December 2001: Day one as a foster parent

Our world had forever changed in September, yet a few miles away the lives of three young children were falling apart. These young children entered our life in December, our first adventures in fostering. Ages 1, 2, and 6, they came with no manual. The two year old looked us in the eye and said "Fuck" over and over. The one year old tried to pull the dining room lights down.

That night, we laid in bed and listened to their nightmares. The 1 year old screamed in his sleep, the two year old cried himself to sleep, and the 6 year old tried to chew her lip off because she was so scared and worried about how we were caring for her siblings. We stared at each other through our own awake-nightmare. It was horrifying. This was not what we thought it was going to be like.

When you make the decision to become a foster parent, you do so to help a child in need. It's a selfless proposition. It's never, ever what you expect it to be. Foster parents are told by social workers that they are a part of a team. In reality, we are expected to feed, clothe, and in general keep the kids clean. We are expected to answer the social worker's questions about the children's behavior and school grades. We are expected to keep our noses out of everything else, simply acting as a chauffeur when asked.

We are not to act like real parents--we are "just" the foster parents. Therefore, we should not try to provide emotional support, other than generic kindness, to our charges. We are not supposed to provide any sort of therpeutic support. If I had known this was what I was up against with "the system", I doubt I ever would have wanted foster in the first place.

The years that followed found us in a constant battle with "the system" as we tried to find the best services available to help the children in our care. Consistantly, we hit brick wall after brick wall. Workers would move on and take new jobs and we found ourselves going over the same ground with new workers. We encountered many, many bad therapists, a few bad psychiatrists, and many, many bad social workers. Amongst those, we also found a few gems, a very few gems.

Ultimately, it was not the children who pushed us out of fostering, it was the professionals.