Gain and Loss

Loss. It is what makes foster care so hard.

Mother's Day was yesterday. I was really hoping I would have had my license in the mail by then. I am still in a season of waiting. My day will come.

I was not anticipating having children in my care this soon. I didn't want my license so that I could have children so that I would be qualified to celebrate Mom's Day.

The hardest part about foster care is the loss that comes with it. The children that enter into the children welfare system don't choose it. They don't want it. They don't anticipate or embrace waking up in a strangers house where they don't know the rules. They don't know the routine. They don't know the people or the food or the location. They don't know where mommy, daddy, grandma, papa, or sometimes even baby brother or big sister are.

They don't understand that they were living in an unhealthy situation. They don't know anything else. They have adapted to their living environment. They have taken on a role that often not even many adults take on.

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I am not going into this to earn the "mom status." I am not going into this to fulfill a longing to be "mother."

My heart breaks for the women who long so much to be mothers, but can't be. My heart furies at the ladies who are mothers but don't embrace selflessness.

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I might gain a child for a day, a week, a year or a lifetime. A child may gain a stable living environment, a safe shelter, a forever home. But they will experience a loss that I will never know. I will never know what it feels like to be taken from my home and lose everything I have come to know.

Too often we use adult rational and think that a child should be happy to be in a stable environment. We fail to even try to come to a place where we relate to a child and try to fathom their grief and loss. They may not understand stable and healthy. They just know what they used to have they have no longer and that what they used to do and eat and play and live has been taken away from them.

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I want to be the momma that God has called me to. Whatever that looks like. Whenever that happens.