The Foster Care Battles I Didn’t Fight

The other afternoon I locked myself in my bathroom with a cup of coffee so I could listen to a radio interview without interruption. The interview was with someone very important to me. He was once a child at the group home we used to work at. He is now a successful adult and the very definition of the word “resilient.” As I listened to his story, I felt overcome with two very different emotions. One was pride. The other was regret.

I am so incredibly proud of this young man and how God has worked through his story. I also recognize the ways the system failed him. . . the ways I failed him.

I can still remember where I was when we got a phone call that he was being moved out of the group home. I remember the tears. I remember the conversation between Brian and I— should we leave our job, our home, the other boys to see if we could become a family just for him? In the end, there was no way we could make it work. We couldn’t fight. We couldn’t fight to be his family, couldn’t fight to keep him and his brother together. It was a grief for us and it’s continued to be a source of regret. Should we have done something differently?

This picture is really precious to me. In the right corner you can see the county courthouse where it was initially decided our daughter’s brother couldn’t live with his siblings. In the left corner you can see the state capital building where our bill to preserve sibling relationships was passed nearly two years later, which is when this picture was taken.

I have to imagine there are many moms like me who struggle with regret for the battles they didn’t fight. We wonder if we should have done something differently, contacted someone else, filled out another form, hired an attorney, done SOMETHING that might have changed the outcome. The “what ifs” haunt us.

As I see how the story played out for this young man, I can see how God was ultimately watching over him. He has a family that loves him, he’s still in relationship with his brother, he’s a college graduate, and he has an amazingly positive outlook on life. I don’t want to make it sound too rosy because I know he has been through hard years and trauma can have a long impact, but he sure seems to have figured out how to make peace with his story.

I can see how God has redeemed some of the painful circumstances I watched him walk through, but I can also see how God used those feelings of regret I’ve wrestled with to push me to fight the battles I could. This is the beauty of the longview of foster care and adoption. This is the benefit of having committed the last 15 years to working with kids. There are mistakes I made, regrets I live with and battles I didn’t fight either because the circumstances limited my ability or I just didn’t know how at the time.

But I know how now. 

We’ve earned a voice and a place at the table by being committed to this broken system and the families that get caught in it. I’ve read more policy memos and research studies than I ever imagined I would. I have intentionally sought out those with the experience I needed to learn from and I’ve been an intentional listener to those walking through their own painful moments.

I have no dog left in the foster care fight. My kids are all adopted. We closed out our home. But I still push in to the hurt and the heartache of foster care both on an individual level as I work with families and on a policy level. I feel freed to be an advocate in ways I never was when we were active foster parents.

I hate that I have regrets, but I think that’s the cost of life. It’s definitely the cost of engaging with the brokenness of foster care. Fighting takes connections built over years of work in the system. Being heard takes years of building up your credibility. Sometimes it takes being hurt multiple times before you decide it’s not just YOU, it’s a system problem that needs fixing.

When our first son was separated from his brother, there was nothing we could do about it. International adoption meant we were a world away. When our second son was separated from his brother, we were told there was nothing we could do. That was a lie, but we didn’t know it at the time. When our daughter was separated from her brother, we didn’t find out about it until it was too late. As I look back at the regrets, the pain, the battles we didn’t and couldn’t fight, I see how they all pushed us to the moment when our youngest daughter would be separated from her brother and we decided to do WHATEVER IT TOOK to voice our frustration with a system that kept denying these children the right to grow up as siblings.

One of my favorite moments in all of our marriage started out as one of the most horrible moments of my life. My husband and I were driving away from the meeting where they told us that although state law was violated in the placement of this baby away from his sister, there was nothing we could do. They were happy with their decision and we needed to be happy about it too. I cried in that meeting (which is something I HATE to do) and found myself sobbing in the car. Over the sound of my own crying I could hear my husband mumbling to himself, “They poked the wrong bear.” I have never loved him more.

He knew in that moment what I didn’t understand yet. That the losses, the battles we didn’t fight, the years of regrets, they had created a Mother Bear heart in me that wasn’t going to walk away from this quietly. The lessons I’d learned, the research I’d accumulated, the fire of my own regrets and the years of watching kids be hurt by a system designed to protect their “best interests” was going to compel me to act.

While I would never want to relive that experience, I can see why it was necessary. I can see why all the pain in the past was necessary. The redemptive moment of watching our bill become a law that protects sibling relationships. . . it was emotional in ways I can’t describe.

This is what I have to remind myself of when I’m tempted to settle into just the “what ifs” and regrets of the life we’ve lead. The kids we could have helped if things had gone differently or the opportunities missed to make effective change— these things may always haunt me, but the years we’ve invested have shown me how God can make good out of that hurt.

I’m not sure if it’s possible to get out of foster care unscathed by regrets. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t risk that reality. It may be the regrets that prompt us to action in the future. This is why the system needs people to invest decades of involvement. We need to be a witness to the longterm impact. We need to be present long enough to see our own mistakes clearly and work to prevent them in the future. Foster care needs us to experience pain and frustration so someday when the right battle comes, we’re ready.