Michael’s Journey In Foster Care
It’s not all happiness and sunshine. My wife and I have children with disabilities, emotional struggles, PTSD, and a slew of other setbacks, but they are ours and we wouldn't ever give them up for anything.
Since our marriage in 2012 we have always wanted children, yet month after month passed with no luck. We started to think having a family just wasn't in the cards for us. We did the usual doctors’ visits to see what was wrong, but nothing ever worked.
We began to lose hope.
We had a good friend that had lost her husband and started to do foster care to help her cope with the loss. She gave us the name of her agency and a person we could talk to if we were interested in starting foster care.
Jumping at the opportunity, we signed up to be foster parents, took all the classes, and brought our house up to par with the regulations.
We were on our way!
We started with a few trial placements, took a kid here and there for the weekend, until we finally got our first real placement: a three-day-old baby who was taken from her mother because she had drugs in her system. Shortly after that, we took a seventeen-year-old girl who was struggling in previous foster homes, and finally a seven-year-old girl who was ready to be adopted.
All of these kids had various issues and none of them were easy to deal with. Trying to be a parent to kids who will never see you as one is very difficult. At times we didn't think we could keep doing it; seeing these kids refuse to be helped because nobody had ever helped them up to this point. Every adult that had been in their life until now had left them, lied to them, mistreated them, and made them feel like they don't really matter at all. If they ever did begin to trust someone, their parents managed to keep their lives together for a month to get their kids back, usually just to repeat their problems and have them taken again. But this time the kids won't go back to the house they felt safe in. They start over. A new place, with people they don't know and don't trust.
“To see kids with problems that I could not have ever imagined going through at that age makes me admire them even more”
Not all birth parents fail time after time, but the majority do and will keep coming up short. The problems they have are difficult ones to overcome, and the kids are the ones who are hurt the most. They are tossed between multiple houses until they finally "graduate" out of the system at eighteen, and then just get lost.
That seven-year-old girl that was ready to be adopted, Elaine, had two brothers, Damian and Jesse, who were all in foster care at the same time but were separated and couldn't be placed together because it is difficult to find a home that can take three children at once with varying ages and needs. Damian had severe issues with anger and his emotions. At age five he was already medicated and had been in three different homes. Jesse was just six months old when we were able to get him transferred to our home to be with his sister. At that point we knew, no matter the issues that Damian had, that we needed to have them all together. It was a struggle, spending hours every day holding him so that he wouldn't hurt himself or others, repeating the steps we had learned from his aides to get him to calm down. It was not easy - it still isn't easy, even years later - but when we see the progress he makes with his siblings, it's all worth it.
To see kids with problems that I could not have ever imagined going through at that age makes me admire them even more. The problem is that whatever these kids say or want is never heard because they are just kids, and don't know what is best for them. Some of these kids say the smartest things I've heard anyone say, and most of them really do know what they want, and what would help them. It's just that we adults think we know better. They can't decide where they go or when they go, and they lose faith in everyone around them. When a kid tells you that they don't trust any of the workers because they always lie to them, it hurts. They are smarter than we know, and they deserve better.
These are our precious children.
We were lucky enough to adopt them, but so many more are out there suffering, looking for a place to call home.
