First of all, thank you. Thank you for caring how we are. Thank you for asking how we are. Thank you for bearing with my long answers or tear-filled responses. We love you. We are SO blessed that so many people care about our family.
Answering this question has become increasingly difficult.
I have a lot going on in my brain right now. Our lives are overwhelmed.
I feel like a walking apology.
I forgot to make that phone call... I forgot to order school lunch for the big kids... I forgot to reply to your text or email... I didn't remember your birthday. My brain is on overload.
If I failed to reply to your email, text, request, application for preschool, question about anything in general, request for a recipe... please forgive me. I thank you for your patience. We have a lot going on right now.
But let me just tell you right now:
It's not about how many kids I have.
When I have to issue an apology for something I have let fall through the cracks, the person to whom I am apologizing often says something like, "It's ok! You have a lot of stress- I mean, you have five kids now!"
And I truly am so grateful for your patience with me and your willingness to forgive me for my failings, that I don't say anything, but I kinda want to scream:
"It's not about how many kids I have!"
Does that sound rude? I'm Sorry. (walking apology, here)
(**DISCLAIMER: If you have said this to me... I do not blame you one bit. I am certain that we would have said the same things... We had NO idea. I am sure that if we weren't going through this ourselves, we would say the same thing. One of the greatest lessons this experience is teaching me is all the things I wish I had said to my friend and foster mom mentor, Mary and all the things I wish I hadn't said to her. I truly appreciate your support and encouragement and the last thing I want is for this post to alienate you. BUT... I feel so strongly that foster parents need real, authentic voices. I hope that somewhere, someone who is beginning their journey in foster care might find some comfort and encouragement and camaraderie from this post. So please know that I love you and am grateful for all of your encouragement!!)
It's just beyond frustrating.
Let me tell you right now that we got in over our heads. Foster parenting is significantly harder than we thought. But very, VERY little of the difficulty has to do with the number of children in our home.
I don't mean to sound like I'm in denial- of course having five children instead of three is adding stress in our lives. But seriously, in all truthfulness...the number of children I have accounts for maybe 10 % of our additional stress. And even if we talk about the children themselves... loving them is like breathing. It is the most natural thing in the world... I cannot begin to explain to you what I feel for those girls in my heart. It was ferocious and intense from the moment I met them and it grows stronger with each passing day.
At this point, you may find yourself thinking what an ungrateful brat I am and asking, "Well, then, Laura, why are you forgetting appointments and texts and emails and applications?!"
Let me try to explain:
We *may* have had a slight savior complex when we got into Foster Care. We saw children in trouble, children in need, and we wanted so desperately to "save" them.
Haha.
Imagine you see a child in a raging river with a storm pounding wind and rain around them, threatening to overtake them at any minute... you would do everything you could to pull them to safety, wouldn't you?
That's what we thought Foster Care would be. "Saving" children by pulling them to land, to the warm, safe family we have to offer. And we knew from training that we would get wet and we would get hurt. But even these amazing little quotes like this didn't adequately prepare us:
In truth, foster care is not pulling that child from the raging river and the storm... it is getting into the river and braving the storm with them.
You give every bit of energy you have to prevent their heads from going under and you let the waves pound your back so that they don't pound theirs. All the while, the biological parents (who threw them into the river in the first place!!) are creating waves that come crashing down at their little heads. The caseworkers, attorneys and judge even allow some of these waves to keep on pounding, all in the name of giving their parents a chance to get off the bank of the river and pull the children to safety. It is exhausting, maddening, infuriating and back breaking. But precious little of that has to do with the number of children in our home. The exhaustion is the storm. We want, more than anything, to pull our girls to the safety of the river bank and into the warmth of our family and home, locking the door on that river forever. But we have NO power to control the end of the story or the timeline of events. We can only endure the storm with them.
What does the storm look like? It is drug use or child neglect or child abuse, sometimes all three. The storm is health issues and developmental delays as a result of drug use and neglectful parenting. The storm is a broken legal system that exalts the rights of biological parents while setting the rights of their children on the back burner. The storm is meetings and driving and visits and phone calls with hostile, aggressive, difficult, and threatening biological parents. The storm is drying a child's tears when their parents fail to come to a visit or when they detail the terrible experiences of their lives. The storm is sitting by a child's hospital bed while they fight for their lives because their parents were too high to get them medical treatment. The storm is gaining the trust of a child who has been traumatically removed from his or her family. Broken as that family may be, it is likely all that child has ever known. The storm is being told to bend over backward to accommodate the parents who put the children into this mess. The storm is listening to caseworkers extol the virtues of those parents while offering no substantial relief or encouragement to our children or our family. The storm is waiting for people who have only seen the children from across a room to decide our fates. The storm is rocking a baby to sleep and not knowing what that baby's future will hold... Will she stay? Will she go? Will some relative or the Tribe step in and take her? Will she be hurt again? Will she remember us? Will all of our love and effort and energy and prayer help anything at all? If our foster daughters go back to their bio parents, what will happen to them? Will they return to us in another year, more broken and scared than before?
These questions overwhelm my thoughts. The intricacies of court hearings and team meetings and caseworker dramas can run rampant in my thoughts to the point that doctor's appointments and lunch orders and email correspondence falls to the back of my mind, sometimes never to return to the forefront. I fall asleep easily because I am so exhausted, but if I wake in the night, I cannot get back to sleep. I lay awake wondering about the one million minutia that affect the girls case. I pray to God and beg sleep to come. So if I have failed to return your call or reply to your email, please know that it was not intentional... and that it wasn't because I have five children. (Ok, maybe a little bit) I just got overwhelmed with it all.
So, how ARE we? We are good, crazy, stressed, happy, overwhelmed... we have all the feelings. We are completely and totally in love with these girls and we are so grateful for your patience with us.
And as we discuss how many children we have... it bears mentioning that the bio mom of our girls is pregnant and due any day.
Will that baby be removed? Maybe.
Will they ask us to take the baby? Probably.
Will we say yes? Probably.
Are we ready for this? No. As far as baby items go, I have a crib and..... that's it.
Are we ready for this? No. As far as baby items go, I have a crib and..... that's it.
You might find yourself wondering if we have completely lost our minds, but let me assure you that we have not. We have considered this issue from every possible angle and have discussed it ad nauseam. It is one of the aforementioned "wonderings" that keeps me awake at night.
Have I considered that maybe our plates are too full and we should just say no? Absolutely.
Have I considered that if we say no, the girls could be removed and placed with a foster family willing to take them AND their baby sibling? Yes.
Is THAT the reason we are willing to care for this baby? No.
If someone came to your doorstep with a helpless newborn and asked you to care for them, would you say yes? My instinct is to take that baby in and keep her as safe and loved as possible. But even instinct isn't enough.
If we accept this baby, will our children get what they need? Would it be too much? Will our heads finally sink under the water?
These are all questions I have asked God.
On Saturday, I spent some time in the temple and was able to be alone there. These precious, secluded moments were like a sanctuary to me. Being in God's house, away from all the hustle and bustle of the world...we talked, God and I. I asked Him all those questions that I have been asking for months. What will happen to the girls? How long must we endure this storm? Why is this happening to them, to us?! I wept. My body shook as I cried out to Him. His answers poured over me from scripture:
"O God, where art thou? And where is the pavilion that covereth thy hiding place?
2 How long shall thy hand be stayed, and thine eye, yea thy pure eye, behold from the eternal heavens the wrongs of thy people and of thy servants, and thine ear be penetrated with their cries?
3 Yea, O Lord, how long shall they suffer these wrongs and unlawful oppressions, before thine heart shall be softened toward them, and thy bowels be moved with compassion toward them?
...My son, peace be unto thy soul; thine adversity and thine afflictions shall be but a small moment;
8 And then, if thou endure it well, God shall exalt thee on high; thou shalt triumph over all thy foes.
10 Thou art not yet as Job; thy friends do not contend against thee, neither charge thee with transgression, as they did Job." Doctrine and Covenants 121
This passage brought me tremendous comfort. I read the whole section and felt nourishment come to my soul.
And then, I found courage to pray about the baby... and I felt the most surreal peace come over me. I felt His love calm my heart and still my fears. Every fear and doubt and sorrow was chased out of my soul and all I felt was peace. Warmth and peace filled my soul.
Will they ask us to take the baby? Maybe. Maybe not.
Will this journey wear us down and exhaust us? Definitely. Will we have anything left of ourselves? I hope we will have easier days... But I honestly hope and pray that gradually less and less of us can be seen and more and more of Christ will be seen. If there is anything I have learned in this process, it's that foster care isn't about US.
I recently read a talk by Jeffrey R. Holland that brought me such encouragement. He shared the story of Esperanza Lamelas who cared for her three granddaughters night and day as they suffered from muscular dystrophy. She cared for them selflessly for 22 years until she passed away.
"In 1989, at age seventy-four, her own health now broken, she died, having given new meaning to the Prophet Joseph’s invitation to “waste and wear out our lives … do[ing] all things that lie in our power … [for the benefit of] the rising generation, and … all the pure in heart” (D&C 123:13, 17, 11)."
This may waste and wear out our lives somewhat. I may even complain about that to you all now and again. But I know what God has called us to do. I know this call came from Him and we trust Him. We trust that His plans are FOR us and we will Go Where He Wants us to Go...
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