Happy Saturday! Today has been a day filled with caring for two babies!! I love the world of foster care and adoption. I love my life and how it’s taken on a beautiful picture of connecting to others through this world even when I’m not active with a placement in my own home. I can honestly say my world of spreading the news of foster care and having other families join me in this journey.. gives me satisfaction words alone cannot convey. Well maybe if I tried hard enough to find them I could but you know what I mean right? I LOVE that I am connected to these families in this way. And I LOVE the babies..wish I could just take care of them…I’d take another baby in, in a heartbeat..but being on my own and having so much to do for my own kids..I am not sure I can actually handle that but my heart is HUGE with desire for loving on a baby..that is for sure. So today I was intrigued by these two babies I cared for..one was a biological child and another was a foster child. And it is amazing when you see how each child exists in this world…it’s a fascinating thing to be able to say I have this experience as a foster parent. I know many think if you can be a parent to your child you can be a foster parent and yes anyone can be a foster parent. I do however think it requires a great set of skills and a knack for dealing with very deep issues. It takes willingness and dedication to endure these difficult sometimes tiring subjects..but along the way you become skilled at a world where neglect is present, abuse and some very ugly negative things with children and the adults in their life are present. Very present indeed. And what you really become a part of is the damaging, damaging effects of kids in foster care. It’s a world where much pain is present..and sometimes you ride the ride with them. You become educated on many things on many different levels. And you experience much joy when they find forever homes, even if you end up not being the forever home for them!!
The journey you go through with each child is unique. There is no one journey the same. I think I like that part. Each new child is a new story. A new family. A new set of tools and skills required. But one thing that never changes is their needs. Its a CORE fundamental need of love and acceptance. It’s monumental. That fact is always the same. And what you really witness is tiny little broken hearts with broken little angel wings. And then you get your own heart involved with them..and share their pain. So your role as a foster parent?..Part Healer. God is in control of the complete healing so it requires for us to pray for these little angels..but you are working for God in these things..so you are like God’s nurse. Part Healer for sure. We aren’t just feeding them and providing for their safety and nourishment…no, we are providing depths of great emotional need that will help mend those broken little hearts and sew up the broken or ripped wings on them. And your one and only hope is they will learn to love with complete little hearts and fly with their sewn up wings. That is it!! It’s foster care stripped down. It all equates to love and needs.
If someone came up and asked me what my favorite part of being a foster parent was it would be knowing that I had something to do with their healing process. Often times a foster parent has these same life experiences. And often times we learn in the midst of taking on a new child..we often times have some of the same beasts in our own past. There are times when you are going through something with a child in foster care that you recognize something in them..because you recognize it in your own self. It is not uncommon for traumatized adults to choose this line of work BECAUSE of their own childhoods and what part they want to play in changing these things for children. Not uncommon at all. We all have ways of conquering inner demons, taming the beasts within ourselves and going out into the world to make a postive difference to a child because it’s a mindset of knowing and relating in ways some other adults can’t. Some foster parents were in foster care as children. Some foster parents were simply adopted and want to help out with the process of finding good homes for kids. Whatever exists for the foster parents, you can usually find some experience they relate to with foster kids that helped them decide they wanted to give back and this is how they do it.
One thing that can never be taken for granted is each child in foster care suffers in some way. I never realized how traumatic childhood experiences could be for the children while they are in actual foster care until I became a foster parent, and I never realized how unresolved childhood issues could affect adults later in life until I found I related a little too well.
I find it incredibly interesting that life is like a painting..a picture constantly being drawn out onto the canvas. The picture is always everchanging though. The colors are like seasons, bright and bursting forth like anger within..and yet blinding like the sun that joy often can do for us. We as the painters of our own pictures have our “paints” all representing different experiences and circumtances…we set out to paint our own life. Is it really uncommon that spring, summer fall and winter could represent our inner self in colorful ways? Sometimes as people we burst forth with great happiness and joy and reflect all these magnificent colors and we are just in full bloom and other times we are cold and dark and just bare like a tree in mid winter. With nothing to offer because we are trying to find warmth inside ourselves. So life is like the tides..constantly moving. Painting for us our life on a canvas. Foster care is like this…constantly changing..flowing from one situation to another…and with each day we progress to the place of healing. To the place where every human being seeks…to find that place..whether it be a place in a family, a biological connection…or a place they can simply say they belong. At the end of the day…that NEED in us all is the same force. We all have the need to have our own paintbrush…We all just have different paintings to paint.
That’s all the love I have today folks…but I’ll be back!
Sully
A Place called Home 
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