I belong to a Facebook page set up for foster and adoptive parents to pull support from one another. Daily, members will post seeking help with a particular situation or a need for something specific, but every now and then someone will post something hopeful that gets my mind racing and reminds me why I started fostering in the first place.
One story in particular was written by an adoptive mother who was struggling with her own feelings of frustration with the foster care system in Oklahoma. In her struggle, she loudly stated, “Maybe I'm just not cut out to be a foster mom.” From an adjoining room, her young daughter, adopted from foster care herself, rushed to her mother's side, hugged her and responded, “It's okay Mom. No child is cut out to be a foster kid either.”
So why are there so many of them?
My fear is that most people feel the way this sweet mother did in her moment of discouragement; that maybe we just aren't cut out for the heartache and waves of terrible emotions we will most assuredly welcome into our lives by becoming foster parents. And there's a big chance some of us might be right in feeling this way. But I have never known anything more profoundly than this; absolutely no child is cut out to be a foster kid.
Tragically, these children can't help their situations. They can't control where they go or why they are taken into foster care in the first place. A child can't simply decide not to be a foster kid. But adults…we can decide to rescue a child. We can recognize that the emotions these children will feel from the moment of their exposure into foster care, will be far greater than anything we will ever feel while caring for them. Foster parents…we will feel fear. We will feel pain. We will feel heartache and sadness and loss and grief.
But a foster child will feel more.
No child is cut out to be a foster kid but since children continue to enter foster care, the best we can do is set aside our own fears and discouragement to rescue these children, so that they never have to feel like one.
Carrie is a stay-at-home mom of five who is blogging about her foster care experiences for MetroFamily. Learn more about her and our other bloggers here and check out all our foster care resources here.
