On the really hard days, it feels like loving a 5 year old. That’s around the age her childhood started to be stolen from her, and a piece of her was frozen in time. She needs to be held. She likes to be rocked back and forth. Sometimes she throws things. Maybe she’ll whine, or stomp her feet. She’ll cry out so loud, you can actually hear her soul hurt. On days like that, her emotions are too big for her to handle.
Most days, I love a 14 year old. She talks about getting her drivers license. She giggles and reads and draws and listens to her music really loud. She asks big life questions and imagines going to her first homecoming dance. She does crafts with August and Eden, and introduces them to the shows she grew up watching. She likes to play with kinetic sand and water beads. She covered her bedroom walls with posters and quotes and photos.
Some days, I love a 25 year old. She is wise beyond her years. Her life experience aged her in more ways than one. She asks for a drink menu and is often handed the alcoholic beverage list. She holds my son’s and daughter’s hands and helps them cross the street safely. People ask her at the park which of them is her’s. She understands why you can’t trust everyone. She knows when she needs to leave a room and cool down. She stands on her own two feet, a self described “strong, independent woman.”
But still, like so many kids in foster care, she thrives in chaos. It’s all she knew for most of her life. Sometimes she unwittingly sabotages relationships, and does harm to herself. She can create brokenness in situations that are whole. She finds the ounce of potential negativity, and allows it to grow and take shape. Canceled plans totally wreck her world. She settles and accepts the worst case scenario; we actually have that trait in common. It was ingrained in my head when I first talked about finding my birth parents. “Be prepared for the worst. They may not want to meet you. It could just be too much.”
The most critical description any foster (or adoptive) parent must remember is that no matter what the emotional age or day, we love and serve children. In my case, she is a complicated, unique, wild, beautiful, funny, creative, adventurous, imaginative girl. She loves to sing and dance and play games. She has remarkable moments of epiphany in the car when she proclaims things like “PTSD does not define me.” In the same car ride she might theorize about why pizzas are circles, cut into triangles, placed in a square box.
Even during exceptionally hard days, she is still wise, lovely, fierce- a daughter in her own right. It is God who placed her in our home to strengthen us individually, and to stretch and chisel our marriage. It is because of Him who loved us first that we love her even more aggressively than the way the enemy has tried to dismantle her life.
And in the midst of this confusing journey parenting a teen from an unimaginably difficult place, I always find lessons tucked in our day to teach me about myself. I still have so far to go to pour out the unending grace I’m called to pour out for her and our littles. A lot of days, I truly struggle to put my selfish desires aside and take the extra time to listen and not wave a story or thought away. There are moments when I just want to throw my hands up and scream, “WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?” I’ve had to apologize to both our foster and our littles for my own anxious behavior. Embarrassingly enough, I’ve hidden in my own closet to protect what patience and peace I have left. Sometimes I react instead of respond. The guilt from those moments haunt me.
But in the evening, when I’m laying on my bed reading a book, she’ll come lay with me and just say “I love you.” I’ll run my fingers through her hair and smile, no matter what kind of day it was, and whisper how much I love her, too. It’s the most important moment of our whole day.
Later, my husband and I will debrief about it all. He’ll tell me about his students and coworkers, and I’ll tell him stories about August and Eden and what they learned in nature that day. We’ll talk about our foster, and we’ll celebrate her wins: like when something that would normally bother her doesn’t, or when she has a great big sister moment, or maybe it’s the beautiful paper she wrote for her English class. We’ll probably talk about the hard, annoying things, too.
I think the most important part about our debrief is the pat on the back we give one another when we have our own wins— like if I don’t lose my cool handling a kid meltdown, or if he gets his grading caught up while listening to a teenager sing in the background. At the end of the day, our relationship is the core. Our family life would not function without it.
Tonight we are attending a banquet to celebrate the organization that equipped us for this battle of foster care: Second Chance Youth Ranch. Without the one on one training and continuous counsel we receive from them, we’d think we’re totally nuts. Nothing I described at the beginning of this is surprising to us, thanks in large part to the hours of training and support we’ve received from them. We have therapists available to us and our foster at any moment. We have a caseworker who visits once a week to mentor our girl. There’s a network of other teens being fostered through the Ranch that our foster beauty gets to connect with and share experiences with. There are other foster parents doing way more than we are, like caring for six fosters at a time. There are leaders in the organization who do some of the toughest work of all: turn kids away who need a home because there simply aren’t enough homes open to take them.
All of these resources together in one place doing big kingdom work by going after the one. The one child who needs extra attention. The one birth mom who needs time to get life figured out for her babies. The one foster parent who just needs an hour break to sit and do nothing, or maybe even an entire evening to go on a date without kids. It’s a mission trip of all kinds, right here in our home town.
If you’d like more information on how you can support foster families, I’d highly encourage you to reach out to Second Chance Youth Ranch and ask to hear their Why. Then ask them, “How?”