Why I’m a Foster Parent

I have wanted to be a foster parent for as long as I can remember knowing what foster parents are. I never felt a strong urge to have my own biological children, I wanted to be a safe place for kids who needed one. I remember learning what a foster parent is when I was a kid, and I was like Zing! That’s it! I’m going to do that someday!

Life, of course, got in the way. I went to college, studied abroad, came back, got my undergrad degree (shout out to Colby College!), worked in undergraduate admissions (shout out to the Payson Hall crew at St Lawrence University!), went to law school at Cornell, got married, and started working at a law firm in my home town of Syracuse NY. All of that felt like the “next thing” I was supposed to do at each step of the way. 

One day I realized I’d been working as an adult in a career for quite a while, and I didn’t know what my next step “should” be. 

Throughout much of that litany of steps I took in my life, I’ve struggled with depression. Whenever I looked at life on this planet I got overwhelmed. I’ve always been a painfully sensitive person, and life is a thorny thing. I’m the little kid who got terribly upset when a caterpillar died, the adult who felt every injustice in the world viscerally. 

It dawned on me all at once one day that while I couldn’t fix every injustice in the world, I could do something to make the world better. It was time to do that something and become a foster parent. No time was going to feel “right” for doing it. We just needed to dive in while we were young enough to keep up with kids. 

God bless my loving husband, who went along with this whole plan with an open heart and tremendous willingness. We had talked about becoming foster parents since we had met – like within the first month – and he’s always agreed it was a plan he was on board with. 

He was the manager at a bike shop in Canton, NY when we met. A bike shop in a tiny town attracted a bunch of teenage boys who didn’t have anyplace better to be, and Seth had found himself “adopting” the kids from not-so-great families who needed an adult to care. He’d take an interest in their school work, listen when they needed an ear, teach them how to calculate a tip at a diner or get a car loan. We made a hell of a lot of pancakes to feed hungry teenage boys on Saturday mornings in those days. 

That experience made Seth interested in fostering teens, which was an interest I shared. Even when we started foster parenting classes we planned to foster teens. But life has its twists, and since both Seth and I worked full time, we couldn’t take teens because at the time they couldn’t be left home alone in the afternoon after school. We had to take kids who were young enough to go to daycare after school. Thus, once we were certified, we took in Kiddo and Brother, who were 4 and 6. 

Being a foster parent hasn’t solved my depression, but it has helped tremendously. I need to be a foster parent. When we took a month-long break one time after a kid had gone on to some pretty terrible circumstances, I struggled. I felt like there wasn’t enough air to breathe, and I was drowning in the unhappiness of the world. I need to spend my days feeling like I am doing something to right some wrongs in this crazy world, no matter if it’s just being good to one kid in need at a time. 

It’s something meaningful. It’s changing a life. Making it better. Even for the littlest kids who won’t remember having lived with us we have built healthy neural pathways in their little brains that can serve them well their whole lives. 

That? That Matters. 

I don’t know how long I will be a foster parent. I suspect Seth will peter out before I do, but at some point we will be too old to keep up with little kids and will switch to bigger kids or will switch teens. And at some point we’ll be too old to keep up with teens too. I don’t want to be in the position where a child comes to us who needs a forever home and we don’t want to adopt because we would be 85 at the kid’s high school graduation. So time will put its own limitations on our foster parenting.

For now, though, I can’t imagine not doing it. It can be an insanely frustrating and emotionally taxing gig full of drama and heartbreak. The system is fairly broken and causes us more angst than I can express. But every heartbreak, every frustration is for a really damn good cause. 

Each child’s life and wellbeing matters. And for now, we will keep doing everything we can for each little life we are blessed to share time with.