Why Foster Care?

I don’t know if there is a “typical” foster parent, but I’m pretty sure we aren’t it.

I’m not someone who ever had any expectation of being a foster parent. I didn’t grow up with a familiarity with foster care, and even when one of my sister’s friends became a foster and then adoptive parent, it didn’t cross my mind that foster care would have anything to do with me. I also don’t belong to a church (a lot of people get involved with foster care through church ministries,) and prior to becoming a foster parent, I didn’t know a single social worker.

As for my parenting reality: yes, my husband and I were facing fertility challenges, but he and I were also in a financial position to elect pretty much any route to parenthood - domestic or international adoption, as well as IVF or other medical interventions.

So why would we - people who had any and all options - elect to become foster parents?

After years on the fertility rollercoaster, I got a bee in my bonnet to look into adoption, something my husband had never been too keen on. But I figured we weren’t getting any younger, so it was time to consider it. When I pressed him on his reticence, he got quiet and said “Aren’t men who take babies away from their moms bad men?”

Oh.

I had never thought of it that way. My husband hadn’t grown up around adoption, and for him it was unfamiliar territory. Yet his discomfort with it made me realize that I had never really thought about it deeply. My introduction to adoption was that I had friends and classmates in elementary school who were adopted. It was normal, and I didn’t question it. But my husband’s reticence made me realize that I hadn’t ever been close enough to an adoptee to be their confidante - to understand the deeper side of things - and, that I didn’t know jack squat about adoption from the birth family perspective.

In short, I had never updated my understanding of adoption from that of a kid to an adult.

So down the research rabbit hole I went.

I inhaled blog after YouTube video after website after conference after personal interview, focusing on people’s experiences as adoptees and birth/first families, but also listening to adoptive parents.

And I realized that there was so much to it.

I began to notice and put together patterns in the adoption world and begin to wonder how they were related to broader society. For instance, how the adoption narrative often prioritized prospective adoptive parents feelings and experiences over that of the birth family or adoptee. I read about how rising adoption levels between the 1950s-1970s led Australia to implement parental support measures, thereby reducing the need to place children for adoption; and I wondered how much the lack of social supports in the USA contributed to our domestic adoption rates. I noticed how opaque and confusing the world of adoption seemed. Who was running this show anyway? I noticed how googling “succesful adoption” would get you a list of stories about people who had just completed an adoption - the perception that the transaction was the success - rather than stories about adoptees who had grown up feeling loved and seen in their adoptive families. If I was going to adopt, for me “success” meant raising the kid to adulthood well, not just making it through the paperwork.

I began to notice what was missing: voices of birth parents, and valuing the birth mother’s story and experience. Solid data on any factors adoption impacts, from the total numbers of different types of adoption, to where those numbers were trending, to data about how lack of health history could impact adoptee health. I began to notice how birth mothers were portrayed, if they were portrayed at all, and how adoptive parents were portrayed. I began to notice how in our capitalist society, money played such a huge part in all of this: who got to keep their kids, who got to acquire them, who got their story told, who was silenced.

I began to think a lot about birth mothers, and how if I had gotten pregnant during a rough period in my life, I would want someone to see and value me staying in my childs’s life, rather than having to decide between an awful struggle or the painful loss of my child - forever.

I looked at my life and noticed people who would have been missing if they had been placed for adoption; people whose parents were in deep struggle when the pregancy occurred. I considered the case of a childhood friend who had faced an unexpected pregnancy in college, and against all odds kept her child, taking a year off from school and couch surfing and accepting government assistance so she wouldn’t be separated from her kid. I remember how hurt she had been by people looking down on her. She and the kid’s dad later reconciled, married, and had two more kids - how painful for them would it have been if their first had been lost to adoption?

And why didn’t we talk about adoption loss? We widely consider losing a child to death as the worst thing a person can go through, yet losing a child to adoption is a topic where too many voices have been silenced, too many stories untold.

I read stories about adoption that were happy, but also listened to the ones that weren’t - the young woman who vowed to never have her family tree add or lose members to adoption, as both experiences had been too scarring for too many generations in her family. The birth mothers who deeply regretted their choice, and felt cheated - they had been young, and no one had pointed them to other options. The stories of birth mothers who had been devastated to reunite with the adult children only to learn that the adoptive families weren’t so great after all, and that adoption hadn’t provided the child with the better life the birth mother had hoped for. I read about how birth mothers were more likely to regret their decision the older they got, and the more education they acquired.

I spent a long time listening to the ugly, the pain, the awful.

And I began to consider my own values and place in this.

It bothered me that so many birth mothers were perfectly qualified to parent, except for the challening circumstances they found themselves in at the time of their pregnancy. There are systems and structures to solve their problems by placing their babies for adoption (a decision with lifelong implications, even if the situation the mother finds herself in is temporary), but very little in the way of systems or structures to help women parent their babies, either through government programs that would help like universal child care and health care, or non-profits or faith-based organizations to support mothers and fathers who want to keep their babies. And bluntly, there is an economic incentive to keep it this way: in this country, people may profit off separating mothers and babies, but they don’t profit off keeping them together.

As I learned more and more, I didn’t feel great about spending $30-$50,000 per child to adopt. It seemed like if I really wanted to put the needs of the child first, why would I automatically take them away from loving parents rather than consider keeping them together? If $30-50k would keep a family together, shouldn’t I simply donate that money to the child’s parents? I began to wonder if anyone had done a data analysis on that. How much money would it take to financially stabilize women in challenge at the time of their pregnancy? How much money would it take to provide full time child care, for instance? Or health insurance? Why hadn’t anyone surveyed birth mothers on what they needed to keep their children? Why didn’t anyone think that was important?

I didn’t like the idea of funding a system that wasn’t asking, or answering, the questions I had.

As someone who had spent her life wanting to support women and girls, I chafed at the thought of using my economic privilege to enter into a transaction that would put another woman through such a big loss.

Mind you, I don’t think its wrong to adopt or to place a child for adoption through these avenues. At the end of the day, our society is what it is, when it is, and kids need families. I don’t want to deprive birth mothers of the adoption option, and one needs adoptive parents on the other side of the equation to make that happen. No one should shame or judge adoptive or birth parents for participating in the systems we have, however faulty they may be.

But I am upset at how little attention we give as a nation to the fact that our adoption systems are just that: faulty, and with a significant history of shaming and judging birth mothers particularly harshly, and undervaluing them and their role in their child’s life. The more I learned, the more I realized that I would much rather be working towards a world in which pregnant women had more, better choices, rather than participating - and funding, and thereby creating economic demand - for a system we had reservations about.

My husband and I both began to feel that we didn’t want to parent a child whose parents were already generally capable of parenting. Aka, the birth parents everyone else seems to want. Nope, we felt pulled in another direction - if we were going to adopt, if someone was going to go through the crushing loss of losing custody of their child, it better be for a much better reason than the lack of social supports we have for parents. We felt better about parenting a child whose own parents weren’t fit to parent.

I don’t remember at which point foster care popped up on my radar, but it did.

It seemed to make more sense to us.

Firstly, we didn’t know if having biological kids was really a closed door or not. Going straight to adoption felt like giving up on that, and we weren’t sure that we were ready for that. Secondly, by fostering - even with all its complexities and imperfections - we would, we hoped, feel more assured that the child really did need an adoptive family. We liked the idea of supporting family reunification. We liked the idea of helping parents in distress keep their kids. We liked the idea of giving parents a shot, and participating in a system that would be funded and designed to help parents keep their family together.

As we went through this process, we had to answer a lot of questions for ourselves. A big one: why do we want to be parents?

In the adoption world, there is a question: is adoption about finding kids for parents, or parents for kids? We decided that we were firmly in the latter camp.

Moreover, we realized that for us our desires to parent boiled down to this:

1.) To love kids with no strings attached.

2.) To help kids be who they want to be.

We could do that with biological kids, or adopted kids. With one addition, for foster kids too:

3.) We wanted to be the grown ups our kids needed, for as long as they needed us.

Our family didn’t need to be “permanent” for us to get what we wanted from the parenting experience.

From that, it was a matter of supply and demand. There are tons of prospective adoptive parents waiting and waiting for matches. But there was a huge unmet demand for foster parents, including right in our own backyard. Why wait for years and spend tens of thousands of dollars to do something that you can do much sooner and for free? We liked the idea of us - people who really wanted to parent, but didn’t have any kids - being there for the kids in our area who needed a safe harbor and some big love to get them through a rough patch.

We wanted to be part of the solution.

Another thing that appealed to us about foster care was that it wasn’t trying to pretend to be shiny and awesome. The foster care system is kind of a mess, and parenting traumatized kids is really hard, and no one was saying that wasn’t the case. No one was trying to sell us on their services, or convince us to part with lots of cash, and so there was little incentive to sugarcoat it.

There’s no requirement for adoption facilitators and agencies to properly prepare prospective adoptive parents for handling the lifelong issues that adoptees can run up against. We had heard plenty of stories by this point from adoptive parents who had been blindsided by things their agencies/facilitators had never mentioned…and then later found themselves scrambling to address an issue they weren’t prepared for. Sometimes, the issue didn’t come to light until the child was an adult and could advocate for themselves - and adoptive parents found themselves realizing that they had really blown it, twenty years too late. We didn’t want to be in that bandwagon. For us, a successful adoption wasn’t about completing the paperwork - it was about having a happy, healthy family life for decades to come.

Coming from that world, the mess of foster care was refreshing. In your licensing classes, you talk abut trauma and grief and loss, because that’s what the issues are. No skating around it, no denying it.

So that’s why we, a couple who could have elected any route to parenthood, chose foster care.

A commitment to putting our time and energy where our social justice values were; a match for our parenting goals; the opportunity to help create a world we wished to see; and the geographic efficiency of it - local kids needed local grown ups, and we were right there, wanting to be those grown ups, for as long as they needed us.

Was our way the “right” way? No, not at all. As I wrote earlier, planet Earth is what it is, and kids need families now, not when life is fixed and reaches some unattainable version of “correct.” There is a phrase I made up to guide me through this life, and I find it especially applies to things like this:

“Love wants to be everywhere,

so wherever you are is perfect.”

I have led you through my own personal thought process, but in hindsight I also think there was something else at work - the little girl who was meant to be my daughter was on a path to foster care. I could not have found her or connected to her in any other way. I like to think that That Which Is Greater knew this, and set me up for an intellectual journey that would prompt me to go in the correct direction of where my kid actually was. Because Great Mystery knows me well enough to know how to lead me in just the right direction, knows what I will respond to.

If my kiddo’s parents were instead planning to place her for adoption, I’m sure The Divine would have put the resources in front of me for my brain to make the case to myself that domestic adoption - with the particular agency my daughter’s parents were working - was the way to go. As much as my rational brain likes the arguments I made to pursue foster care, in hindsight I realize that I could have made equally valid arguments to go in any other direction.

The way my husband and I ended up becoming parents was very “us” - a story of intellectual analysis, research, social justice, and divine-led, gut-trusting, bananas risk taking all blended together. (The same could be said of many other choices we’ve made. It’s kind of our thing.)

As for all the other awesome families we know who came together through any other form of foster care or adoption (or IVF, surrogacy, or old school conception) - “their” kids were in China or Nigeria or Florida, or needed to spend time in a test tube or loving surrogate, or show up planned or unplanned, so the parents followed the bread crumb trail until they found each other. I like to imagine that all kiddos require their future parents to find them were they need to be found. The same magic that brings together biological families also brings together adoptive and foster families, there’s just another layer to it.

At the end of the day,

“All humans are valuable,

and all experiences are valid.”

However our families come together, grow, evolve, and change, they are all beautiful, messy, imperfect - and all full of lessons about love.

That’s really what it’s all about, isn’t it?