The part of foster care that no amount of training can prepare you for is how the relationships develop.
We didn’t treat our girls as “foster” children. We treated them as “our” children. We took them everywhere. We played together. We just went on with life. We developed a relationship with them. It was just natural. So, I still don’t know if it was from trust or just being a kid without a filter, but our oldest started telling stories from home. The biggest provider of back story for us was always our oldest.
The younger sister was a different story. When we met her, she said very few words. She would talk alone with her sister, but with us, for the most part, she would just point and grunt. Occasionally she would summon the courage to shake her head yes or no. It was weeks before she said a complete sentence. We were fostering two very different people, each with her own personality and specific wounding.
It didn’t take long at all to realize that Child Protective Services didn’t know anywhere close to the whole story. They had the main points but there was SO MUCH more happening in that house that they didn’t know about. That made things more complicated for me. I passed along all of the information that was shared with me, but watched CPS do nothing with the information. The girls had a guardian ad litem but he never even met them until just before we adopted them.
I became the download point for my oldest. The saddest part of that is she wasn’t telling me everything. I am 100% certain that all these years later there are still things I don’t know about. What I learned early in the process is that CPS doesn’t really care about the length and breadth of the depravity. That is for the foster parent to bear. Their job is to protect the children. They had enough information to take the children out of the home. That is all the information they wanted.
What is broken about it all is they were making plans to reunite without understanding the depth of abuse that actually happened. We felt very much like they were working against us. We saw the brokenness caused by events in the home and knew they were working hard to send them right back to it. The system NEVER took into account the whole environment. They were focused on the parents themselves. I heard repeated stories of things that happened away from their parents. I suppose it was all related to the specific issues of the parents, but there was abuse that happened at the home of a babysitter and at the home of a family friend. Safety of any kind was hard to come by for them.
They did have extended family that helped to the extent they could. I was told though, that when family was around things were very different. The parents were decently skilled at hiding the truth from their families.
Without a doubt, the hardest part of foster parenting is loving a child or children with all you have with full knowledge you may lose them. If the system weren’t so broken, maybe it would be easier. In our case, I was hearing story after story of solid depravity and abuse while knowing the plan was reunification. It was the type of stress that breaks people. We survived literally and only by the strength of God in our lives. I’m sure that if they had ultimately been returned to that home I would have never been okay again.