So after putting our now 4-month-old foster baby, screaming with a combination of stranger anxiety and being over-tired, in the car with her social worker to go to her visits just now, I'm going to write a little bit about the layers.

(This is based solely on my opinion and experience, and on my understanding of Massachusetts DCF policy and practice, which may be flawed.)

This is related to the earlier post I made about the issue of "giving them back." The plan for the vast majority of children in care is to reunite them with their birth families, so "giving them back" is part of our job as a foster family; we are not a designated pre-adoptive family. People ask me a lot about becoming attached and now that our foster child has been with us much longer than we originally expected (3 days has turned into 2 months, and looks to be at least a few weeks more, maybe longer), I answer that there seems to be, almost daily, a new layer to how difficult it will be to finish up our placement. Yes, we are attached; every day more so.

When the baby came to us she was a 9-week-old, non-interactive, newborn lump made of needs. She slept about 20 hours out of every day. She ate, we changed and bathed and dressed her, we held her and cooed to her, and she is what I call an "easy" baby--slept well (and still does), and once we'd sorted out some feeding issues, ate well and was generally content. She was cute but didn't really "do" much.

Within a few weeks, she had grown a lot, and started smiling at us. She was awake for longer stretches, and one day I realised she was starting to really look at me like I was her mom, which for all intents and purposes, I am. That was definitely an added layer of difficulty for me, relative to the fact that at some point, she'll be leaving us. Not that she will ever be 6 years old and ask her family, "Hey, what happened to that lady who took care of me when I was a baby?" because one of the gifts we as parents are given is that our children generally won't remember much before their 5th birthdays. . .so they won't remember when we let them roll off the bed, or when we let them scream in the crib for a half hour just so we could take a shower, or when we forgot to test the water from the sink-sprayer and accidentally gave them a cold shower. I know that even though she knows me as her primary caregiver, she will forget me, probably sooner rather than later. But the fact that I know she feels I am her mom gives me a new layer of difficulty when it comes time to let her go, because yes, it's good and What We Want to reunite her with her real mother, there will be part of me thinking, "How can I take this child from the only mother she really knows?" (she has a one-hour visit with her mom once a week; lately she also has a one-hour visit with dad).

So there's that. And now we are adding the stranger anxiety, which is natural in a baby her age and a sign that she is developing normally and that she is able to form an attachment to people (issues of attachment are so critical when it comes to foster care and adoption--we want children to strongly attach to someone--even if it is not their birth parent--as it is crucial to their ability to be empathetic, sympathetic, understanding of the range of emotion, trusting of people, etc). But it is not at all easy for me, when instead of the newborn lump I used to be able to pass to anyone at anytime and she was just happy to have a warm pair of arms to lie in, I have this squalling, howling baby looking at me like, "WHO IS THIS?!" when I put her into the arms of her social worker to go to her visit.

(I just answered the phone and it was the social worker saying she forgot to ask when her last feeding was. . .and I could hear the baby still howling in the background 30 minutes after they left. She is still very unfamiliar with her father, who had not seen her for at least 6 weeks, which at that point was about half her life, and who is a teen aged boy, so you can imagine how un/natural his interactions with a baby must be).

So, again, these are issues that are mine, not the baby's. She will be fine, no matter what, because I am building her a good foundation for loving, trusting relationships with caregivers. But I must admit, despite my big talk in the past (and the present) about how I know this is just part of the job, the letting go, I am beginning to dread it. I have to remind myself more than I used to about how she is not for keeping, is not ours, not mine. I have to shake myself out of daydreams more often. My favourite coping mechanisms (despite the fact they often don't serve, but old habits die hard) are magical thinking (if only X, Y, Z happens, everything will miraculously be easy, happy, glittering and dipped in chocolate) and avoidance. Even if I chose to avoid thinking about our foster child moving on, I get a reminder every week when she is whisked off to a parent visit; there has only been one week of the 8 she's been here that I haven't had at least one contact with "the system"--her social worker, our social worker, WIC, the court investigator, the baby's attorney, etc, etc).  It would be easy and comfortable for me to avoid the truth, so I really do force myself to stay in the reality of the situation. Almost everyone who compliments me on her cuteness is told she is a foster child, if the conversation lasts beyond, "She's so cute!" "Thank you; I agree." (babies are great conversation starters; strangers almost never talk to each other except about babies), more as a reminder to me than anything else. I don't want praise for my saintliness, as you know; and I am not minimizing her connection to us or her place in our family, I am merely acknowledging it, and reminding myself.

My magical thinking bubbles are still limited, though perhaps they are more like 10 minutes a day than 5. In the back of my mind, I know how we would tweak her name to fit our family better while still respecting her birth family. I wonder if she will be potty trained earlier than my boys were. I think about finding a sister for her, about decorating a bedroom just for her, about how we will need at least 4 bedrooms in our next house so we can fit more foster kids. And while I really do try to keep a lid on that sort of stuff, it's natural for a parent--even a short-term parent--to dream a future for a child, and when the time comes to give her back to her bio-family, part of me will mourn the fact that my dreams for her and for our family won't pan out the way I sometimes hoped. Actually, the hardest part may be that we will likely never get to know how her life turns out, so long as it doesn't turn out "badly." That is to say, if the reunification of her bio-family happens, and she does not come back into the system (if ever I have prayed in my life, I've prayed that if she leaves our care, she never has to come back into foster care. . .as if her mother can take responsibility and parent her appropriately, by sheer force of MY will), there is no way we will ever know how things turn out for her. And that will take some getting used to, as I have never been good at letting people go. I am in touch with all my exes; I try to keep tabs on how people I "used to know" are doing, because I really do hope they are doing well. I want everyone to be happy and find peace and be successful in their lives; I have a notion that as the years go on, it will be hard for me to accept that some or even most of our foster children will leave us and we will never know what happens after the door closes behind them.

Meantime, I try to flow like water around stones; I take each moment as it comes. . .with three children in my care there is always a need to fulfill, not to mention taking care of myself and being part of a couple. So there's plenty of grunt-work to distract me from the larger picture, but I do find myself sighing now and again. I have said out loud, "What will I do when you leave me?" But I also ache in my heart for her mother, whose heart I know must also ache. And a wise friend reminded me in a comment on my last post that our children--even the children we give birth to--are only "on loan." And despite my protestations that I am not a saint, that I am doing this selfishly (I love babies; I want lots of kids around; I enjoy and think I am good at mothering; I want to dress little girls in frilly pants), one of the things that was said to me that sticks, is when my friend Gamal urged me not to sell myself short, because the butterfly's wing can start the gale. There is a purpose to this process far greater than my personal pain, of which there will be some, I know. And remembering that larger purpose helps me deal with the other stuff. There are many lives entwined in this, and it is messy and sad and my part in it is actually the part that can bring some light and some joy to an otherwise disastrous situation for this giggling, whooping, wiggly baby.

She loves me. It breaks my heart. But that's OK.

So I'm going to write a couple of posts over the next however long, about this foster parenting experience. This is all my personal experience and opinion, and my personal understanding of Massachusetts DCF policy and procedure.

First I wanted to write a little about the phrase I hear from nearly everyone who finds out we are fostering: "I couldn't give them back!"

When I first started hearing this, while we were doing our training ("MAPP" Model Approach to Partnership in Parenting; 6 nights, 4 hours each night), it kind of upset me, because it seemed to imply that I was somehow more hard-hearted than the person saying it, because while they could never give the children back, I somehow could. Well, trust me, when we first thought about foster parenting, one of the first doubts I had was that I would not be able to give them back.

One thing that going through all the training did was to give me a clearer understanding of how children come into DCF (Dept. of Children and Families) care, what the goals are, and what the expectations are of foster families. There are two primary goals when a child comes into care.The first is to preserve families whenever possible. This can mean that the parents get substance abuse treatment, or counselling about domestic violence, or help finding a home, etc, etc, as needed, and meet certain goals in order to be reunited with their children. If children being returned to one or both parents is not possible, efforts are made to place the child in custody of willing and able relatives: grandparents, aunts/uncles, etc. Sometimes there are child-specific placements to non-relatives--the cases like this that we heard about were often teenagers who were either removed by DCF from dangerous homes, or who were thrown out of their homes by parents, and who then went to live with the parents of a friend or schoolmate, rather than to a relative, or to a shelter.

The second goal is permanency. Children in DCF care are no longer allowed to languish for years in foster care or group homes, and every effort is made to move them as seldom as possible from one care situation to another (understanding the importance of this is one reason we have agreed to keep our current foster child well beyond the initial "three days" we were told to expect to have her, and beyond our personally preferred two-weeks-or-less). If it becomes clear in 6 or 12 months (which is still a long time for a child to be "in limbo") that the parents are not living up to the plan for the family, and that it is not likely the parents (or another relative) will be getting custody of the child, proceedings begin to arrange a permanent family for the child (ie, parental rights are terminated by the court).

I've come to think that many people who are not involved with foster care tend to think of it in terms of adoption, rather than "just" being a foster family, not neccessarily planning to adopt. Our training session included about 1/3 people who were specifically looking to adopt children from DCF care. While their pre-adoptive placements always have some risk involved, matches are made carefully so as to minimize the chance of "disruption" (the adoption does not become final and the child leaves the pre-adoptive home). Families who are strictly fostering, without specific plans to adopt, have a different job, and that is to care for children until their permanent plan is put in place and enacted. Since we know the primary goal is to preserve families, we accept each placement knowing that this is not a child for us to keep (even if we sometimes wish to, even if we think we are "better" for the child than her/his birth family, even if we fall in love), this is a child who needs us to care for her/him until s/he is returned to her/his parents, other relatives, or made free for adoption. And yes, if a child in our care became free for adoption, we would be first in line, and at this point, we would of course consider it.

When "giving them back" is the whole point of your job as a foster parent, you know that although it will be difficult, maybe heartbreaking, to let them go when the time comes, you know the time is coming so you do have a mindset from the beginning that "can" or "can't" isn't an option--you will give them back. Also, since our family's drive to become a foster family is our sense of compassion for families in crisis, we try to always think of and discuss our foster child's birth -family with a sense of compassion for their difficulties and hopefulness for their successful reunion. As much as we might dote on and adore the child in our care, she has a mom who loves her and we always, always hope that they can be together. Babies belong with their families.

We talk every day about our foster child's family, how much they must miss her and how we hope they are ready to take care of her again soon. Even though she is too little to understand, on the day of her weekly scheduled (supervised) visit with her family, we say things like, "You're going to see Mommy and Granddaddy today! Yay for you!" We refer to ourselves as Miss Jeniphir and Mr. Tim. She is our boys' friend, not their sister or even foster-sister. She is visiting, not living with us. These are ways we protect our hearts by not losing sight of the fact that she is not "ours," and (hopefully) reminds our boys that she is not staying forever.

I do allow myself about 5 minutes a day for "magical thinking" about all those "what if's"--if she became free and we adopted her, etc, etc. . .but I quickly put that aside and get back to reality. I keep in communication with her social worker (and ours) so I have a realistic picture of the family situation and the likely future for this child. This particular family's issues are not such that it's likely mom would surrender her for adoption, nor that the court would move to terminate rights. It does seem possible-to-likely that she will come into care again at some point (we are rooting for mom to get her act together so this doesn't happen but the social worker doesn't seem hopeful that this will be the last involvement), but unlikely she will ever be free for adoption. Knowing this is important, too. It keeps me from getting carried away with wishful thinking.

So I used to get a little offended that people seemed to be implying that I am somehow colder than they are when it comes to "giving them back," but now I realise that it's usually just that they are (a) feeling sympathy/empathy for what will surely be a difficult thing to deal with (keep in mind, we haven't had to give one back yet! We know it will be a grieving process for all of us) and (b) unaware of "how it works." Most people seem to think of it in the context of fostering-to-adopt, which colors their perception.

It's my job to give them back. I want to give them back. As a foster parent, I'm part of the larger system whose goal is to preserve families and provide permanency for children. I actually want to, in 15 or 20 years, be able to say that I am the mother of 100 children! And if I didn't give any back, that would never be the case.