Foster Revolution

I'm coming to think that my role in this crazy world is to lead a revolution in foster care.  I'm not skilled at advocacy by any means, I just talk and write occasionally.  Despite my English degree work I don't know how to write a position paper, and I haven't the faintest idea of how to go about changing the world or where to start and it seems a losing battle.  If I could find myself a microphone and some foster parents willing to listen, I absolutely would; I'm quite sure that a great deal of them won't like what I have to say.  But as we move along I'm learning that my opinion of our job does not match the opinion of my DSS training, the Guardian ad Litem, the Social Worker, the birth parents, or even other foster parents.

You see, the problem is this:  we are to treat these children as if they are our own.  We are to be sure that we clothe them and feed them just like our own children. We have been told in training seminars and throughout home visits that we must be sure they have just as many life opportunities as our own kids.  Throughout our weekend of foster care training we heard statements like these in every session.  Now, I understand that these children legally belong to their first mom and first dad.  I understand that we are employees of the state, and that DSS holds the guardianship of them (somehow 'guardian' and 'foster parent' are different things legally, although here we have all rights of a parent except spanking.)  I also understand that my three year old already clearly knows that "foster kid" equals "not mine", and that the absolute bottom line thing he needs to recover from this is a firm and unbreakable attachment to parents.  And I am that parent.

So what is my stance?  From October of 2011 until the day they walk out this door with suitcases and boxes in hand, I refuse to treat these children as if they are our own... because they are our own.  Many families these days include more than one set of parents, and each of those sets claim the child as their own and love them and help them adjust to the split situation.  No one even considers the idea of telling the other that they're not a parent.  Our children have two sets of parents and right now, they are as much ours as theirs, if not more.  Right now, every time I stop and think, "Would I do this for my kids?" I am actively damaging my son's ability to connect and heal.  These children belong to us, and I will continue to hold that perspective as long as it is my job to raise these children through the chaos that is their past.



You see, the problem is this: when speaking with the trauma therapist, she asks me honestly why in the world we haven't taken them back to DSS yet because of his tantrums.  We have been 'comforted' multiple times by people within the system - DSS and therapists and foster parents - all telling us that it's completely okay to decide it's too hard, to be sure that we take care of our own needs and if that means sending the children back, there's no guilt or shame attached.

I had a short conversation the other day with an acquaintance, and her side went something like this:

"I walked into a church the other day, and you know?  All they talked about was faith!  And GOD!  I mean, geez, why're they wasting all that time and money on those things in church, when it could be fun and exciting?  Do you know if there's someone that will donate some money or maybe drive me around to other churches and fix this problem for me?  If not, I'm certainly not going to CHURCH again, cuz what's the point?"

All right, so maybe that's not how the conversation went exactly.  But just as a church is a formalized institution created with the original purpose of presenting the ideas of faith and God to the populace, the foster care system is a formalized system created with the original purpose of caring for children who have been abused or suffered trauma, the causes behind removal from the home.  So why is it that people go to a DSS office, go through 14 hours of intense training, sign up to be a foster parent, then - in shock and dismay - discover that their new children suffer from abuse or trauma? Seriously?  Did you not expect this?  This is THE PURPOSE of foster care.

So what is my stance?  It comes in three parts: general parenting, special needs parenting, and foster parenting.

Generally speaking, Parenting is hard.  I don't care if it's foster, step, biological, or godparenting, if you have a child in your care it will not be easy. While every age is tough in its own way, no one in their right mind would expect starting out with toddlers to be anything but a struggle.  Anyone who voluntarily signs up to be a parent and then gets annoyed that it's hard is clearly out of their minds.  On hard days some parents may joke that they'll sell their kids to the gypsies, but everyone knows they're joking.  Apparently there's some people in the world who haven't realized it's a joke.

Then there's the fact that pretty much every single person I know has something. I have dwarfism.  My brother-in-law has neurofibromytosis. My cousin had learning disabilities. One of my best friends' brothers was on meds for ADHD back in the early 90s.  Eight out of ten families that I knew growing up had something that required parents to fill out extra forms, attend extra meetings, sit in doctor's waiting rooms, hold back tears in pre-op or therapy, write the umpteenth appeal to insurance, and threaten school districts with lawyers.  This is normal life.  All of the things that I or family or friends have were genetic, and we lived with our supportive and loving birth families.  Every child in the foster care system also has something, it just has a different cause. Right now, we are their supportive and loving families.  We focus on providing for our children everything that they need to grow and heal regardless of the status of DSS support or financial backing not because they're poor damaged children and we feel sorry for them or are guilted into it, but because this is parenting.  When we say we intend to be parents, this is what we're talking about.

Of course, my final perspective comes when recognizing those different causes of the something that they have.  When I signed paper after paper saying that I will become a foster mother, I thought about the hours of training we've been through.  I thought about the photographs of children physically abused, I thought through the different scenarios of behavior shown by children who were sexually abused. I thought about my cousin who was adopted after years of being my uncle's foster daughter and all the chaos in their lives. We filled out the five page child factors checklist four times and update it annually, taking each behavior, each addiction, each genetic difference, deciding which ones we are capable of taking on.  With each mark of the pen, we created structure and guidelines to develop a foster care scenario with which we agree.  In business terms, we signed a contract designed to give us everything we wanted.  In heart terms, we accepted our children before they even walked in the door.  So - saying nothing of the fact that every child who is 2, 3, or 4 years old will throw tantrums - returning them is out of the question.  Like everyone in that training room, we were fully aware of what was asked of us and we don't just throw in the towel when it gets hard.  And now, of course, it has nothing to do with the training or the therapists or the other foster parents.  It has to do with what will happen to these children inside themselves if I strap them into the car and tell them that because (at three and four years old) they won't go to bed on time I'm dropping them off in the office to start a new life with new strangers.  The fact that this happens all the time should fill every single one of us with overwhelming shame.



There's more, but that's a start.  My revolution involves changing fundamentals.  It involves changing the language related to foster parents and overhauling the perspectives of our responsibilities.  It brings a paradigm shift to the process, hopefully ending in not just the best care that can be provided in the given circumstances, but in a new generation of foster children who are stable and washed with complete healing.  It also involves an awful lot of people unfamiliar with these ideas to pull together and support each other for the good of our children and our future.  Though I don't often get opportunity to blog like this, I hope that over time I'll be able to tell you all how we're working out solutions.