I realize when most people make the decision to become foster parents, they struggle with the idea of loving a child and letting them go. Who wants to sign up for that? How can you really love a child and commit to them with the full understanding that pain and loss are around the corner? Especially when you know you can’t control what kind of environment this child goes back into. For most of us this idea seems so foreign and frightening. Is it really worth it to risk that level of pain and hurt in our lives? What about in the lives of our children who will certainly attach to this new foster sibling and be hurt when they leave?
It was in trying to explain the idea of temporary caregivers to my three year-old when we first started foster parenting that I realized why this idea didn’t seem as scary to me as maybe it does to other people. Or at least, while it is scary, the fear doesn’t keep me from the investment. I think it’s because of the change of perspective I experienced very early in this parenting gig. It’s because of Grace.
Before we arrived in Liberia to bring home our son Josh, he lived the majority of his life in an orphanage. I am not going to idealize or denigrate the orphanage environment. It was what it was. While our experience with the orphanage and the people who worked there was positive, I know other children have come from the same or similar environments with scars and I don’t want to minimize that. The truth is that whatever success or failures it had, it couldn’t be a family for children who needed a family.
In my envisioning of this orphanage before we got there, I pictured my son the way he looked in the first image we saw of him— crying, in a full diaper, reaching out. In my mind, he was lonely and scared and reaching for me and I needed to get there as fast as I could. When I arrived I found the reality was different. He had a loving caregiver. A nanny who doted on him and knew what songs to sing when he was upset and sat with him in the night when he was deathly ill from malaria. He had Grace.
While Liberians do speak English, it is not an English that is recognizable to most American ears. Communicating with Grace wasn’t easy, but I was able to ask her how she felt about loving these children and letting them go. She expressed a peace about it, a joy even. She did what she could for the time she had with them, then passed them into the waiting arms of people she hoped would love them the way she did, even though she had no guarantee or control over that. Her opinion wasn’t asked about where these kids should go, even though she had such intimate knowledge of them and their needs.
So when my three year-old asked me to explain what this fostering thing was when we brought his foster brother home from the hospital, we talked about Grace. We talked about how she had loved him knowing that she couldn’t keep him. How because of her love and care, he was better able to trust that people would be kind to him. How without Grace he might have had a harder time knowing what a mommy should be like and learning to be part of our family. I told him that Grace didn’t love him because she could keep him, but just because he was a child who needed love for however long it took for us to get there.
Four years later, Josh still repeats this story when we talk about foster care. I can tell this feels personal to him. He was once a child who was vulnerable and needed someone to fill in the gap between his biological family and permanency, however long that would take. He gets that other children need that too, even if it’s hard for us to love them and let them go.
I find myself often thinking of Grace when I rock new foster babies in the middle of the night. How many children did she love and let go? How many lullabies and bottles and kisses? What a gift she gave to us in handing us a baby who was ready to trust and believe that adults were there to meet his needs. She gave us the gift of easy attachment without ever knowing how the story was going to play out. We are incredibly blessed by who Josh is and by our relationship with him. When I rock those babies, I feel in some small way I’m trying to repay the debt I owe Grace. I do what I do because it was once done for me and my child.
Most of us will never know what it’s like to have our child taken from our home. We may never feel that shame and desperation. We may never know what it’s like to wake in the night wondering if somebody is treating our child with love or if they are living a nightmare without us. It may be hard for us to have compassion for the mother who abused or neglected the child in our home, so sometimes your motivation has to come from outside of the situation.
In those moments I remember that I am doing the right thing because it was done for me. I do it not because there will always be a longterm “reward” of permanency, but because often the reward IS found in those moments of beauty and connection with a content baby in the wee hours of the morning. I do it not because I hope to control what the future holds, but because I can make an impact on the here and now. I do it because I want to give this child the gift of trust— a trust she can take with her through the rest of her life in whatever situation she finds herself in. I do it because what I do for these little children, I’m doing for Jesus. In the truest sense, I do it for Grace.
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