Calling of the Heart

My job as a recruitment specialist often takes me to conferences where I set up a table with Hands Across the Water's information on foster care and adoption.  My goal is to share information with people who may be considering becoming a foster parent.  The latest conference I attended was a teacher training conference.  I was unsure if there would be any interest from this group because teacher's deal with children all day long.  Would they have any interest in fostering?  I was surprised by the level of interest.  Potential foster parents can be found anywhere or be anyone.  As someone who is a professional in the foster care world, I cannot predict who may have already been touched by some aspect of foster care.  Some visitors to my table have been foster parents in the past.  Some are grandparents with the possibility of kinship care in their future.  The most common type of people who visit me are people who have thought about fostering for a long time and have not done anything about it.  Recruiting foster parents is not like convincing a potential buyer to buy a product.  Foster parenting seems to be a calling of the heart.  People have been touched by the thought of fostering long before I come along with my information table.  Essentially, my job is to talk and share information.  Ironically, I was very resistant to becoming a foster parent myself!  I was more interested in adoption in the beginning than actually helping a child in need.  I have always wanted a large family, but after the birth of my third child I experienced some really frustrating fertility issues.  It wasn't long before I started researching adoption.  I started my search for an older child in the United States in the age range of 5 to 8 years old.  I thought this would be a piece of cake.  The news is always talking about older children who need homes.  However, this route proved unsuccessful for us.  A helpful social worker gently suggested foster care.  I was nervous about this option but open to exploring it.  My husband was not interested in foster care at all.  I have to confess that I tend to focus on beautiful children to the exclusion of reality.  My husband is much more practical and thinks about financial issues and space issues.  As I researched foster care, I realized that this was the path we had been searching for without realizing it and I quickly brought my husband over to my way of thinking.  Here are my top two reasons for choosing foster care (forgive me if they are a little selfish).  First, there are young children entering foster care all the time.  As a foster parent I would be the first in line to receive this child.  Adopting domestically meant that I would be adopting a child from a foster home.  Therefore, my house would be the third place the child would land, if not more.  Second, the child would be younger if I was the first in line.  These reason's are still true.  There are many, many teenagers in foster care who need homes but there are also children of all ages.  My story had a happy ending with my two little boys who we have now adopted.  I have also learned of the amazing benefits to fostering a teenager (but that topic is for another post).  As a recruitment specialist, I have found the perfect job for me because I love to talk about children and foster care.  Foster parenting is not a job, it is labor of love.  It is no wonder that the idea to foster a stranger's child begins in the heart.  If you have an interest in finding out more information about fostering a child, visit http://www.hatw.org/