The Truth isn't Always Pretty

I have wanted to update this blog for quite some time…but honestly, it has been so hard to do so. I want so badly to write about how wonderful and easy our lives are. I want to share precious stories and updates about our life as a foster family. But sometimes, those stories and updates are in a short supply. 

Sometimes life as a foster family becomes so difficult that you have to look through hundreds of photos to remember the good.  You have to pray…and I mean on your knees kind of pray that you can get through the weekend maintaining some type of sanity. You have to fight tooth and nail to make that precious little boy or girl do homework that is an entire grade level behind, just so they have a shot at catching up in school. Sometimes you have to wake up 5 minutes early and give yourself a pep talk before you wake them up for school. And honestly, sometimes you thank God in heaven that your husband (or wife) has more patience that day than you do. 

Foster care is hard. It is a beautiful thing, but it is by far the hardest thing I have done in my entire life. We love our 2 children deeply. We tend to their every need, we are there when they laugh, there when they cry so hard they cannot breath, we are there when they tell stories that make our skin crawl. We are also there for the fits of rage, the hateful words, the anger that is taken out on us for things done to them by others. We are here 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. 

I think if I am honest with you, the hardest part of this entire journey is the isolation. When we first decided to be foster parents we had tons of people surrounding us, supporting us, cheering us on. But, as we have walked this journey for almost 5 months, that support is becoming less and less. We are harder to hang out with, harder to talk to, harder to be around because we are constantly bombarded with challenging situations, awkward questions, and short lived plans. We never know if we are going to be free on Friday night or Saturday. Our peers have babies…we have school aged children. 

My biggest source of comfort right now are the 3 or 4 other foster moms that I know. I cannot tell you the relief I feel when I get a message back from one of them saying “I know how you feel” or “yea…we dealt with that too.” Because the truth is, so few people understand how hard it is to love someone else’s children day in an day out knowing that it is not permanent. Few people understand how much of your life you have given up in order to care for these tiny precious people. And few people understand how heart breaking it is to watch those tiny people struggle and hurt so deeply knowing that you are unable to fix the pain because you are not the one person they want most. A small percentage of the population knows how hard it is to know the truth behind a situation and not be allowed to tell our children when they ask. 

So why in the world am I writing this? Because I can tell you in the struggle, in the pain, and in the isolation I have learned more about what it means to be the hands and feet of Jesus than ever before. Because this blog is about the truth, not about the ideal. Because life is hard enough as it is, why pretend to be a perfect family? Why not put the struggles we face out there and hope that someone else reads it and knows they are not alone. 

Finally, because I am hoping in writing this that you (wherever you are) will look around and find a foster family or organization that helps foster kids (I am not talking about myself here…just to be clear) and offer support. Ask them what you can do to help and then DO IT. Don’t flake out. Maybe that means helping the foster family who has 5 kids fold laundry, maybe it is making dinner one night, or maybe if you are a saint it means offering to watch the kids for a few hours to give them a break. Maybe it is a simple buying a foster child a christmas present, writing them a card on their birthday. Or maybe you can contact your local children’s division and donate suitcases that you don’t use, coats you don’t need, or shoes you don’t wear to a family who takes in short term placements, and so kids don’t have to move their stuff in trash bags. There are hundreds of ways to help without being a foster parent yourself.

I also want to say thank you to my amazing friends who are there, who do ask, and who do go to extremes to help us. Thanks to our family members and friends who sent our kids christmas presents. Thank you to those of you who took my kids to school and picked them up from daycare after my surgery. Thanks to my mother in law who literally flew across the country to help us take care of our kids so they wouldn’t have to move homes after my surgery when I couldn’t walk for more than 30 seconds. Thank you to those of you who have been there, listened to us vent whether it be on the phone or in person, and those of you who actively love on our kids when you see them. You are so very appreciated and so truly special to us. 

Even though we struggle, and even though this journey is hard I would not trade a single moment of it. 

Thanks for reading. 

Kevin and Anna