Goodbye, foster kids

Tomorrow is the last day with our foster placement, a two-year-old and three-year-old, half brothers.  They have lived with our family for a year and a half.

Tomorrow evening they will go to their mom's new apartment to restart their lives with her, now that she's clean and off drugs.

Somehow this feels like I'm writing a yearbook entry, and summing up this experience I'm tempted to say "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times," or "What a long strange trip it's been" or some kind of appropriate cliche like that.  They fit.

After a year and a half of revolving our lives around the needs of two toddlers, not to mention all the appointments and visitations, we are ready to move on.  We've been ready for a while.  The kids need resolution, and so do we.

Every Friday night at 7pm for about a year I know where I have to be: dropping off kids to visit their bio family.  Every Sunday evening at 7pm I know where I have to be: picking up kids from visiting bio family.  And now the drop off will be for the last time.

It's a mixed bag of feelings, for sure.

When someone lives with you for a year and a half, they definitely feel like family.  When small children start calling you Mommy, they definitely feel like family.  Except that they aren't.

And that is hard.

And living that way for too long isn't healthy for anyone.

Honestly, my experience with "the system" wasn't great.  The kids had four different social workers in less than one year.  (Due to employee turnover.)

I never felt heard by anyone in the system.  Nor was anyone particularly concerned with communicating with me.  Over and over, I witnessed the child welfare system prize procedure and paperwork over the best interest of the child.

To be frank, our child welfare system sucks.  It's government, and government doesn't do a lot of things well, in my opinion.

The bureaucracy and the waste in the system are mind blowing.  It's a taxpayer black hole.

And those frustrations are on top of the actual work and emotional fatigue of taking care of the kids.  Someone sent me an article that said 50% of first time foster families quit after their first placement.  I believe it.

Do I want to do it again?  No.  But officially, we are just taking a break for now.  We'll see what's next.

You see, a part of me still believes in the idea.  I do want to help children.  God has given us the resources.  I don't want to be selfish with my own life.  (Although honestly, I kind of do.  I just don't think I should be.)

We're going on vacation the morning after we drop off the kids.  I think it's a good way to restart our lives again.  (This will probably be the last post for the next 10 days or so.)

I'm going to take some time over the next few months to rest, be with my family, enjoy the holidays and work on The House of Goodwill.  That I am very excited about!  

Foster kids, you will never remember us, or that you lived here.  But we will never forget you.  I will miss teaching you Spanish.  I will miss watching "Jorge el Curioso" with you while you ate your galletas and drank your jugo.

I will miss making your cribs into forts and reading you libros.

I will not miss my house smelling like a gross diaper all the time.  

And I'm not kidding, as I was typing the last sentence out here on my patio, I heard a very loud crash from inside the house.  When I went inside to investigate, I discovered that one of the kids (who was supposed to be napping), had swung his blanket up toward the overhead light and broken the glass, causing it to shatter and fall all around the room.

I'm not making that up.  There are things I WON'T miss.

I always told them not to go into a particular corner of the dining room where I have two 3-tier marble tables with plants on them.  One day, one of them managed to run back there, fall into one of the tables and hit his head.  As he fell, he knocked the table and all of it's plants over, which just happened to fall onto the other table with plants, breaking the marble (and the wood) on BOTH tables.

There are things I won't miss.

But there is a lot that I will.

And as upset as I was over the broken light fixture and the marble tables, I know that human beings are infinitely more important than things.

For better or worse, whatever this experience meant to us or to them, I know it mattered to God.  It was worth doing, and it is one of the few things in my life that I'm very proud of.

I'm excited to get my life back, for a while at least.

It was a long strange trip indeed.

Foster kids, we love you.  Vaya con Dios.