Letting Go

There is one subject that comes up more than any other when I am discussing foster care with people.  Potential foster parents want to know how they will be able to let go when it is time for the child to leave.  People say, "I could never foster a child because I would love them too much and would not be able to give them up."  Unfortunately, this heartbreak is built into the system.  Foster parents are asked to open their homes and their hearts.  A foster family builds bonds of love and trust because that is what the child needs to heal from the trauma they have experienced in their lives.  The family does this knowing that the child will eventually return to the birth family.  As with most things, this potential heartbreak is not easy to define.

I had to let go of one of my kids this week.  My emotions are a tangle ball of yarn as I begin the process of adjusting to a family member missing from my home.  Shelly has been with our family for 10  months.  My husband and I taught her to drive and helped her buy her first car.  I cheered her on in her school work and helped her work through her emotions over her birth family.  She became one of our own during those months.    Now she is gone and her room is empty.  Her car is not parked in front of my house.  There is this huge, gaping space where she supposed to be.  The grief of a mother is a real and tangible thing when I comes to fostering kids.

However, there is another side to this heartbreak that is very difficult to explain to people who have not fostered before.  I would like to try and explain so that other's can learn about the reality of taking in a stranger's child.  My relationship with Shelly was not all roses and smiles.  We had our difficult times too.  For most of the the 10 months that she lived with us, Shelly was glued to my side.  She wanted to go where ever I went and kept up a constant stream of chatter.  This is fine for a few days, but after weeks of Shelly time, I was begging my husband for some reprieve.  I spent a lot of my own personal money on the things that Shelly needed.  She came to us with one small bag of clothes and one pair of shoes.  She had no friends in our small town because she did not go to school here.  That meant that she had no friends nearby to connect with.  She was always here.  This changed as she got more comfortable but for the most part, Shelly was always in the house.  What I am nicely saying is that Shelly was emotionally and sometimes financially a source of  constant stress for me.  Now that she has moved out, I feel that burden of stress slowly lifting.  I woke up this morning and only my little boys were up and about.  The older kids had gone to work.  It was a wonderful feeling to feel comfortable again.

When I let go of a child who has been with me for a long time the feelings are always two sided.  Sadness and relief.  Stress and freedom.  Sometimes a foster family is glad to let a difficult child go, and that is a normal feeling.  Fostering kids causes us to reach deep inside ourselves and act outside of our comfort zone.  It is a relief when things return to the comfort zone.  It is part of the process to have good, bad, or ambivalent feelings about a child leaving.   When someone asks me how I handle the heartbreak of sending a child home, I tell them that I am sad and I am happy.  I will miss Shelly and I will cry over that loss.  However, I will also be happy that she is on a new path and I can have some privacy in my own home again.