I’ve always wondered if somehow we all have a journey that is sort of meant for us.
I wandered up and down the barbie isle at Benny’s with my younger sister. We were going to pick children to complete our barbie families (we could have played dolls forever) She picked 2 babies and a Kelly doll, she was thrilled! I also picked three children to complete my family except that mine didn’t “match”. They were all different colors and my little sister asked why? I told her that families didn’t have to look the same and my barbies children were adopted, I was 7.
In 2015 my husband and I attended a meeting for information on Foster care. We had attended this same meeting a year prior but my husband insisted that he wasn’t ready, so we waited. The meeting lasted a little less than an hour and I was sure that all the questions asked in the meeting would scare him away for the second time. In the car on our way home he asked me if I truly wanted to go through with the classes for foster care. I knew that we had to, I believe that if you cant stop thinking about something you should do something about it. He asked me if I was afraid, what if foster care is horrible? what if the scary stories online are really what its like? What if we get a child that’s out of control, we haven’t ever parented before how would we be ready for that? I told him you don’t know what you don’t know until you know. So our journey began
My husband and I have a very strong relationship and that has certainly been a key factor in this journey. We were young to be doing foster care, at only 25 and 28 we were the youngest couple in the foster care training course. We were also just about the only couple who wanted “older” children between the ages of 5 and 10. We are extremely active and our life seems a little to go go go for an infant. I cant tell you how many people asked why we didn’t want our “own” children. I will have to share the ups and downs we has while getting licensed in another post…Regardless of everything we became licensed within 9 months and received our first placement call 2 days after getting our license. I declined our first placement. The situation with the case explained to me on the phone was terrifying. I knew we wouldn’t be able to provide these children with the care they needed, they needed to be placed with someone who had experience with trauma and kids in care. I was bummed after the call, what if all the cases were like this and we just weren’t cut out for the job? I will admit that I was was pretty naive in the beginning, I pictured us with this child going to the beach and teaching him to play baseball, it all seemed to make sense in my mind! But guess what when you have never parented and you haven’t got a clue of what these kids have been through the beginning is anything but a walk in the park. Two days after that call my cell phone rang with our case workers number, it was just after noon on a Wednesday in May. “Can you take two girls for a few days? We think they will go with a relative shortly but we need a placement for right now?” I thought this would be a great chance to get our feet wet, I called my husband and he gave me the green light!
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