Foster Care

Trying to revive the blog after catching up on Liz's POTD and feeling happy that I know more about what's going with her life.  Plus, Ann is on the brink of baby #2, which you know motivates me to crank out some good breast feeding reading.  

When I turned 30, I made a list of goals to work towards by age 35.  That seemed so old at the time, right?  Now that I hit that mile marker in January, I wrote a post about how I did on those endeavors.  One item that I made no progress on / committed to was thinking about alternative ways to start a family if it hadn't happened for me naturally.  Sadly, there is a part of me that still thinks I'm not old enough to have children and be responsible for raising them to not suck.  As it turns out, plenty of people think 35 is more than "old enough" and technically I have a home and solid salary and pass for a mostly successful adult most days...so family planning time it is!

I've always been interested in adopting, and after some local news stories about the number of children in the "system" in my local community and reading a memoir (on my recommendation list from 2016 post), I decided to look more into foster care or fostering to adopt.  

I attended an information session in early March to learn about the different ways to get involved.  I was so impressed by how full the room was with people wanting to learn about opening their home to the community's families in need.  Ages ranged from newlyweds to retirees, single parents and couples, straight and LGBT.  I was one of two women who shared I was there because I hadn't met a guy I wanted to have kids with and was exploring starting a family on my own.  One man (there with his wife) came up to me after the session to say he thought it was really cool that I was looking into this and moving forward with my life and goals despite not having found "the One" yet.  

After sitting through the info session, I walked away with two takeaways:

1. Agencies work really, really hard to reunite biological families.  Parents get a lot of help and tries to pull things together and regain custody of their children.  It sounds like the success rate of these attempts is fairly low, so while I think it's wonderful and the best situation for the immediate family to stay together, I found myself questioning how much harm we were doing to these kids by continuously putting them back into family situations that are unhealthy.  That decision isn't for me to make, but it does make you wonder how bouncing a kid in and out of foster care for 18 years while their parents recover and relapse from drug addictions or anger management issues is really in anyone's best interest.  That isn't the reality for ALL cases, but it pains me to think it's not abnormal.  
2. I am not a good candidate for foster care because I travel too much for work.  Even if I had a nanny or my parents stay with the child while I traveled, they felt it was too much instability for a child already going through a crazy time.  I get it, but I was disappointed.  

Still, I am a good candidate for respite foster care--when full time foster care parents need a break/adult only time, or a traveling and can't take children with them for whatever reason.  I think this might be a nice way to get involved and at a shorter duration while I see what this foster/adoption system is like.  I submitted my application yesterday!  More details to come on the training and vetting process.