Every Christmas I have pulled out the ornaments and along with the fancy and the breakable and the milestone ornaments, there is a little group of handmade ones. There are the photo ornaments my oldest son made in his preschool class. There are the salt dough ornaments I made one year with our little ones so we’d have a fingerprint one to send to a foster child’s biological family. There are the many cut-out snowflakes and handprints and school crafts that hold precious memories. And for years, there has been this little set:
I remember the day I received this bunch of ornaments as a Christmas gift from a little guy I loved at the group home where we were houseparents. He made them in Sunday School and put them under our Christmas tree in a white paper bag, all decorated with markers and glitter. There were some ornaments he made for me and some he made for his mom in a separate bag. I loved that his Sunday School teacher had understood and anticipated what he probably struggled to express– that he had two families who loved him and would each want their own set.
For years I have been the keeper of these treasures. I’ve lovingly pulled them out and used them to decorate our tree. I’ve remembered his sweet face, his forever positive outlook on life, the precious times we had together, the last day I was his housemom and how I told him he would always be family to me in my heart.
Although it’s been 12 years since we spent a Christmas together, he has always been on my heart and these ornaments were always on my tree. But last year it was time. It was time to let him own his own story.
He’s married now. He has a baby daughter. He’s decorating his own tree. And just the way my mom gave me the ornaments of my childhood so I could create those traditions with my kids, it was time for me to pass his ornaments on to him. It made me sad to package them up, but I knew my job was to always do what was best for him and what helped him know and own his own story. It was time.
There was a time I was paid to be his mother. That’s the literal truth. I applied for a job, I received health insurance and time off. There were five years where my actual job was to be a mom for kids who needed it and my husband was employed as a professional father. We loved that job. But then the day came when that job ended and I told my husband it felt like we were living a terrible country song– we lost our house, our minivan, our community and our kids all at once. It was disorienting and painful. If we could have had our way, we would have taken each one of those boys with us and created a new family. But that was not an option we were given. They had families that loved them. We were just hired to do a job.
Nobody paid me to keep loving them. It’s just what you do when you care about someone. You can’t turn that off. There were no terms in our contract that specified we would keep their Christmas ornaments until they were ready to have them. You couldn’t pay someone enough to make that open-ended commitment, live through that grief every year and to carry that flame of love for kids. You don’t do it for payment. You do it for love.
When you love a child who will be with you just temporarily, it’s easy to see everything as a season or a brief moment in time. Can we make it through these next few weeks? How quickly can we clean out his room to make space for the next kid who needs it? How do I live through the grief of loving and losing over and over again? We assume because we didn’t get “ownership” of that child, that their story with us is just a short one. But it’s not. If you do it right, you may have a long shared history with them, beyond the reach of the court or a biological parents’ wishes. You will have the relationship you created during all those weeks or months or years of bedtime stories and family dinners.
I wish more foster parents would go into their foster care years understanding this reality that I never considered when we were doing group home work. Adoption isn’t the only way to achieve permanency with a child. Building a trusting relationship with them and ideally with their family is a beautiful way to ensure that 5, 10, 15 years down the road, you will be mailing them a package of the Christmas ornaments you kept. They may be temporarily in your family, but their souls are eternal. The impact you can have on their life may be lifelong, even if the time you’re their primary caregiver is relatively short.
Being a foster parent isn’t something you do and then it’s over. It’s always with you. Those kids are always with you. Maybe it’s the family picture on the wall with faces included that you haven’t seen in years. Maybe it’s the box of Mother’s Day cards from children who once considered you their mom. Maybe it’s the photos you keep, the handful of school papers you’ve hung on to, the communication log from visits, or the onesie they outgrew but you just couldn’t get rid of. When you become a foster parent you become the keeper of their story. It’s a job that lasts long after the child is gone and the case is closed. It’s a role we hold on to forever, always willing to share the memories and missing pieces with an adult who was once the child in our home.
Isn’t that something we do with our families? We reminisce about the good old days or we ask for explanations of the hard ones. We process what happened now that we’re adults and we can understand it differently. The kids we loved will one day be those adults– curious, hurting, wondering if they’re remembering it all correctly. We have that one last gift to give them. The gift of their story in a way that only we remember.
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