Foster care is a pendulum. Feelings ebb and flow and there are good times and bad times, just as I’m sure there are with any parent. After a wonderful weekend, I sit here emotional thinking about what I’m doing.
I’m at the point in my life where I know more people that are parents themselves than not. I have several people I can run to in order to discuss parenting woes and to share funny stories of my new life as a father. However, I’m realizing now how difficult this journey can be alone. I know that I’m not truly alone. People have made it abundantly clear that they are here for me for anything I need, but there is a part of this that I am doing by myself.
There is no one who really understands the difficulty that comes with being the single parent of a foster child unless they have gone through the process themselves. There is no second person to lean on when you are emotionally drained from the experience. After a wonderful string of days, you sometimes forget that your life isn’t like that of your friends who are parents. Something always happens shortly after to remind you that this could all be temporary, and it leaves you feeling as if you are just pretending to be a parent. Biological parent visits come up, you have paperwork to fill out, there are notes to take almost daily, your child tells you they wish they wouldn’t have come here after you send them to take a timeout over bubble gum, or they talk about going back to their “real home” when you make them follow rules. I’m sure I’m not the first of my friends to hear these things from their kid (I probably said the same things to my mom and dad a few times), but in this case, it could happen.
When you have a child of your own, you know their history. You have pictures of them growing up. You’ve been there for them for every scrape, every milestone. With foster care, I feel like it’s mostly just living in the present because you don’t know what’s to come. You love them now because you don’t know if they were loved before. You keep them safe each day because you don’t know if you can keep them safe forever.
People say that foster parents are brave, and I didn’t see that before becoming one. I knew that this was what I wanted to do in the hopes of finding a child of my own. People would ask me if I would be able to have a child and then eventually give them back, and I always said that it would be hard, but I would do it. That was all easy to say when I didn’t actually have a child placed with me.
Words are easy when your heart isn’t firmly attached to someone else’s. But now, it is and I realize how crushing this whole process could potentially be. How do you protect your heart when it is filled to the brim with the joy of being a parent? How do you give a child everything that you are and know in the back of your mind they may not be here to stay?
I don’t know.