I am a horse trainer’s daughter so the majority of my life has been lived in the country. When I was little, we lived on a ranch with a horse pasture just outside our front door. I had tons of adventures, and several injuries, in that pasture. My brothers and I built an obstacle course for our bicycles there and…
I am currently trapped on the couch under a snoring 5 year old. He is stuck on The A Team right now and he really needed to watch just one more episode. I love that his current obsession was one of my favorite TV shows as a kid. I also treasure these nights when he asks me to stop working…
Tonight I sat on the couch with my broken little girl and held her while she cried. Tonight we watched a movie and held a puppy while we waited for the grief to subside. Tonight, once again, I told her that it’s OK to hurt.
Fostering is hard. This is a slow and hard process and there are no guarantees. We all have tough moments but our general attitude has to be that we want what is best for the kids even if that hurts us. I believe with all my heart that every child deserves to have someone that will be devastated to see them go. If you can be that person who opens your heart knowing it will be broken, then maybe fostering is for you. But if you can’t, then you should look for another way to help kids or grow your family.
Out of everything that I’ve learned during this journey it has been how absolutely normal foster kids are. They are regular kids with scars from selfish adults who didn’t treat them right. Like many other people, I was scared of foster kids. Especially the older ones just seemed too dangerous to have around my family. True, some of them have worse issues than others but really these are just regular kids that got a rough start. Not average… just normal kids.
