This IS Indeed Us
There are 4,000 kids
in foster care in SC, and 600 kids waiting for forever families. This Is
Us- South Carolina.
For a long time, I have recoiled in horror as the media
always seems to portray foster parents as heartless and abusive people. Finally, the tide seems to be turning with
the movie, The Great Gilly Hopkins,
and now This Is Us. These
are the foster parents I know in our community.
Our community is full of foster parents who make great sacrifices, take
on great risks, and greatly invest in children from hard places as depicted on This Is Us this season.
Fostering is the first thing perfectionist Randall has waded
into without assurances of success. And,
as Randall points out, fostering is indeed
“as hard as they said it was going to be.”
I am praying this show gives other “perfect” American families the
bravery they need to risk failure by investing in a child who needs the love of
that idealistic family they are holding so tightly to.
Randall is shocked, like many overzealous newbies, that once
a family is licensed a social worker will indeed drive to your house and drop
off a child/children in less than 10 minutes. They leave sometimes without
having a correct last name or birth date, much less knowing about allergies, or
having a clue about what that child has experienced the past 12 hours. They leave you with 14 hours of training, a piece
of paper, someone else’s most prized possession, and a little precious, injured
soul. Sometimes you can start your first
“day” together at 5pm with dinner and time to talk, but sometimes its 11pm or later. Sometimes they stare blankly at you with
fear, trembling quietly, or screaming through tears, and other times they run
around wildly fueled intensely by anxiety. There is no real way to prepare for
such strong emotions, except to ensure that you have support in the wings. This is where Fostering Faithfully comes in. The
relationships built through support group becomes a network of people to call
for help, ask questions, or cry with after feeling traumatized yourself by what
you now know as more than just another story on the news of abuse/neglect.
Randall rushes to the door to stop the caseworker questioning,
“Are you going to leave? She’s not okay.” The caseworker’s response is spot
on. “Yes, that is correct. She is not
okay. She was just taken from her family and brought to a stranger’s house.” Randall thinks he can win her over with trite
advice from blogs, by giving a house tour, and saying their names over and
over. It just isn’t that simple. No matter how spectacularly you feel “ready”
the child and the foster parents have fears to overcome and trust to build,
which takes time and work.
He is sorely disappointed with an aggressive interaction,
and heads to bed with a classic
foster parent move: the baby monitor hidden in his daughter’s room. This made me chuckle since the “baby monitor
trick” is something that always helps us cope with our own first-night
fears. I am sure when the 12 year old foster child entered
the biological kids’ bedroom in the middle of the night every person in America
took a long, deep, scared breath. I was relieved
when the writers chose the high-road again.
After all, there is enough negative stereotypes of foster kids in the
world. She really just had questions
about figuring out how to best “survive” in her new home. This
is often the main objective of foster children each day, just figuring out how
to meet their needs. Many foster
children are normal kids that just need to learn to relax and be a kid again,
knowing a loving caregiver will meet their needs physically and emotionally.
Foster parents have
the great honor and overwhelming task of earning trust they didn’t violate and
of meeting basic needs, so foster kids know how to thrive, not just survive. When the new foster child finds out that they both
kids in the family have iPads, she says, “This place is crazy.” It has been our great joy to share our own
wonderfully “crazy” life with foster children who’ve been able to enjoy
boating, hiking, swimming, camping, riding 4 wheelers, and playing in the creek
and river, which seem like crazy wonderful
experiences to kids who’ve been busy worrying about too many adult things or
left to figure life out alone while a parent is distracted by drugs.
I am breathing a sigh of relief that the writers of This Is Us seem really in tune with what
foster care is actually like, and while many Americans find the emotional storyline
captivating, I hope Americans will actually realize that they can have their
own family love story by opening their hearts to the idea of foster/adoption,
following through with all the unglamorous paperwork to start the story, and
saying that first fearful “yes” to see what story God will write with their
family’s gift of love.
There are 4,000 kids
in foster care in SC, and 600 kids waiting for forever families. This Is
Us- South Carolina.
