FOSTER PARENTING

Because of foster parenting, a dear friend of mine is going through some changes. It's much like when one has their first baby but instead of a man and woman becoming a mother and father, an entire family becomes...something different. Everybody's life changes.

The person and family that you've known for so many years walks out the door the day foster children enter your home. Your old life leaves, you and your family become somebody and something else, just like that. You will never be the same.

Foster parenting is, It is...

It is really, really hard. It is so hard. It's not a little hard. It is very hard.

Fostering is one of those things that take you to the brink of the parenting mountain, dangles you over the edge and then brings you back to the ledge. Just when you think you have your toes back on solid ground, it drops you into the air, off the cliff, to freefall.

Fostering stretches your emotions. It stretches your marriage and it can bring the relationship between your birth children and yourself to the fringes, dangling by a thread.

It changes you. You will never be the person you were before you began the fostering journey.

For those who try it and find that it's not for them after only a month or two of having a new child in their home, it changes their ideals of what they are capable of handling. It changes their ideals of what love can do and brings a new understanding that love can only carry one so far.

For those who begin taking the classes to be certified and bail out when they hear about the kind of abuse that actually happens or after listening to a teenager who has lived through the system, it changes their view of every person they pass on the street.

For those who bring crack addicted babies into their home and hold someone else’s screaming,
agony-ridden child in their arms, for hours and days, it changes them. For those who watch that baby grow, develop and thrive for their efforts, it changes them. For those who hand that child back to their birth mother, it changes them. For those who adopt that child, it changes them.

For those who go through the classes, read the literature, bring the children to their home, hang on through the tantrums, trials, tears, spit, heads slamming against the floor trying to cope; For those who watch their own birth children cry, scream and bang their fist into the wall; For those who willingly create a temporary turmoil in their blissful home, invest their love, time, devotion and patience into blending souls together into a happy unified family; It changes them. It changes, stretches, and breaks old beliefs and breathes new beliefs into people who willingly accept the challenge. For those who take up the opportunity and say,

"We'll give it a try. Bring it on."

They will never be the same.

It stretches their heart, lays flat an excruciating awareness of the human existence and they, for all their wants, hopes and desires mold into new creatures, better observers, souls of a keener awareness.

Anyone who has ever touched the hem of foster parenting...

They will never,

they will never,

be the same.

Then there are the children.

The children, the teens, the babies, the souls ripped from the only world they have ever known, thrown into a new home, a different home, told in no uncertain terms that this WILL BE their new home, they change. They are scared, they are alone in their hearts, they are scared, scarred and bruised inside and at times...out. They are bounced on their bruises painfully, onto a new floor, looking up at a new hand reaching out to help them up. They are drowning in the unknown that they did not choose.
They will never be the same.

They are why the change takes place.
They are why some take the time.
They are why.

They are worth the change.
They are worth the growth.

They are why.

THEY are why we reach inside ourselves, dig for the energy, the love, the stregth and the guts to keep, to stay, to hold to that long road that reaches the other side.

They are why we want to grow, love, cherish, bond.

They are why It is worth, a try.