Probably the question I get asked the most is “what made you decide to pursue foster care?”. That’s actually kind of a long story. And since I made a space specifically for long stories, you’re in luck (although I’ll still try to give the short version)…
I have actually always been interested in adoption. Honestly for as long as I can remember. The only explanation I have for that is that God placed that in my spirit and spent a really long time preparing my heart for it. Growing up I always assumed that would look like a foreign adoption. The night Joben proposed to me we talked about it. I was like “Yes but you should know that I’m planning to adopt children”. He thought we should wait until we had “our own” kids (I cringe at that phrasing now) and I thought that sounded reasonable. So when I was good and sure that I was done “having kids” I was like “hey remember how I said I definitely wanted to adopt and you said ‘sure after we have some kids first’ … we had some”. And we agreed that we were ready to move forward with pursuing adoption.
We actually had some close friends who had recently finalized a foreign adoption, and after seeing second hand how foreign adoptions work, it became clear that wasn’t something that would be practical for our family. We pivoted to a domestic adoption, but that didn’t sit right with me. Our goal in adopting was to provide a family for a child who would otherwise not have one. There are literally waiting lists full of hopeful parents wanting to adopt an infant in America. How could I feel right putting together a profile and “competing” with other families whose only option for children was adoption. It just wasn’t the right fit for us. Adoption from foster care kept popping up in all my research, and I happened to have a friend who was a foster parent, so I was able to chat her up on her experiences. The more we learned about foster care the more confident we were that this was the right fit for why we were interested in adoption in the first place. We know many adoptive parents, foster parents, birth parents, foster children and adopted children, and when you put all of their stories side by side we came to learn that whenever it is possible, it’s best for children to remain in the families they are born into (This could honestly be it’s own post. Maybe more on that later). The reality is, though, that sometimes it just isn’t safe for children to return to their first family, and that’s who we were interested in being there for. We didn’t want to compete for “someone else’s child”, we wanted to provide a family for a child who was out of options.
The certification process took much longer than we planned, and honestly we really should have taken that as a sign. We knew that the adoption process would be much longer when coming through the foster care system, but we never even considered that it would take us 4 years to meet our son. So here we are, creeping up on our 6th year as a foster family. We’ve parented 13 children, 28 kids total have passed through our home, and we have finalized the adoption of our son. Many mistakes were made, lessons learned, hearts broken and restored, and prayers prayed. We hope to continue to serve families in this way as long as we can. We have seen the system here locally grow and become strong in ways I never could have imagined when we were at the beginning of our journey. We’ve seen families restored and children heal, and we’ve also seen unimaginable heartache and struggle. We’ve seen our kids flourish and rise to the occasion, and we’re also having to help them heal from their own traumatic experiences. The scope of experience and emotion is difficult to put into words.
If I knew then what I know now, I am confident that there are some choices I would have made differently. But I absolutely without a doubt would say yes a thousand times to foster care. It broke us in some ways, healed us in some ways, but definitely made all of us better people.
The road to foster care wasn’t a straight line for us. We knew we wanted to be involved in helping children find families, and we just kept pushing forward until we found what was right for our family. There were many set backs along the way, and times we considered giving up, but what blessings we would have missed out on had we not kept doing the next thing. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard “I could never do that”, but once we are faced with the reality of the families out there needing help, how can we not in some way give. There are so many options for getting involved and just about everyone has something of value to offer. And it’s okay to do it on your terms. Your ability to maintain a pace is more important than your ability to go full throttle till you burn out. That’s why we set firm boundaries as we learned what they were.
*Next up, I’ll summarize our adoption, but I’m going to try to push out some posts over the next few weeks covering some of the most common questions I get. If there’s anything specific you’ve been curious about, or a specific topic you’d hope to see, let me know in the comments!*