I Still Don’t Matter: An Update On Foster Parenting In a Normative World
Written by Sandra Olarte-Hayes LCSW, Director of Equity
I’ve been struggling to think of what to write for this month’s post. Each time I sit down in front of the computer to write, my mind goes blank. I shared with a friend about how hard it was to think of a topic for this month’s post and she reminded me about the requests I had gotten for updates on how things were going after my posts back in September and October about becoming a foster parent in a pro-natalist world. She also reminded me that the fact that I am so exhausted because of some of the complexities of how I am parenting is in and of itself worth writing about.
We had a young person placed with us the day before Thanksgiving and I am now full-time parenting an almost teenager. She is amazing. She is joyful, musical, and full of personality. She is loving and so so fun. I find myself so connected to her that every moment I am not with her, even when I am doing other things, a part in the back of my brain is always thinking of her…loving on her and worrying about her. I know most parents can relate. There is also suddenly a ton of conflict in my life that wasn’t here before. Some days it feels as though there is a war going on in my household between my partner and I and this beautiful child. There are constant clashes around screen time, telling the truth, the appropriate and safe age a 12 year old’s boyfriend or girlfriend can be, bedtimes, grades, eating vegetables, tooth brushing, and a myriad of other things.
A lot of this, I’m sure, sounds very familiar for parents of pre-teens but there is a lot of added complexity. First, while we’ve bonded very quickly with this child, we don’t have the years of relationship and trust-building needed to build buy-in that a biological parent would have by this age. Our kid has a lot of trauma. We just met her and she is fiercely independent. She resists all supervision and guidance in a way that is unique since she has had to raise herself in a lot of ways up until now. She gets very distressed if you try. In our disagreements, there are a lot of tears. There is a lot of anger; there is literal fear of us and it shows up often. Her whole life has changed in such a short period of time and she is in a new home, with a new family with new values, customs, and patterns. No wonder she rebels. We get it, but it is a lot. Needless to say, none of us are getting much sleep.
Other elements that make this experience difficult and complicated come with co-parenting with the state. The sheer number of appointments I’m expected to fit in each week and the fact that I have no choice or self-determination in them is overwhelming. This includes weekly individual therapy, family therapy with biological parents, and sometimes family therapy for our family (not to mention my partner’s and my own personal therapy appointments). We also have weekly visits with biological parents that we drive her to which are sometimes far away to accommodate the needs of other team members (and multiple hours long so we are left waiting around far away from home on the weekend). They are also sometimes scheduled very last minute (I found out this past Saturday that I had to start driving my kid somewhere on the following Monday). We also have monthly visits from CASA, the Guardian ad Litem, our child’s DFPS caseworker, and our family’s DFPS caseworker. Some of these visits are announced and some are unannounced, but each involves invasive questioning of this child about her life and feelings that leaves her feeling so powerless she needs to tear apart her room and re-organize all the furniture afterwards. The next few days are usually a wash.
We are lucky to have a really great team of DFPS caseworkers, CASA advocates, and Guardian ad Litems and we know everyone is doing their best trying to keep kids safe and balance the needs and priorities of multiple stakeholders, but it is true that the system just isn’t set up to accommodate our needs or make our lives any easier. Some would argue that it isn’t even set up to center the needs of children (especially children of color), families, and the needs and trauma histories of biological parents. Everyone is operating within a broken system and we know it, but it is still a system that determines most aspects of our and this child’s lives along with our parenting choices and time commitments.
We expected co-parenting with the state to be hard. We knew there would be trauma and a million appointments. It’s what we signed up for. What is parenting if not doing hard things for children? It all really is so, SO, worth it to my partner and I to do right by the children of the world and there is also so much joy and meaning. But the changes have hit us like a whirlwind and I wanted to shed some light into the fact that this is parenting and it is life shattering and hard in ways that other people don’t understand, even if it is different from what our society traditionally values and considers a family.
We are still experiencing a lack of systemic and social support and that adds to the difficulty. Two months after a normative parent becomes a parent, most parents (though of course not all) would still be on leave or at least working reduced hours. That has not been the case for us because it isn’t socially acceptable for us to take any time because what we are doing isn’t considered maternity or paternity. We work at our usual rate and there is still a lack of recognition more broadly that foster parents (and non-normative parents) are parents. I am here to assure you that we are exhausted and our worlds have been completely shaken throughout this transition.
I still feel deeply isolated among the parenting community. After the painful conversations with our friends and family this fall, we have fortunately gotten more offers of support and curiosity around our process. People are showing up better, offering to help more, and asking more questions and I am grateful. But some of the people I quoted in that first post have continued to show me that there isn’t much space for my feelings even if they came to understand what was wrong in September. So, while there is more engagement, the message here continues to be that there is not much space for my feelings across our differences….that the feelings of biological mothers must be centered at all costs, and that they are the gatekeepers to true motherhood. We are still working on it, but it is sad and my partner and I still feel very isolated even if people are offering to bring food.
I also see the subtle ways in which I feared my community’s bias would impact my kid coming to fruition. I’ve been to a few baby showers recently. One was the first baby shower since all of those painful conversations this fall in the same friend group where most of the statements in September’s post were said. There was A LOT of attention being paid to the biological children who were mostly babies and the toddlers. Our friends were very loud in their effusiveness over how special and cute they were. While this was going on (and almost the entire shower) our kid sat in the corner alone on her phone. These are friends who have spent quite a bit of time with her, have offered to babysit, have gotten her gifts. They know her well enough to come up and talk to her at an event, yet almost none of them spoke to her. I’m not even sure the mother-to-be even greeted her. In the face of bio kids, especially little ones, she was pretty much invisible.
I know that little kids are really cute, but it feels silly, almost condescending, to have to remind people that even if a child isn’t biologically related to an adult they love…even if they aren’t a baby or a toddler, they are still worthy of interest, curiosity, and excitement. They are still people and they are fascinating creatures and have whole inner worlds to explore. Even when littles are around. Why is it acceptable as a norm for them to be treated otherwise? Imagine how it might make an older foster child feel to watch such excitement and *literal* squealing over the littles and the bio kids when they are standing right there? What about for a foster child who is approaching the age of 13 where it becomes exceedingly more difficult to find a family to foster or adopt them because their age apparently makes them undesirable? My kid is worthy too, even if I didn’t birth her. Seeing the bias I anticipated play out in this subtle way was sad and infuriating. I told my community to watch out for this, to do the work to avoid it, and yet here we are.
So, that is my update. Things are better, things are still hard. I am tired and growing. There is a lot of meaning and beauty. We are moving forward.
