Last week was the week of many visits, a sure sign that there is a court date coming up. Friday was the law guardian. She came to hang out and see how CD was doing. CD really showed off for the law guardian. She was in a great mood, showed off her toys [her latest is a "wala" (koala) that was won for her by her 9 year-old brother at a recent trip to Six Flags], how she sings and told the law guardian about the trampoline in the backyard and demonstrated how she goes "dumpin" on it with her brothers (and me).
In conversation, the law guardian, a young mother of a four year-old, asked, "would you foster again?" I was very honest. I told her that we have no intention of closing down our home. However, we are taking a great emotional risk with CD. I told her that though I assume that even if we lost CD, time would heal my family, I am afraid of what my family would go through to get to the other side. I explained that even if my husband and I felt that we could do it again, our choice to foster was a choice for our boys too. While they agreed to it, they are kids and too young to be responsible for the decision. I don't know how they would handle losing CD. They adore her. It might not be fair to put them through that kind of loss again.
So I don't know. I would hope that we could continue to foster whether we adopt CD or not. Reality is, this is tough stuff. Foster parenting does not need to be a life-long commitment and if it proves to take too much of a toll on our family, at the conclusion of our journey with CD, we may decide that we did as much as we could to make a difference as we could handle right now. We'll see.
2 comments:
There is a question I would like to ask about the foster system:
Many foster systems seem not inform foster parents about the history of the foster children.
I suppose that this can be very problematic when a foster child has to heal of a traumatic and abusive past: the foster parents cannot understand why their foster children act as they act, they are not prepaired to help them heal.
So why do they do that?
In training, we are told that we will be given all the information that we need.
When you get the call, you get very little. When you ask questions, they tell you that there are things they can't tell you. It is a major problem and the reason so many kids are bounced around. If foster parents were given all the info and needed supports from the outset, they could agree to take only children they feel confident that they could handle and know what it is they will need to be prepared for.
I think it just is the reality of a system that often places children on an emergency basis with only hours in which to do it. Social service workers want the placement and they want it fast. Leave out information and the foster parents won't know to hesitate before saying, "yes."
It is absurd. It is bad for the kids and it is bad for the foster families but it is what happens all too often.
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