Funny things people say to foster parents…

A family like ours that has so many small children is bound to attract some attention when in public… It probably doesn’t help that at any given moment, at least two of them may be screaming bloody murder. After we attract the initial attention usually confusion follows as people take in a scene of two women with five small children of all different colors. I think some people assume that some kids belong to each of us and therefore that is why they don’t all look related. Some people are not content to just wonder and feel the need to make a variety of entertaining comments. I really don’t mind this for the most part as it makes for some great stories.

Once Julie was picking up a prescription for our adopted daughter at Target. We go there so often that most of the people in the pharmacy know us and know that we foster and adopt. Julie thought the pharmacist she was talking to knew our history. He asked her where our daughter got her blonde hair (Julie has dark brown hair). Julie thought for a moment and then replied “I think….I think her father has blonde hair.” Needless to say she got a very funny look from the pharmacist until she cleared up what she meant by her comment.

Frequently, one of us gets brave enough to take a group of our kids alone someplace to do errands etc. Usually walking through the store we get one comment the most. “Wow! You have your hands full.” It’s fine the first time but by the time you leave the store and you have heard it about ten times it’s not as amusing. The funniest part is that usually this gets said to us when we don’t even have all of our kids with us.

Some time back I was leaving my doctor’s office after an appointment. I had two babies with me nearly the same age but clearly of very different nationalities than me and each other. A nurse held the door for me and my stroller and as she glanced at the babies faces she said, “Well obviously they aren’t both yours.”

A while back I was on my way into a store. I had two of our kids with me and they were about 6 and 9 months old respectively. The 6 month old looked very much like Dora. She had fair skin and lots and lots of dark hair. The 9 month old was Puerto Rican and had beautiful deep chocolate colored skin. I had arrived at the store a couple minutes before it opened so I was waiting in the entry way. The kids were in a double snap and go stroller in their infant seats. A women approached me, looked at the babies, and asked if they were twins. Though I was surprised she thought this as the babies looked so different, I told her that they were not, just very close in age. She kept staring at them and saying to me “Are you sure they are not twins?” I told her I was very sure.

Once we were at the Verizon store dealing with some phone issue I was having. We only had one foster daughter at this time. She was adorable and bopping around the Verizon store. When we approached the counter, the salesperson said “Is that your daughter?” As new foster parents, we weren’t that suave with our vague answers to such questions so we said, “No. She’s our foster daughter.” He looked very confused and asked me “What does that mean?” I explained to him that her parents couldn’t take care of her so we were caring for her instead. His immediate response was “Why would anyone want to do that?”

There seems to be this magical thing that happens when you put two or three children into a stroller at the same time. Immediately you start to get people asking if you have twins or triplets. One combination raising such a question was our very radiant white caucasian daughter and our adorable asian foster son. Another combination was three kids of all different nationalities and ages.

A few times we have had children that bear a striking resemblance to each other and are of nearly the same age. This happened with two little girls placed with us early in our experience as foster parents. People frequently would look at the girls and ask us how old our twins were. Julie found it highly amusing to respond with, “Well this one is 2 and this one is 3.”

We like to take walks to the local parks and beaches from time to time. This generally involves a double stroller and a triple stroller. We have had people stop their car next to us and ask if all the children are ours or if we are a daycare.

Another amusing comment we have gotten is, “You take the kids out?” This is amusing for obvious reasons. Of course we are not going to keep them locked up in the house! They actually can handle being in public just like any other children.

Once I was having a snack with my daughter and son at a coffee shop. My daughter, as I have mentioned, is about the whitest child in America. My son is a gorgeous shade of chocolate brown. At the time, my daughter was probably two and my son only a few months old. He was in an infant seat facing me and my daughter was sitting at the table. My daughter was rapturously enjoying a doughnut. When she loves something, everyone in the area can tell. She exclaims about how wonderful it is and dances for joy. A woman sitting near us noticed how happy she was and kept commenting on it. The women was a bit older and probably had the same skin tone as my son. After a few minutes, she commented that my daughter did not get my curly hair. I agreed with her without giving any detail. A few minutes later, I began to gather our things. My son was sleeping in his seat and hadn’t stirred since we were there. He was facing away from the woman. The women said, “I need to come over there and see your baby.” I smiled and said “sure” and she came over. The second she saw my son, she said in shock “He has a black mother!” I was taken aback but I said, “Yes, I think he does.” She just stood there looking at him and said, “He doesn’t just have a black mother, he looks like he has a black father too!!!” I again agreed with her. She was acting like I stole him. I wasn’t sure what to do so I just said goodbye and headed out laughing to myself.

What well meaning strangers say to us more than anything else is that we are saints and that they could never do what we do. This is the hardest comment to take because we know we are not saints. We are people who were lucky enough to have the choice about whether to experience the pain and joy that fostering brings.

The saints are the people who do not get the luxury of choice. They are our foster children who do not choose to live their lives in the shadow of parents who have often given them every disadvantage possible. They are our family and friends who are just as important in our children’s lives as we are. They love them, treat them like family, and make them feel like they belong. We did not ask our family and friends permission before we exposed them to the world of foster care but they support us and our children without complaint. The saints are also the biological parents of our kids who against all odds work hard to pull their lives back together to get their children back. They are the parents who allow their children to remain in contact with us after they regain custody because they understand that we love their children too.

Hope for DCF…I have seen it myself!

Last Sunday I read an article in the Boston Globe about how the number of children being removed from families and placed in foster care has reached an all time high in this area. This is supposed to be a result of the recent death of a child that everyone seems to think should have been prevented by DCF.

I actually heard a news reporter say that if “the system” is working correctly it really should prevent any harm coming to children whatsoever.

Ordinarily the Department of Children and Families (DCF) is given the impossible task of determining which will be more damaging for a child: remaining with their biological parents and risking abuse or exposing them to the trauma of being removed from their family to be placed in foster care. I don’t know about you, but I think this is an impossible task. No matter how you look at it, this decision involves the values and opinions of DCF personnel being applied to the complex life of a family.

As I read articles, listen to conversations, and watch news broadcasts, I am struck by how judgmental “we” are being about DCF and the decisions they make.

I have certainly experienced how “the system” works and I definitely have strong feelings about my experiences. I was told when we started fostering that we would encounter all types of scenarios and workers in our experience as foster parents. Some of those experiences and workers would be “good” and some “bad.”

This has proved to be more true than I could ever have imagined.

I have sat in meetings where it was clear to me (and the majority of other adults present) that a parent was unfit to parent and giving them custody of their child was a bad idea. I have watched workers in this same meeting tell the parent what a good job they were doing and how well they had done earning the right to have their child reunified with them. I have also been berated by these same workers in these same meetings for being too critical of biological parents and too demanding the the child’s needs could not be met by reunification with their family.

Each parent with a child in care “must” complete tasks on a service plan to get their child back. Some of these tasks might be parenting classes or passing drug tests. I have seen parents told that they were making sufficient progress with their service plan when they had not completed a single task on the plan. This is definitely disheartening at best.

I could go on about the negative things I have seen…and I may in the future but for now, let me talk about the things that I see that I think should be encouraged.

Maybe instead of only focusing on the mistakes DCF has made, we should focus on what has gone right. On the successes that have been brought about by those who have gone above and beyond to do their job well.

I have seen workers at DCF go above and beyond for children in our home. One little boy we had with us wanted his bike from his biological parents home. When his social worker heard about it, she arranged to pick up his bike from his parents’ home and bring it to our house. For this little boy, this meant having a piece of his home with him at a difficult time when he missed his family.

I have sat in the office of a supervisor in DCF in tears of anguish over the fate of a child in my care while she hugged me and assured me that I would get through that impossibly difficult time.

I have stood in the court room on the day of the adoption of my first child. Along with our extended family, we were surrounded by “more staff from DCF than I have every seen at once” as the judge presiding over the adoption put it. Our social workers were there just to join with us in celebrating the joy of knowing our little girl would never be leaving our arms. One of them wasn’t even supposed to be working that day but she came just to share in the celebration of a permanent home for a child.

I have received countless calls and text messages from our family resource worker after normal business hours to offer us support and encouragement at challenging times. I have been told on many occasions that though she would be on vacation, she would just be a phone call away if we needed her.

One of our social workers moved to a different office to work before we finished the adoption of our daughter. Not only did she come back to the area for the day of our adoption finalization but she also stopped by our house later on the same day of the finalization to bring a gift for our daughter.

One social worker I have worked with spent over $3000 of her own money for a Christmas party for the children in foster care. Though she was paid back for this, it took several months and she did not complain about having to front this money…not even once.

We had a preemie in our care at one time. When it was time for her to start going to visits at the DCF office with her biological mother, our social worker planned visits for first thing in the morning when the office would be at its cleanest. We were very worried about compromising the health of this very fragile preemie so we supplied cleaning materials and the social worker cleaned the visit room before our foster daughter had her visit.

One of our social workers made the first birthday cake for our son who was formerly a child in her care. She delivered it to us for his first birthday party. I can’t wait for the day that I can show him the pictures and tell him how lucky he is to have had so many people who cared so much for him from the very beginning of his days.

These “good” things are only a few of the many miracles that we have witnessed in our four years as foster parents. They are successes of DCF and they are enough to give me hope. Yes, those who work at DCF are human and they fail, but they also succeed. DCF is not the only system in society that has people who do not do their job or do not do their job for the right reasons. It is not the only system that has individuals making decisions that could ruin the lives of others. I am all for fixing what is broken but let’s apply our judgment to what is broken in a more fair manner. There shouldn’t be a spotlight only in one area because of one tragic event.

I want to take this time to send out a heartfelt thanks to those who bear the burden of caring for children in foster care. Words cannot express how thankful I am for social workers and what they do for children. I know that I could not face what they face each day without totally losing my mind. Thank you for what you do on behalf of the precious children that we care for together!

Let’s try this again…

Some time ago, I decided to start a blog to chronicle my adventures as an adoptive/foster mom. That didn’t really happen. Mostly this is because I realized that I really didn’t know how to do a blog. Thanks to my beloved sister Abby, I think I am on a roll. Here we go again!