After Your Foster Placement Leaves

December 6, 2024

Recalibration.

The period of time a foster parent experiences after a foster placement leaves.

It can bring about a variety of emotions. The depths of grief and overwhelming sadness. A sense of relief. Joy even.

After having had three separate placements in my first year and a half of fostering, I can confidently say:

There are no right or wrong emotions to have.

It’s an odd span of time after the kid(s) leave with all of their belongings. The house is quiet and empty. Days that were full of school and appointments are suddenly free. Time expands and bends in on itself. It’s just weird.

My first placement was actually a three week emergency placement of an 11 year old girl whose foster home had disrupted (meaning the foster parent put in their 30 days notice). My time with her ended with a police car ride when she left my house at 10:30 on a Saturday night. She left a couple of days later for a children’s home. She needed more care and supervision than I could provide and it was a relief to make it through those few weeks.

My second placement was two sisters, ages 6 and 7. I fell in love immediately. So when they were moved four months later, I experienced the deepest heartbreak. I had panicky crying fits the week before they left, and didn’t leave my house for three days following their departure. I wondered if I would ever be able to open my home again….. and a month and a half later, I was buying chicken nuggets for the freezer. :) Nesting as one might say.

My most recent placement of three siblings- ages 9, 7, and 5, fell somewhere in between my first two placements. They were wild, no boundaries and no chill factor. But they were also sweet and empathetic and want to see goodness in the world. They actually reunified with their mom right before Thanksgiving and all I feel is happiness for them. No tears, no sense of grief…maybe a little sadness that my house is so quiet.

But what I continue to be amazed by, is how quickly even the oddest of families can change your life and routines. I’ve had to stop myself from combing through clearance racks at Walmart to look for their clothing sizes. Or to retrain myself from using certain phrases that became our standard family language. My last crew are from Honduras so I often said, “ven aqui”, or “come here”. At night we said, “te amo, dulces suenos” or “I love you, sweet dreams.” Kids permeate every aspect of your life and these entrances and exits of foster children don’t come at standard timese (i.e. sending a kid off to college). They can be abrupt, confusing, and jarring. I am learning more and more that every placement is different and therefore my reaction and emotions around each placement will be slightly different.

But now I move into my least favorite phase of foster care…. the consideration of a new placement. This involves a lot of phone calls, questions, and evaluating whether you are ready to take on the risks of a particular case. Because out of all the uncertainty of foster care, there is one certainty- and that is…. you never get the full story. :)

When Fostering Breaks Your Heart

April 12th, 2024

I have heard it said and had it said to me, “Oh, fostering is so brave of you. I could never do it. I could never send kids back. It would break my heart.

I am here to tell you that I am not brave.

I’m also here to tell you…. IT SHATTERED MY HEART.

So much so, that I spent the first 48 hours sobbing, with my phone shut off, locked up in my house, unwilling to see or talk to anyone. The depth of grief I felt after only three and a half months with my first littles, rivaled the time I held my cat of 17 YEARS as he died of a heart attack in the middle of the hallway on an unsuspecting Sunday evening.

It’s been about four weeks since two chunks of my heart climbed into a rental van and rode out of town. I searched the internet for people who had shared their experiences with kiddos being reunified or moved. There are plenty of instances where placements have been disrupted, where the foster family’s situation had changed, or behaviors/needs made the home a challenge to serve a particular child. I think sometimes there can be a sense of relief in finding a better fit for a kid. Or making the difficult decision that a certain foster home is not the best combination of factors.

But that was not this. And the severing of a deep bond the girls and I had developed over the last few months cut me in all the ways it possibly could. As someone who has felt very strong ties to wander, those sweet little hearts settled me, gave me a sense of belonging to this uniquely created, yet temporary family.

WHAT I LEARNED

  1. It’s not about me. LITERALLY. I don’t call the shots, and I don’t get to have an opinion. It sucks.

  2. The number one priority is the kiddos. What do they need to prepare for the move? The who, what, when, and wheres. When and how to share the news, building in time to process, validating their emotions- both the good and bad. We spent a lot of time talking about how it’s possible for two opposite emotions to be true at the same time (i.e. happy to have a safe home and sad to be away from family)

  3. The community will grieve with you. I didn’t think about how I was going to have to navigate our community’s sadness over the girls leaving. Their teachers, our church, anyone who had spent time with them, also grieved the goodbye. I had to hold my sadness, the girls’ emotions, as well as the questions of everyone else.

  4. Boundaries are important. I had to be very clear about my own boundaries. I didn’t have answers to questions and I didn’t have energy to continually reflect on the inner workings of the court system and case workers that I barely understand myself. It’s incredibly difficult to tell someone that you can’t discuss it.

  5. Support is everything. Find a support group. The fostering journey can feel lonely and isolating. I like to say it runs parallel to normal parenting, but there is so much more to trauma informed care and each individual case, added to the challenge of being inserted into a child’s life with no prior background knowledge…. if there isn’t a local, in person support group, join one online. I find a lot of comfort and solidarity in some facebook groups I’ve joined.

  6. There is no easy way to avoid the pain, you just have to go through it. Feel the feels. Cry the tears. Whatever your normal outlets for processing are….lean into them. Even as I cried my way through that first weekend, I gardened and organized my home. I took naps and wrote a song….I don’t know if anyone will ever hear it, but it was important for me to write. It is titled, “Lot to Learn”.

And maybe not every placement will feel like this. But I am more and more convinced that I would rather have my heart shattered a million times than close my home to children who need a safe place to land. It would be selfish of me to say that the protection of my own feelings is more important than these kiddos who don’t get to choose this journey. So I’ll be taking some time. Time to grieve and recalibrate. Time to settle my soul and gear up for the next round. Let’s go.

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