Tomorrow (Sept 13) is my oldest daughter’s 22nd birthday. That means I have been part of her life for 12.54 years. She was 9 years 5 months and 16 days old when I met her for the first time. She and her 5-year-old (5 years 3 months and 19 days) full biological sister came into our lives as foster daughters. We were their only foster placement. Hubby Guy and I woke up one morning just us and went to bed as a family of four. Just over two years later they were legally ours forever.

     I’ve decided that it is time to talk about our foster care and adoption journey. There is SO MUCH that I could share. I was talking to a friend whose family is embarking on a journey of their own with the guardianship of a child from another family. It occurred to me that I am stuffed full of experiences both good and bad that others may benefit from hearing. Here comes our story:

     I thought about foster care a lot as a teen. My mother was medically complicated and my father traveled a lot for work. I pondered what would happen if things went sideways in a hurry. I also thought about how it would feel to be part of a different family. I am not generally a very empathetic person but I could never get past the notion that foster care is a reality for way too many children. That has always made my heart hurt.

     As I got older, being a foster parent someday became something I decided I wanted to do. My brother was adopted as an infant and I always knew that adoption was something I would be happy to do. I just thought it would be way cooler to adopt an older child from foster care.  

     I didn’t get married until I was 32. By then I wasn’t super keen on the notion of having a baby. We found out pretty fast, though, that we would be unable to have a biological child.  Hubby Guy was almost 40 so he wasn’t heartbroken that we wouldn’t have a baby. We had conversations while we were dating about how old we would be by the time our children graduated from high school. We agreed that the math didn’t work in our favor.

     Hubby Guy and I are pretty perfect together for a number of reasons. I will save those for another blog. One of the reasons, though, is I found out while we were dating that foster parenting is something he had thought a lot about too. We both came to it for different reasons but agreed it was definitely for us. When we found out that we couldn’t conceive, our minds were immediately made up. That was all the validation we needed.