foster care

This may never see the light of day, but I wanted to pour this out somewhere.

This waiting. It’s really something like I’ve never done before.

waiting & wrestling foster care adoption reflections

It’s not just waiting. It’s that while I’m waiting I am also locked in a complicated battle, emotionally and spiritually.

The waiting gives a person lots of time to do a lot of soul-searching, and actually forces it upon you.

I lie awake late into the night wrestling.

I’m wrestling in prayer for a child I have never met. For whomever my son or daughter is, right this moment. For whomever is taking care of my child while I am waiting. For whomever brought my child into the world, regardless of why they are no longer raising him/her. For whomever that child is loving, or leaving behind, or afraid of, or living with, or hoping to find. For the workers who are trying to make the best decisions for all of us without knowing the future.

Those might be obvious.

But the wrestling that goes on with my own self is stranger.

I want this child to walk through my door tomorrow. But that’s not in anyone’s best interest.

I want to feel pride that I can parent “better” than my child’s birth family. That’s horrifically unfair and inaccurate.

I want to send 2879234 emails to my adoption worker, checking on the status of our license, checking in on children, badgering her to work faster. This is not appropriate.

I want to daydream and plan and start setting up a room and making phone calls about appointments and school, to start buying supplies and planning for a family of 5. But this is getting ahead of myself, assuming that God’s plan is the same as my plan, and could lead to major disappointment.

I want to focus all of my late-night wrestles on a particular child that I’ve fallen in love with. I want to think of that child as mine to love, mine to raise… I want to be that child’s mother. But I have no reason to think that I will be matched with that child.

I want to be more stoic, and chastise myself for allowing my heart and intuition to zone in on a child so quickly in the process, to guard myself from the probable loss of a child I didn’t have the right to miss. But that’s going against my nature.

It’s difficult to realize my human weakness in all of this. That I have absolutely no control over how my family is going to evolve. That no matter how badly I might want something, I cannot be certain of anything.

But in actuality, this is exactly the same as every other mountain to climb in life. Unable to see the other side, no idea if emotion is warranted, no way to predict what comes next. No certainty of what God has planned. No clue if my will aligns with His.

And I wonder if I’m ready. I wonder if I jumped in too fast. If the Lord is making me wait because I am somehow not yet fit to parent you.

But who’s ever ready? You weren’t ready. I’m probably not ready. And it’s okay. What’s going to happen is we’re going to be a little bit of a mess, but we’re going to be together. I’m sure I will disappoint you and break some promises and do and say the wrong things. But I love you, and it’s going to be okay.

I feel like we’re a bit of a minority in the adoption community.

We have our own biological children. We could probably have more any time.

We are only 30.

We work with kids and teens every day (we’re educators.)

So why did we decide to adopt from foster care?

Let’s begin at the beginning, eh?

I’m adopted. Now, I was adopted privately, as an infant, to parents who were almost 40 with infertility struggles. So not really the same. But at about 8 years old, I suddenly realized that adoption was a thing any adult could do, and I knew I wanted to adopt children. I didn’t even know at that time if I wanted to marry or have biological children, but I was 100% committed to the idea of adopting some.

I chose adoption because my life was forever changed.

Fast forward to the ripe old age of 18, right before high school graduation. My (now) husband and I are in my childhood living room, having a very sincere discussion about our future. In this conversation, we established that we were going to marry each other, acquire a dog, and I came out of left field with, “You know I’m going to adopt some kids, right?” To which he replied, wisely, “Okay, sure.” Followed by, “And you know, if there’s several there, they’re all coming home with me, right?” “That’s extreme, but yes, I know that.”

We chose adoption together. It was foundational to our marriage.

So adoption has been in my heart for 20 years, and was put fully on the table right in our discussion of marriage.

5 years into marriage, we happened to have a baby. And then another one. And we talked about adoption this way: “When we have saved up the money, say around 40, we’ll be able to adopt those kids.” It was never an “if,” always a “when.”

Then the story takes a sharp turn. I made a friend in college to whom I am indebted for other reasons, but he and his wife added 3 children to their family from foster care. We get together socially with this family, we love their kids, heard about their experience, enjoyed knowing a family who was adopting, but thought no more of it. One day, we were involved in a conversation on Facebook with some other mothers, discussing how some of us thought someday adoption might be affordable for our families, when my friend uttered these fateful words:

“What we did was free.”

Free.

I had no idea.

I dove immediately into research, contacting, discussing with my husband. It was a matter of a month before we were attending our first of many meetings and seminars and filling out paperwork. And just 6 months later, we are only waiting on the office work at the agency before we will be approved for placements.

We chose adoption from foster care because we could afford to help children sooner.

As educators, there have been many incidents where we work closely with neglected or abused children, and wish we could take them home with us. We want to change our students’ lives for the better, and some of these students need clean clothes and consistent adults and a hug before we can worry about their academic skills. Of course, it isn’t legal to snatch up your students and take them home with you!

We chose adoption from foster care in order to help children on a more basic level than we can do at work.

I know everybody who chooses to adopt comes from their own set of experiences and desires, and I can’t claim to understand any other parents’ motivations. For our family, our desire to adopt had nothing to do with nurturing an infant – we are very blessed to already have begun our family with two infants born to us biologically. Because of this, we couldn’t think of any reason why we needed to undertake private adoption, or infant adoption. We love being around older children and aren’t fearful of the speed bumps that come with adolescence or having a transracial family. In fact, I find myself quite excited to jump into parenting an older child.

We chose to adopt from foster care because we, personally, are impartial about age or ethnicity.

If some of these reasons resonate with you, check out foster-to-adopt programs for your state!

Share your adoption stories or blog links below!

Mostly Caffeinated

Waiting and Wrestling (Foster/Adopt Reflections)

Why We Chose Adoption from Foster Care