Since my last post about foster care, I have wanted to write another that would be more positive, more recruitment-like. This isn’t that post. Things. They are just not going my way in foster land. Friends who love me ask how things are going and I talk for a really long time and when I’m done, I realize I haven’t said a thing. So much is happening in the case of my little guy (who is with us) and his little sister (who is in foster care but not with us – for reasons I can’t understand or explain). But none of it gets us closer to what Child Welfare calls “permanency” for these little people. Impermancy and continued limbo for them leaves me six different ways of all wrung out.
Foster care’s imperviousness to my naturally controlling ways is, I know, good for my soul. But it feels like what it looks like when Harry Potter, Ron, and Hermione drink polyjuice potion. I know trusting the system, waiting, sitting in the uncomfortable is stretching me into a new person. I certainly hope that new person is not Crabbe or Goyle.
Okay. Here’s something positive. I guess the stretching is just what kiddos do to parents. In some cases, literally, with stretch marks or gray hair and wrinkles. Most of the time though, the stretching is just like mine – figurative and uncomfortable but likely for the best.
During the sixteen times each day that I feel like giving up on foster care, I remember the kiddos. All of them. And I know I’m not ready to close up my heart as long as even one of them might need it.
open book open heart 
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That is why you make a great foster mom, because your heart is open and so is your home. I imagine that it gets better, but I also imagine it stays hard at the same time. That is what makes it worth it, things that are easy are usually not as great as things that were hard to come by.
You are so right – about the hard stuff. Thanks for the encouragement!
I am glad you have an outlet that is interactive and yet personal so you can release all that tension and get on with the business of waiting. It is a little like what every parent goes through while waiting during pregnancy months, but it is intensified when you have to be outside the decisions that are being made. The not knowing is not fun. That is why some of us moms knit blankets. It is about 1/3 done.