We've finished all of our foster care training (36 hours of classes, 2 hours of online, a total of 76 hours combined). It has been eye-opening, terrifying, and heart-wrenching to say the least.
Yesterday, we met two women who came as guest speakers to our training, the biological mother and the foster mother (who are now best friends). Eighteen years ago this single mother had three children and was a severe meth addict. The night the police came and removed her children from her, she was so devastated that she immediately made attempts to take her own life.
You see before, If she had drugs taken from her she could always find a way to get them again. If she had money or anything stolen, she could find a way to fraudulently get more. But she realized when her children were taken that no amount of finagling or criminal masterminding could restore them. It was a done-deal. It was over. Her parental rights were completely terminated.
Though the mother could not get her children back, the foster mother understood that we are all biologically tied to our children and them to us. There is no way around the need we all have to stay connected to what flows within our own veins. She understood that a major part of the grief her foster kids would suffer from was being separated from their mother. To help them through their sorrow, she hung a picture of their mom in their bedroom and took them to visit her at the county jail twice a month.
These attempts the foster mom made to keep that connection touched the biological mother's heart so deeply that she started to gain hope. She realized that her life wasn't over. She discovered she still had something to live for and she was being given a second chance. Over the course of several more years the bio-mom was able to turn her life around. She got out of jail, sobered up, finished school, and got a job. She now works as a counselor in a correctional facility for women and helps them recover from substance abuse. It was worth every sacrifice and every effort of the foster mom to not only care for the children but to see that their mother needed rescuing too.
We have a few loose ends that need to be tied and then we can have our home-study come to evaluate us. We should have our licence to foster in a little over a month. Once we start having children placed, their stories will be kept confidential with us. Our entire family will be thrust into a vastly different world from the one we've known. As the one who is primarily home, I will be attending regular court hearings and arranging visits with the biological parents on a weekly basis as the caseworkers and judges sort out what is in the best interest for the children. We've never been to court for anything and we've never had to deal with visitation arrangements.
Ultimately with every foster child we care for, our goal will be to do everything we can to help them stay connected to their biological family on the safest terms. We want their parents to get better, to get treatment, to get counseling, and to turn their lives around. The ideal is to give the children a safe place to live until that happens and they can return home. When that doesn't happen, we will adopt.
-Alicia
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