Letters from Pemberley

We’ve told a lot of our friends and family about our decision to become certified foster parents.  The responses have ranged from “That’s great!” to “I could never do that!” to “Are you insane?”

Regardless of where on the spectrum of responses you are, here are some of the factors in this decision.

• LA County has the largest number of foster children in the nation.  The need in LA County is twenty times higher than Ventura County, where we used to live.
• If foster kids age out of the foster system at 18 without being adopted, 50% of them are out on the streets within months.  Half of LA’s infamously large homeless population are former foster kids.
• Foster children can be removed from their homes for a variety of reasons.  Common reasons include parent’s drug use, prostitution, poverty (children picking through the neighbor’s trash cans to try to find food), homelessness, physical abuse, sexual abuse, and severe disabilities that the bio parents can’t care for.
• While we’re certifying to foster-to-adopt, the current trend in the CA courts is to try to reunify children with their biological parents.  The ideal for any child is for his biological parents to clean up their act, get sober, get a job, have a place to live, and be able to care for their kids.  Quite often, bio parents will have jumped through enough hoops to get back their kids after some months, but many of the foster parents we’ve met have had their foster kids come back repeatedly when the bio parents fall into bad habits again.
• The timeline from a child entering the foster system to having parental rights of bio parents terminated (and thus child eligible for adoption) can be 2 years at least.  This is not a quick process.
• Over half of the kids in foster care in LA County are hispanic, and about a third are African American.  Only ten percent are white.  It is likely that our future children will not look like us.
• About half of the other parents I’ve met in foster training are single moms and lesbian couples.  This probably should not have surprised me; after all, those demographics are not going to have children in the traditional way.  All of the women I’ve talked to have been super nice and really seem to care about kids.  I’ve been really challenged that if you believe as I do that the best thing for children is to be raised by a mother and a father, and if you’re solidly married yourself, opening your home to children is the most concrete way to match your actions to your words.  Facebook status updates are not going to provide a safe, secure home for the 6 year old daughter of a drug addict prostitute who picked through the trash to find food to keep her 1 year old brother alive before DCFS took her and placed her with two of the women I met a couple weeks ago.  I believe she is in a better situation now than she was last year.  But I wish we’d been certified at the time to be able to take her and her brother in so that she could grow up in a home with a safe, positive father figure.  Families like ours are needed, desperately.
• Our agency, Koinonia Family Services, invests a lot of energy into training their foster parents.  They don’t want to burn us out on our first placement.  The application has a place to check off things you think you can handle.  We said yes to any race/ethnicity, boys or girls (though Tommy really prefers a boy), maybe a sibling group of two children (we will be certified for two and possibly three if we put a crib in our room), but not a severely disabled child (because I wouldn’t be able to care for their needs adequately with the other young children in my home) and not a child with a history of violence (ditto).  We’ve been advised to stick to birth order, so we will only be taking children younger than ours, and we will be asking a lot of questions about molestation because we need to protect the kids we already have.
• LA County has the most onerous requirements for foster homes in the areas served by our agency.  In addition to locking all our cabinets with any chemicals and getting lock boxes for our knives, vitamins, etc, we’ll have to move one of the girls out of their room (because there can’t be more than two children per room), get a landline phone for the first time since 2008, have our fingerprints sent to the FBI (this is probably standard but sounds cool and hardcore), and have monthly visits to insure we’re keeping our liquids locked up, our furniture bolted, all our fire extinguishers in good working order, etc.  We’re inviting a lot of government oversight into our home in order to foster.
• We have always known we wanted to have six children.  We’ve known for years that we wanted to adopt.  The only thing preventing us before now was the no-more-than-two-kids-per-bedroom rule in our 3 bedroom house in Thousand Oaks.
• The kids are all on board and excited.  We talk often about saving toys for the foster baby, Tommy really wants a little brother, and Janie is insistent that everyone else in the family gets to be a big sister/big brother, and it’s her turn to be the big sister.
• Once we get a child, we won’t be able to post pictures publicly for privacy reasons, so we’ll be making the blog private.  Even on here, you won’t be seeing a lot of pictures of our new child.
• We might not know that much about the situation that landed our child in foster care, and we’ve been advised to be cautious about sharing what we do know.  If, God forbid, some misunderstanding happened and my own children were placed in foster care, I would not want strangers knowing every detail of their lives!  So please understand that there’s a reason we won’t be saying a lot about why our child is not with his or her bio parents.
• Since we’re asking for a young child, it’s likely that we’ll be ordered to take them to visit their birth parents at a neutral location (our agency’s office in Carson, an hour away in no traffic, or the closest DCFS office in Canoga Park, 30 minutes away in no traffic) an average of 3 times a week.  We have no say; it’s completely what the judge orders.  Come February, I’ll be spending a lot of time in the car.  I can’t bring the other kids along for security and privacy reasons, so I’m already compiling a list of babysitters to watch them since Derek won’t necessarily be able to come home at the times I need to go.
• Finally, whenever it just seems like too much inconvenience, I have to remind myself of the WHY again.  This video does a really good job of showing the foster experience from the child’s eyes.

That’s enough for now.  I am certainly grieving the loss of our comfort, the convenience of being 100% in charge of my kids’ schedules, and the flexibility of being able to leave the state whenever we want without court approval!  I’m going crazy on the kids’ Halloween costumes this year, knowing that I may not have the energy to sew anything again for a long time.  I’m trying to soak in as many snuggles and peaceful reading times on the couch, knowing that life will be much more hectic and stressful this spring.  I’m trying hard to front-load our school year and all of the kids’ activities, knowing that we will not be on our A game with another child in the mix.