to that the emphasis that well-meaning, but uninformed folks place on that relationship, and it is a day rife for tears and anger.  I don't know that all of our foster daughter's anger and outrage over the last few weeks can be directly attributed to Mother's Day preparations, but it's likely that the activities they were doing at school in preparation kept the separation from her family fresh in her mind.  There was a tea party in her kindergarten class where moms (the invitation at least also specified it could also be a mom "stand-in") were invited to the school to be celebrated by the kids.  Unfortunately, I just started a new job so I wasn...

This is such a common question, and one that's easy to gloss over.  But there are times when being asked this question immediately results in me breaking down in tears.  Sometimes life is just overwhelming.  And sometimes this normal. simple question that is thrown out without much consideration or thought floods me with the reality that in that particular moment, I can't just say, "Pretty good."  We just finished a weekend of being unable to answer "Pretty good" to that question.  Our six-year-old foster daughter is experiencing some pretty serious regressions with her behaviors.  While we understand that her behavior is communicating her pain and frustration and anger, we still have to ride it out with her.  And while her needs are front and center, it can feel stifling to feel like we don't have the flexibility or freedom to have our emotional needs met, too.  On Friday night, we had plans to meet some new friends from our church for dinner...

Early on in my foster parent licensing process, I got directed to the  Empowered to Connect  website that contains a very comprehensive collection of resources to help understand effective ways to parent "children from hard places."  This website is devoted to the principles developed by researchers Karyn Purvis and David cross, now known as Trust-Based Relational Intervention (TBRI), in understanding the needs of children that have experienced trauma.  I'll give a very, very brief overview of some of the research that supports this parenting philosophy, but please know that I will do a clumsy job compared to the experts and that it is well worth it to spend some time going through the website.  TBRI is based on the idea that any behavior displayed by a child is the communication of the need.  Children that have significant trauma backgrounds, even if the trauma occurred during the mother's pregnancy and even if the child was placed with a non-birth parent ...

I'm not going to lie, the idea of being a foster mom was a little overwhelming, but I thought it would be manageable.  The reality of actually becoming a foster mom was much more intense.  I had gone from a single woman that ate cereal for dinner four nights a week to a single parent taking care of two children, one of which was a very intelligent teenage girl incredibly unhappy about being in my house. I was very fortunate in a lot of ways.  The girls were in another foster home prior to coming to me, so I had time to get to meet them a few times before they came to stay with me.  I had a month to prepare for them to live with me, not just a few hours.  I did not have to deal with immediate aftermath of them being removed from their home and being told they were being placed in foster care.  But it was still so, so hard. I was really prepared for the girls to be depressed or angry or whatever other down emotions you might imagine.  I was not prepa...