So, on Tuesday we learned about a 16 year old who needs a home. Seth and I decided we were interested in taking a teen. I got excited about the prospect.
Then Kiddo threw a holy fit yesterday about giving up her room and sharing with Tiny. I mean, a triggered trauma losing it kind of fit. So we scrapped the idea of using what has always been Kiddo’s room for a teen. And I cried.
Then this morning Kiddo is totally coming around if we redecorate Tiny’s room to accommodate her and it would need to be totally redone. It’s set up for only one kid and a toddler at that. We’d need bunk beds with a “private” feel on top for Kiddo to have her own space. We’re negotiating what stuff of hers would go in the closet, what on new shelves, what wall art would go where. She’s really accepting the idea now that she understands she gets a say in how it would work.
Although Kiddo does keep saying things like “she’s not getting MY bed! She has to get her own!” Which is fine because we do have a spare bed frame and could swap. But OY. The things we do for this child. Also, she and Tiny can’t have matching bedding because what if they got washed and she accidentally got Tiny’s bedding?! The horror! I compromised on same bedding, different colors. And rolled my eyes directly at her.
Of course, money to redo Tiny’s room is… nonexistent. We may need to ask for some help from some friends. Since I’ve had several friends ask how they can help, I’ll set up an Amazon wish list if I can figure out how to do it and share it. I’m becoming a Luddite in my “old” age – it’s eluding me so far this morning. I’m hoping for another stimulus check, personally. That would help us more than I can say. I figure that part of things will come together somehow.
This is what Kiddo and Tiny do together. They trash rooms. This took them all of about 2 minutes. God help us when they’re sharing space officially.
So, Monday morning we will contact the home finder again to see about meeting the teenager. And if that teen doesn’t wind up liking us, perhaps another one will. Or another older kid. It means we’d be limited to taking young single girls for the room Kiddo will be sharing once Tiny goes home but that’s ok. Medical cases are often just one kid so hopefully that will work out too.
I’m taking a lot on faith here. But then, I think a lot about foster care has to be taken on faith, and things have worked out so far.
I got a great question from a dear friend (a series of great questions actually) that I’ll answer in a series of posts. One of her questions was what we do to help kids catch up developmentally.
The short answer? Believe it or not, just play with them. A lot.
All our Littles have been evaluated by Early Intervention at some point during their stay with us. Early Intervention is an state-wide organization (run through the Department of Heath I believe) that helps assess the development of babies and toddlers and determines what additional services they may need to thrive. It’s meant to catch developmental delays before kids become school-age. It applies for kids under age 3 (the school districts provide EI services after age 3), and all that has to be done is we have to request that Early Intervention evaluate a child. They bring in a bunch of specialists who help assess kids’ gross and fine motor skills, their sensory issues (sensory seeking or sensory avoidant), their language (both receptive and expressive), and other skills. At the end of the evaluation they sometimes make recommendations for additional evaluation or for services that the child should receive. Those services include PT, OT, speech therapy, and special education teachers.
I’ve learned a LOT from all our kids’ service providers. I’ve sat down with each of them and asked for instructions from them for what we should be doing with the kids between appointments. From PT I’ve learned that active play by kids is hugely important. Speech therapists have taught me that just talking to kids is essential. And Special Ed teachers have taught me that getting down on the ground and playing with kids with toys is crucial.
Literally. It can be that easy to help kids catch up.
So we do things for gross motor skills like take kids to playgrounds that are age-appropriate (there’s one right behind our house about 2 blocks away so we are super lucky). We romp with kids in the yard. We let them climb the furniture. We make silly games out of walking on pillows. We take them swimming. We encourage them to run on uneven ground. And when they’re old enough to fit on one, we provide bicycles and lessons on riding and balance.
With regard to speech and language, we talk to kids allllllll the time. When Kiddo came to us, not only was her vocabulary extremely limited, she didn’t understand the typical back and forth of a conversation. So, quite simply, we modeled that for her. We would talk with each other in front of her, and include her in conversation. She struggled at first but got the hang of the give and take of human conversation within a few months. We avoid baby talk and use our usual vocabularies with kids and they catch on to the meaning remarkably well.
We teach kids words and colors and numbers and letters through alphabet puzzles and drawing on paper with markers. We have lots of Little People animals and use them to help teach kids what sounds animals make. I ask kids what letters are on things in the doctor’s office and grocery store, or what colors things are, as a way to pass the time and keep them from climbing the walls with boredom.
Kids’ brains are naturally so curious, and they love interaction with grownups. Most of our kids come to us starved for attention. So when we give undivided attention to them they really engage and their little brains can almost be heard whirring and clicking as they learn.
Brains making connections through play
We read books with kids. There are bedtime stories and sessions in the middle of the day where kids bring us books and we read them. We’ve sought out all the books we can find that are engaging for kids and don’t make our brains melt with repetition. Kids love the snuggle time during reading, and the power of getting to choose the book. They don’t have to be alphabet teaching books or anything like that – almost any picture book will do. Sometimes when kids come to us they can sit through exactly one page of reading at a time before they’re off getting the next book, but that counts too. It just tries my patience, but they learn gradually to sit through more and more of the books.
And we spend time with them being silly with toys. This is one of my favorite videos ever because Mouse is so damn cute and Seth is so silly with kids. I love it. But this video models exactly what I’m talking about: playing with toys in a child-led way. This is the silly play that causes kids’ brains to expand and light bulbs to go on.
There isn’t any magic to getting kids caught up, but honestly the process does seem sort of magical.
To be clear, we are not superheroes who give our kids our non-stop undivided attention all day every day. That’s not needed. We do things like other normal parents, like spending too much time on our phones. We occasionally turn on a movie and let Tiny watch it as a way of babysitting her. (She always asks for Frozen I or II. What is it with those movies?! I like them but kids LOVE them. She sings along to “Let it Go” with abandon.) There are times when I say no to reading a book or getting down on the floor to play because I’m just plain too tired or distracted or bored with the prospect. And that’s ok too because kids need to learn to entertain themselves sometimes.
But our kids DO get a lot of attention and play overall. And apparently that is what is needed because we watch miracles happen with our kids as they catch up with what they’ve missed out on because of the stress in their lives before coming to us. Time and safety alone are huge healers.
Sometimes our kids need more help with behaviors than we can manage ourselves, and we’ve discovered an agency that provides play therapy and skill builders to kids in foster care (or who have ever been in foster care). It’s all paid through Medicaid and we just had to learn that they exist in order to utilize their services. We’ll now use that particular agency for all our kids if possible. I’ve already put in a plug for therapy for grown ups, but let me here put in a plug for therapy for kids, too. Play therapy is amazing. And it really can help kids work through their traumas.
So that’s our “magic.” Service providers, and playing with and talking to and reading to kids. We provide the framework and the kids themselves do the rest.
Our former homefinder (aka our case worker as foster parents) has now moved to a new position in adoptions. She called me out of the blue to ask if we’d be interested in taking a 16 year old girl who is freed for adoption.
I’ve mentioned before that Seth and I originally planned to take teens when we became foster parents, and life got in the way and now we are in the groove of having little kids. But saying we had originally planned to take teens and making the decision to now take a teen are different things, at least according to my blood pressure and heart rate.
Kiddo is adamant that she doesn’t want to share a bedroom with Tiny and “she’s not getting my room!” Soooo, we will have some emotional land mines to try to navigate with Kiddo this weekend. Maybe if we promise to let her redo Tiny’s room with fancy bunk beds or something. It’ll be a bit rough negotiating with Kiddo because her room has been her room for 5 years. There’s bound to be some emotional stuff there.
Kiddo’s mom is worried about this teen because she was once in foster care and remembers how screwed up the other teens were. That scares me. And makes me so sad.
But at the same time, doesn’t every kid deserve a chance? This particular teen’s bio says she likes art (check – artist here), writing (check), and music. She’s rumored to be afraid of cats – we have five. So that might make things not work from the get go. It’s not ideal timing as Seth is entering his final semester of nursing school and rebuilding a bathroom at the same time. And the bedroom this child would need is currently full of construction materials. And we are down to one bathroom for the household and only a bath tub.
Buuuut, we’ve told the agency we are interested in moving forward with at least a phone call introduction for now, to see how things might go.
One of the things making me inclined to go forward with this is this awesome YouTube channel called Be the Village. It’s a family with little kids who fostered a teenage girl for a year and a half before the teen went back home. And it went well – she was a good kid. That channel is in the back of my mind now. There’s a chance it could work out great.
There’s also a chance it could be a disaster, but 🤷🏼♀️.
I’m apparently a risk taker.
Who knows where this will go. Odds are it won’t happen. But… it might.
My husband is tearing apart and rebuilding the upstairs bathroom, and the noise of his work is reverberating through the whole house. Tiny thinks that means she needs to sing louder than the drills and saws.
That’s a question we get pretty often and it’s a very, very good question. The short answer is that we cry, and we hurt, and we miss kids no matter how long they’re gone.
I still miss the first kid we sent home with whom we have no contact – Gronckle. I think about his rambunctious energy and his warm squishy hugs and the silly things he used to do and it hurts. The pain is more acute when they first leave. When Gronckle went home suddenly, I put away every single toy the day that he left so that I didn’t have to see them. I closed his bedroom door so I didn’t have to look into it. And I just plain felt a lot of pain.
Seth playing peek-a-boo with Gronckle
And then over time the pain morphs into something more gentle like longing. It becomes more bearable, and it just becomes a part of me. There’s a whole lot of longing in my heart. I long for hugs from Gronckle, and Mouse, from PB&J. Hell, I long for hugs from Kiddo and Brother, and I see them all the time! Not having “our” kids here with us is terribly, terribly hard.
I worry about their futures – Gronckle’s in particular. He is very well loved and lives in a pack of happy rowdy cousins, which is great. But he lives in a very impoverished neighborhood, speaks only Spanish at home which will present a challenge when he reaches school age, and is not getting the services he probably needs. He’s starting off with a huge disadvantage in life in a terrible school district in a violent neighborhood. What is his future going to be like? I’m utterly helpless and can’t do anything about it. I’m just left to worry.
Baby Gronckle at the water table. The kid loved water, even icy cold from the hose. You’d mist his face with it and he’d laugh and laugh and laugh.
Seth and I both have very good therapists, which I think is crucial to being a good foster parent. Mine helps me through the grieving process each and every time we have a child leave us. She also helps me process parenting mishaps (Mommy guilt is so real), and helps me navigate the parenting process with each different kid. Honestly, she has helped me be confident in my parenting and has helped me know that I am doing my loving best with each child.
Peeps, find a therapist. I swear on a stack of Bibles that everyone could use a good one no matter what their lives have been like or what they’re going through.
We have pictures of our various beloved kids up around our house. When they first leave, what I feel when I see the pictures is a deep sharp pain. But over time, what I feel becomes just a gentle missing, and I can remember the joy of the moment that was captured in the photo. They make me smile now, even if the smile has a tinge of sadness.
Mouse learning to army crawl
I think a lot about brain development and little kids. As we are learning and growing we develop neural pathways in our brains that our brains will use throughout our lives. So even the kids who don’t remember living with us will have brains that remember a feeling of safety, of stimulation, of love. In short, Seth and I have left a mark on their brains, and it’s a healthy one. It’s something.
When we have kids with us we always manage to catch them up developmentally as much as humanly possible, and that helps give them an advantage in life as well. When kiddo came to us at age 4 she had an extremely limited vocabulary, like of 30 words maybe. She didn’t know colors, numbers, letters, animal sounds. Her little brain had been in freeze, fight, or flight mode so much of the time that it hadn’t been learning the things that most little kids learn in a healthy environment. Even her gross and fine motor skills were behind where they should be.
Little bitty Kiddo at a parade.
When she went home a year and a half later she was completely on target in every category of development. When kids experience safety, their brains get a chance to grow, and the human brain is an amazingly elastic thing. She is now performing at grade level at school, and sometimes even a little above. I like to think we had something to do with that academic performance, though now her Mom has taken over in providing her with the safe environment she needs to learn in and gets plenty of credit too.
Somehow, knowing that we made a positive mark on kids’ brains and development makes a huge difference in my grieving process. It’s not necessarily logical, but knowing that we did something positive for a child in ways that will last their whole life makes losing them just a little bit easier.
I can’t keep writing blog posts without talking about the elephant in the room: Covid-freaking-19. Ugh.
It’s presented some unique challenges for us as foster parents and just plain as humans.
For starters, it delayed my becoming an Attorney for the Child (AFC). After I resigned from my position as Of Counsel to my old law firm, they cancelled the AFC training program because of Covid. I thought I had set aside enough savings for us to ride out the transition between regular paychecks from my firm to getting paid after cases are resolved, which is when I get paid as an AFC. (Which sucks by the way. Sometimes months and months of work will go into a case before I can get paid for it.)
Ha! Enough savings, my ass.
Remember that Seth is in nursing school full time right now so he doesn’t have any income. And then I up and quit my job and became just plain unemployed for 4 months. Whee! God bless my Mother especially, my Father, and even our church friends for helping us financially this past year. I am used to being the one helping people, not the one needing help, and this has been a blow to the ego and also an exercise in gratitude.
I’m finally getting paid a little for some cases but have lots more work in the books that I can’t get paid for yet. Seth has a semester to go before he becomes a nurse. Those stimulus checks are lifesavers for us, as was the $600 per week unemployment benefit that went on for several of my months of unemployment.
And before you ask “don’t you get paid for being a foster parent?” let me forestall the question. Yes, we do. It’s an absolute pittance for regular rate kids, better for medical kids like Tiny who is paid at a “special” rate. But we’re paying for daycare and food and pull-ups and clothing and lots of my lost work hours out of what we are paid for her, and we are losing money, not making money. Which honestly is probably how it should be. I don’t want people becoming foster parents for the money.
Anyway. Enough about our broke-ness. Back to Covid.
The tree topper I made, trying to capture the look of the Sputnik chandeliers at the Metropolitan Opera… but which instead turned out to look like Covid. Oops. It was a very 2020 tree topper.
Unfortunately, being a foster parent means exposure to various people who could pass along the virus. We have had two Covid scares because Tiny’s service providers had contracted Covid. She has had 4 to 5 service providers come each week for things like speech therapy, a nurse, play therapy, and physical therapy. And Covid or no, those services have to happen.
Her nurse (who weighs her biweekly, and used to come weekly) contracted it first. No one told us until she came back to work and informed us herself that she had had Covid. Her employer and the county department of health both failed to notify us that we were supposed to be quarantined. No wonder the virus is spreading like wildfire. Then Tiny’s speech therapist contracted it and notified us herself that she had tested positive so that we could quarantine for 14 days. That time the county informed us we were supposed to be quarantined 7 days into our quarantine period. Sigh.
Now, thankfully, Tiny’s service providers are starting to get the Covid vaccine, so that risk will be reduced. But even with our wearing masks I’ve been cringing each time I let a service provider come into my home.
The other exposure we have had because of foster care is through kids coming into care. Twice during the pandemic we have accepted an emergency foster care placement from CPS late at night. Both times we were only able to take the kids for short term placements because we couldn’t afford daycare costs for any other kids. But both times we answered the phone when CPS called and said yes to a temporary placement so some little people would have a safe, warm, loving place to land for a few days until a more permanent arrangement could be made for them.
The first time it was two little girls ages 18 months and three, and we had them for three days. The second time it was a little guy age 21 months, and we had him for a week. The girls stayed healthy while they were with us, but the little guy came down with a sudden fever of 104 and scared the pants off us. We had to take him for an emergency Covid test, which thank heavens turned out to be negative. But we went through 24 hours of anxiety thinking we’d all been exposed.
Seth is healthy as an ox, knock on wood, and has no pre-existing conditions. Plus, since he’s a nursing student and on the floors of the hospital regularly, he is getting the Covid vaccine and has already had his first shot. Tiny and I on the other hand, are vulnerable to Covid. I have the pre-existing condition of being obese, and Tiny has heart problems. We can’t afford to have the virus in the house, but on the other hand, the little kids who were left out in the cold had to have somewhere safe to go those nights. Someone had to take the Covid risk, and twice it was us. It may be us again.
Tiny, mask up. She’s so good about the mask. And the shades are purely for style.
Visits, too, present an opportunity for Covid to be spread. Tiny has visits with her mother every other Friday, and for one of those visits one of Tiny’s siblings (who still live with Mom) was home under quarantine because of exposure through school, but Mom wasn’t quarantined and was able to come to the visit. It made me nervous to send Tiny for the visit, but Tiny misses her mother so damn much and we already missed a visit because we were under quarantine and I didn’t have the heart to cancel it. I’m not even sure I could’ve canceled it if I wanted to.
Some of my friends have basically been able to lock themselves at home, get groceries through Instacart, and have no one come to their home so as to stay safe from Covid. I’d have loved to have been able to do that for Tiny’s sake – that weak heart scares me – but it’s just not been an option for us. I have to work, which means Tiny has to go to daycare (trust me I’ve tried the alternative and it doesn’t work). And the service providers have to come. And Seth has to be in the hospital for nursing school. And my heart would have broken if I’d said no to the temporary placements.
It all adds up to a lot of exposure but thank God, masks work, and we’ve stayed healthy so far. Here’s hoping we make it through this home stretch to get a vaccine for me, and praying we achieve herd immunity to protect little fragile Tiny.
It’s 5:30 AM as I’m writing this. People keep asking me how I find the time to blog when I am a foster parent and work, and it is a tricky tricky thing just to foster parent and work full time at the same time, let alone blogging.
For 15 years I worked at an excellent law firm in downtown Syracuse. I was an environmental attorney, which means I dealt with cleanups of contaminated sites, compliance with environmental regulations, litigation related to those things, renewable energy projects, etc. I did some zoning work as well. It was sophisticated work, and I had brilliant and accomplished colleagues who do incredibly good legal work in a wide variety of fields.
For the first 10 years, I went back-and-forth between loving and hating my job. Everyone who works knows that personalities can be the biggest challenges in a work environment, and my law firm was no exception. The work was good, but the politics and personalities sometimes really got to me. That said, I didn’t know what else to do, or how I could possibly transition to any other career, so I stayed. I worked my way up to being a Partner at the firm.
And then I became a foster parent.
And from the first day of foster parenting to my last day at the firm, I felt like I was being pulled in two very different directions. My heart went one way, my work the other.
Foster parenting is a hard gig. It is incredibly emotionally taxing, and there is a lot that has to be done during the work day. Caseworkers have to do home visits, and while a few have been willing to come at the crack of dawn so we could get to work on time, most needed to come to the house during the workday, meaning at least one of us had to come home to be there for the visit. Kids have doctor appointments, and our kids have a lot of doctor appointments. Kids have behavioral issues, and sometimes need to be picked up from daycare in the middle of the day because they’ve been suspended or expelled, as happened to us with Brother.
The list of reasons we needed to leave work in the middle of a work day is pretty endless.
I have a friend who is a single foster parent and works full-time as a teacher. I don’t know how the hell she does it. With two of us alternating taking time off from work, we still had issues. At one time Seth had a boss who reamed him and threatened to fire him when he needed to leave work in the middle of the day to pick up Mouse from daycare and take her to the emergency room. I mean, really. That could happen to any parent not just a foster parent, but the man had the audacity to tell Seth that “she isn’t even your kid.”
I kid you not.
My firm was gracious about it to the last. Their approach was that, so long as I got the work done, I could come and go as I needed. Trouble is, I started not getting the work done. Law firms have billable hour requirements, and I wasn’t meeting mine. I had colleagues who manage to go home and put their kids to bed and go back to doing work on the laptop, but that’s a skill I have never mastered. Once we wrangle children into bed, I turn into an exhausted soggy mess and need to crawl into bed myself. So I wasn’t putting in enough hours during the day, and I wasn’t making up the hours in the evening.
Still, my firm remained gracious about it. I kept my job. But I got a lot of reminders about how I wasn’t pulling my weight, and the guilt about it started to eat me alive.
So I went down to part time. I resigned the Partnership I had worked so hard for, and took a position Of Counsel to my firm so I could work only 25ish hours a week. But by then it was too late. I was so exhausted from the push and pull of work and kids, and so sick of the work that didn’t make my heart happy, that it wasn’t enough to keep me at the firm.
One of the many reasons I would have to leave work to deal with foster parenting issues was court. Everything related to foster care is overseen by the Family Court system in New York State, and there are regular court dates that foster parents are invited to attend. Seth and I have always attended every court date we were able to go to, because we want to know what’s going on with families of our kids, and sometimes we have valuable input into the level of care a sick child will need – which parents have to be able to provide – before the child can go home. Every child in foster care is assigned an attorney to represent his or her interests. These attorneys are called Attorneys for the Child, or AFCs.
We have had some colossally shitty AFCs representing our kids. We have also had three incredibly good AFCs representing our kids.
One of those good ones became my mentor when I decided one day that I, too, wanted to become an AFC and represent kids in neglect and abuse cases and in custody disputes.
Once I decided that’s what I wanted to do, that’s what I did. I am incredibly proud to say I am now an Attorney for the Child, and I have a part time caseload of kids who are the subject of neglect or custody proceedings. I used my newly freed time as a part timer at my firm to shadow other AFCs to fulfill my requirements for becoming one myself.
I can never repay the debt I owe that amazing attorney who became my mentor. She let me shadow her, introduced me to judges and other attorneys, sent me sample forms for various documents, and generally showed me the ropes. She’s still mentoring me, and God bless her, she picks up the phone when I call with the most inane questions because it’s all so new to me.
My mouthy new coworker. The judges are getting to know her because she invariably starts to yowl in the middle of Microsoft Teams court conferences.
I work mornings from my home, and the occasional afternoon. I’m able to be home in the afternoon for all of Tiny’s service providers, and she’s just in daycare in the mornings.
My other home office coworker, who thinks my boobs are her shelf.
I like working part time though I do hope my case load eventually increases so I can be full time. I do better when I’m working a lot because parenting is not something I’m cut out to do full time. My brain gets soooo bored with just being a mom. (I try to say that without mommy guilt but it’s hard!) I think full time AFC work will happen for me over time because one of the rural counties I work in has a pressing need for AFCs.
And so help me, I LOVE the work. I love the kids. I love the judges in that rural county. It’s all coming together in amazing ways and I feel like I’m where I’m meant to be.
I feel like there are so many foster care blogs that are very religious, and a lot of people do enter foster parenting because they say they are Christian and “felt called by God” to foster or adopt kids. If you read my previous post about why I foster, you know God doesn’t really factor into my decision to be a foster parent. That said, we are churchgoers. I’m not sure how much we are Christians though.
Seth and I both grew up in religious families. When he was a kid, Seth’s family was Pentecostal, and he was homeschooled. I grew up in a Catholic family.
Neither Seth nor I much liked the exclusionary policies of the churches we grew up in. Seth really hated that the ministers of the Pentecostal churches he attended had lots of money and spent their time talking to the congregation about tithing, while most in the congregation in his poor rural community were struggling to put food on the table. Driving the family around in a conversion van and having a bunch of kids wearing designer clothes while the congregation dressed in rags and went hungry didn’t sit well with Seth, and didn’t strike him as being very Christlike.
I hated that my Catholic Church fired the gay choir director because of his sexual orientation. I loved that choir director. His ebullience about the music was a source of joy for me even when I was really depressed as a child, and I needed him. He got fired for loving. Then I turned out not to be straight myself, and knew I wasn’t welcome in the Catholic Church because of that.
As adults, both Seth and I steered widely clear of religious organizations and institutions. We both felt that Christianity was a great source of hypocrisy in the United States and we wanted nothing to do with it.
Then we became foster parents.
One day, leaving daycare, I commented to Kiddo that the baby someone was carrying, who just happened to be Black, was especially cute. She looked at me in surprise and said, “you like Black people?” Shocked I responded that yes, of course I liked Black people. She proceeded then to try to convince me that she herself was white, despite my knowing her Black daddy.
In relating the story to Seth that evening, I wound up in tears, and I am NOT a crier. We were doing something very wrong if Kiddo thought we didn’t like Black people and that she needed to be white to be loved by us. We had intentionally enrolled Kiddo in a very diverse daycare, but when we really thought about it we realized that the kids were diverse – there were more Black kids than white kids – but the teachers were almost all white. Kiddo had no Black adult role models in her daily life, and didn’t see us interacting with Black adults very often. That HAD to change. Immediately.
How on earth would we diversify our local friend group though? I have lots of Black friends from college and law school with whom I am in regular contact, but they live all over the US and none are nearby. My law firm, and Seth’s employer, were shockingly white. My closest friend locally had been Black, but she had died suddenly a few years earlier, so I couldn’t call on her to help us.
The obvious choice? Find a diverse church. STAT.
I was very wary about the prospect because, though I pass as straight since I’m married to a man, I’m not. I couldn’t stomach a church where people equated being gay with being sinful. And way more importantly, Kiddo is somewhere on the gender identity spectrum, sometimes identifying as a boy sometimes as a girl, and I would NOT put her into a situation where she would get pressured to be a girl just because that’s what she had been identified as at birth.
I looked at the local UU churches, knowing they are very liberal and open, but found their online photo galleries were far too white to meet Kiddo’s needs. So I googled the big pretty church we drove past all the time on the way to daycare – the one that had the giant rainbow flag plastered to the side of the building – University United Methodist Church. I was positively delighted when I looked at the online photo galleries and found there were lots of Black members. Check. Check. I decided we would attend on Sunday to see if it might work.
When we walked in the doors on Sunday, within 15 minutes we knew we were home.
The members of the congregation greeted us with effusive warmth that made us feel immediately that we were welcome. The Pastor, who is a woman, started off worship by mentioning that it was a reconciling congregation that was welcoming to people of all sexual orientations and gender identities. The sanctuary was stunningly beautiful, with airy Gothic arches and breathtaking stained glass windows. The music was rich and plentiful. The paper we were handed when we walked in was full of news about outreach programs in the local community, from a food bank to a little free library to social justice activism. And yes, the congregation was truly diverse.
Kiddo and Seth in the rocking chairs at the back of the sanctuary
We started attending every weekend. When we were asked to become members of the church, Seth approached the Pastor to tell her that he was, as he puts it, “agnostic on a good day.” She cheerfully responded that all were welcome to become members of the congregation no matter where they were on their faith journeys. So that was that. We became members.
Kiddo helping us prepare Thanksgiving Dinners for the food pantry at church
Five years later, I’m still not sure how I feel about that whole “Jesus is the son of God” thing. God and I have a tricky relationship. I do believe, however, that Jesus the man lived a remarkable life. I’m a fan of biblical history, I’ve read fairly extensively, and have traveled in the holy land including on a trip with church members this past spring before Covid-19 put a stop to such travelings. I strongly believe that if we each lived life according to the teachings of Jesus that are set forth in the New Testament, the world would be a better place. I don’t care so much about the worship of God, but if we truly treated our fellow humans according to Jesus’s teachings, the world would be a much kinder, more loving, more beautiful, less lonely, less poverty stricken place. That’s more than enough to keep me going to a Christian church and listening during Worship.
As for Kiddo, she’s a whole lot more comfortable with her identity as a Black person these days. And she loves Church and the Pastor and several members and employees of the church a great deal. Like a typical 9-year-old, she complains that church is “booooring,” but still asks to go most Sundays. I am content knowing that she is growing up experiencing what a healthy caring community is like.
As time has gone on, Seth and I have become increasingly involved with the church, and both serve on various boards and committees. Each and every one of our foster kids has been joyfully welcomed and adored there. Members of the congregation have become good friends who have provided a whole variety of supports to us over the years. In the time of Covid, the church, together with the Food Bank of CNY and a couple of other faith communities, have stepped up and are providing an extraordinary amount of food to those in need. In addition to the rainbow banner, the Church now has banners that say “Immigrants are Welcome” and “Black Lives Matter.”
And I’m very proud to be a member of UUMC’s congregation.
We get that question allllll the time about our foster kids and my answer is always “I don’t know.”
Do we want to adopt? Yes, we’d love to adopt a child or two. But that may never happen and I have to find a way to make peace with that.
One of the hardest things to adjust to in being a foster parent is not knowing a damn thing about the future. I don’t count on what’s going to happen next week. The reason for that is that things can turn on a dime, and all everyone’s expectations can go right out the window.
And it can go either direction. Or back again.
Our first brush with this happened with Gronckle, our third kid. We were told from the outset by folks at the agency and by Gronckle’s former foster parents that it was expected that Gronckle’s placement would end in adoption. Gronckle‘s mom was very very young and was not doing any of the things she needed to do to get him back. Dad was in prison for the long haul. And no other family members had turned up on the radar as being a resource for Gronckle to go to. It stayed that way for months, with the court using the words “concurrent planning” in regard to Gronckle, which means that the agency’s priority plan, which is always “return to parent,” wasn’t working very well and the agency was working on an alternative plan at the same time, which was adoption by Seth and me.
We were idiots and got our hopes up. We told people we hoped to adopt Gronckle.
Gronckle with Seth and Slimy
And then one day in court a new relative was mentioned – a paternal grandmother – and within a few short weeks the grandmother had been assessed by the caseworker and passed the background check and Gronckle went to go live with her. It happened so fast our heads spun. And our hearts were wrecked.
Now, I still have some doubts about whether this was the right choice for Gronckle. On the whole we are majorly pro-family but there were some… circumstances. And we have no contact with the family so have no idea how things are going.
Mouse cheerfully taking apart the containers cupboard
Then there was Mouse. She was our next kiddo, and from the start it seemed to us that there was no question that she would go back home. We weren’t even sure whether she should have been removed in the first place because her parents seemed remarkably competent. And then mom and dad missed a court date, and some allegations were made about some activities they had potentially been involved in, and in one court appearance we were suddenly back to talking about concurrent planning again. We were asked whether we would adopt her. This time, thankfully, we kept our heads screwed on and didn’t get too excited about the prospect because we had seen what could happen with Gronckle. It’s a good thing we didn’t get too excited about it because she did indeed go home, and to pretty good circumstances too I think. I ran into Mouse‘s mom a few weeks ago, and while she sadly didn’t have Mouse with her, we did have a little chat and it seems like everything is going really well. Mouse is thriving.
Seth and Tiny
At one point during Tiny’s stay with us, the agency planned to move her to a different foster home. That is a whole long story that I can’t get into, but we almost lost her then. And now, questions have come up again about whether her mom can do what she needs to do to get Tiny back. I don’t know the answer. And I’m really really torn about whether Tiny should go home or stay with us. Neither option is ideal.
I won’t ever let myself believe that adoption is going to happen unless I am actually signing adoption papers in a court room, because things can turn on a dime at any time. And I mean any time. Even after a child has been surrendered by parents or their parental rights have been terminated sometimes the adoption doesn’t go through, and not because of a choice the adoptive parents make about it either. It’s just such a complicated system with so many moving pieces and so many competing interests that it’s hard to count on anything.
When we took our initial foster parenting classes, we took them with a group of people that we largely stayed in contact with afterward. None of the ones we stayed in contact with are still fostering. Several couples adopted the first two children who came to them. (A couple of others quit because the foster care system is so broken and it really got to them.)
Am I jealous of those couples who got to adopt the first few kids who came to them? I have to admit that I am. But I’m also torn because I know that adoption is by definition traumatic for kids. They lose their whole first family and wind up so very often missing them their whole lives. That’s not some thing I want to wish for for any child. But it does happen. And I’m a little sad that, if it’s going to happen for a certain percentage of kids, that we haven’t happen to have any of those kids when it did happen. But, maybe we wouldn’t be where we are if we had adopted a kid already, and I like where we are and love taking care of Tiny.
Who knows what the future holds. We have Kiddo in our lives for the long term, which is something for sure. We are blessed and lucky that we get to watch at least one kid grow up. And we genuinely love fostering and being able to send kids back home to families that have healed during their time apart.
But for people who want to straight up adopt and don’t have the heart for fostering, foster care is not the best way to go about growing a family. There are too many moving parts, too many lives and personalities and situations involved. It’s a hard way to go.
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