It was so fun to be able to talk to Jami from The Forgotten Initiative face-to-face (via technology) for the first time through this interview. Our families have lots in common (large multiracial families through biology, international adoption, and foster care) and we share a heart for kids and families in crisis. Below I have the link to our conversation and beneath that are some written thoughts that came to me after our talk.
-I talk about “God’s plan” a lot. I have read that for some adoptees, that’s really frustrating– to feel like “God’s plan” was for them to be separated from their biological family. I want to think about this more and I know it deserves a post all it’s own, but ultimately I feel like the Garden of Eden was God’s Plan A and everything since then has been God using pain and suffering to create beauty. Infertility wasn’t beautiful. My kids having to lose their birth families wasn’t beautiful. I have a hard time knowing what kind of a role God played in all of that, but I do believe he was active in creating beauty from the hard. I am NOT implying that God took delight in this pain, but in the same way Jesus wept at the death of his friend even though he knew he could and would raise him from the dead, I think Jesus weeps at this pain even though there is a plan to make something beautiful out of it.
-I advise that people don’t look at adoption as a band-aid for infertility. I want to acknowledge that there likely won’t come a day where you wipe your tears and say, “There. All better now.” and feel totally healed. Infertility grief comes in waves and it’s okay to still have it during the adoption process or post adoption. I think the important step is to be okay with grieving what you lose through infertility (the ability to carry a child, your specific genetic traits, breastfeeding, being able to protect your child in the womb, etc.) so that adoption doesn’t have to try and fix problems it was never intended to fix.
-In talking about kids having to leave our home, I hope nobody hears me being flippant. It was hard. It still is hard. There are moments to this day (about 8 years since we left) that I still grieve that we weren’t able to be more of a support for some of those kids in the group home. Losing them was hard and we wrestled with regrets– could we have done more while we had them, could we have done something differently so they were able to stay, did they know how much we cared about them? When we left group home work, we moved several states away which has limited our ability to continue to be actively involved with these kids. I hate that. There are a few of them that if they showed up at my door tomorrow, we’d wash those sheets again and welcome them back to our family. Although there was a peace and comfort present, we still grieved.
-A good friend of mine used to be a caseworker for the state and now works in training and licensing foster parents. She challenged me recently that maybe there could be a way that disruptions from foster care never have to happen. Could we provide the right resources at the right time so no child ever has to have multiple placements? Can we work harder before placing children to be sure the homes they end up in are capable of meeting their specific needs and are committed to the process? I want that to be true. I talk in this interview about having a situation where we had to tap out. It was heartbreaking, but there were definite safety issues and I think it was the right decision. I want to live in my friend’s world and I want to help her create it, where you always have what you need to get your foster child the help they require, you know exactly what you’re getting into from the get-go, and you have an active support system. I don’t think we’re there yet and I think foster parents do need to have an understanding of their limits, but I want to do my part to continue working for a day when those issues are no longer issues.