Loss

Foster Mom:
I remember reading a book my bff gave me in high school when my boyfriend & I broke up. Title? "How to Survive the Loss of a Love". She announced she would be going to prom with said ex-boyfriend soon after.  The funny thing is, I didn't feel like a glutton for punishment. Really. The book spoke to "Limbo" - the hardest part of losing a love.

Fast forward 24 years and here I am preparing to lose a love. My husband & I are foster parents. You read that correctly, we volunteered to become involved in the lives of others for short sprints of time.
Volunteered. For this. Losing a love. What were we thinking?

Better yet, while in training to become a foster parent, why isn't this addressed?

In the last 24 hours we have "gained" a newborn, and "lost" her. That was the easiest 24 hours. The complications arise from knowing that her big brother will be leaving us "soon", whatever / whenever "soon" is. This is so that he may be placed with his sibling, in their aunts home. The same aunt who may or may not have wanted him when he was placed in our home a couple of months ago.

Here's the thing.... I am not a "sharer" but I have never been so compelled to look at a system so new to me.

Let's look at goals:

• Family reunification. Agreed - good if the family meets the criteria.
• Stability for the children placed in foster care.   

Let's stop and think about the 2nd bullet point. Stability vs. Reunification from the extended family who declined care a few months ago. UGHHHH....

We knew what we signed up for. Doesn't make it easy - but we knew. 

Foster Dad:

This is only our second foster child, and he has only been with us for a few months, but he is VERY much a part of our family. I feel a love that I have never felt before and having not had children of our own, I can only assume it is the same indescribable emotion that biological parents go through but I won't pretend to know that for sure. 

What I can assure you of, is that when the day comes that he has to leave us (and we have been informed that this day will more than likely be sooner than later) that day could possibly be the hardest day of my moderately young life. This thought defaults me back to the many months of training that one must go through in order to be certified to do this. If there was one thing that I most definitely took away from that time, it was that foster children experience loss on an unimaginably fast and massive level. Everything that existed in their universe is ripped away, sometimes in a matter of minutes. When our present child arrived, he did so with the clothes on his back, and nothing else. Granted a one year old has very little concept of ownership but still. Loss on a subconscious level is still loss. 

How do you prepare someone to lose someone they love? A best friend, a sibling, a mother or father? How do you prepare a parent to lose their child? The CPS agent assigned to our child recently informed us that she would give us "plenty" of time to come to terms with the fact that this beautiful and amazing one year old boy that has been a ray of sunshine in our lives is going to be taken away. How many days does it take? What's the going rate on heartbreak? One day? Ten? A month? My number is zero. There are no amount of days that can make this okay. Maybe that's why they don't "train" you to deal with this in training classes, because they know deep down inside that there is nothing they can say to prepare you for this. It just sucks, and you have to suck on it. Well I for one, am going to embrace it. I'm going to be the saddest foster parent you have ever seen and some day shortly after this is all over, I will wake and all will be right in the world and I will be ready to do it all over again. In the meantime, I am going to love that boy with everything that I am.