“Are You Going to Adopt?”

This was one of the most frequent questions I got when people learned I was a foster parent.

It was also one of the most disheartening.

“Are you going to adopt?” was one of those questions that kind of seemed to erase the entire beginning of the conversation, the part where somehow it came up that I was a foster parent, and how that means I am caring for a kid while the parents are working to stabilize their family situation.

No one ever asked me how they could help my kid’s bio parents.

No one ever said, “Wow, I hope they get the support they need,” or “It must be heartbreaking to be going through so much struggle that you can’t be with your kids. And what a leap of faith, to have no choice about where the kids end up! I can’t imagine how hard that must be for them.”

No one ever said, “I cannot imagine how terrifying it must be for the kids, to just end up at the house of a stranger during a terrible and stressful time, and to have to trust that everything is going to be ok.”

It was odd for me that many of the people I spoke with were parents themselves, many of them mothers who had carried their own pregnancies and raised their own kids for years, and yet they always seemed to identify with me - someone who has not been through the experience of pregnancy and birth and child raising - rather than my daughter’s mother, who had.

One of the big national new stories when I was a foster parent was about the separation of children from their parents by the US government at the Mexican border. A lot of people got very upset about that (myself included), and rightly so.

There was a lot of cognitive dissonance for me as a foster parent, to see my local community so upset about the parent-child separations in that situation, and yet have them have no concern about the impacts of child-parent separation that are inherent in foster care. To not even see it.

The level of outrage at children being separated from their parents seemed to come from a place that was completely ignorant of the fact that kids are separated from their parents by the government every day, all across America.

Yes, the situations and reasoning are completely different. But the trauma and heartbreak is the same, no?

It struck me as totally odd that someone could vociferously decry the situation on the border, and then turn around and act as if the kid in my care should have no issue with being separated from her parents.

“Are you going to adopt?”

All of the actual reality of the situation brushed under the rug with that one question.

Me being a foster parent wasn’t about me adopting. It was about me donating the spare parenting energy I had to my community, where it was needed to care for other people’s kids.

I wish people could have seen that, and stayed with me, right where I was. Right where my kid was.

“Are you going to adopt?” was one of those questions that erased the value of what I was doing as a foster parent, and simultaneously erased the value of the people whose children are removed.

Not a single person I spoke with ever said “Oh gosh, I hope your kiddo’s parents prevail! I am rooting for them!” or, “I bet there is nothing that little kid wants more than to get their mommy and daddy back, healthier and happier.”

But I really wish they did.