Love: From a Fostercare and Adoption Perspective

 Love.

 

Sometimes love looks exactly like love for bio kids. When you look at them, your heart feels so full it could burst. You feel sunshine streaming out of your pores, and you feel like you’re the luckiest girl in the world to be their mama. It’s the easiest and most natural thing in the world. 

 

But.

 

Sometimes love looks a lot different than love for your bio kids. Your heart may not feel much when you look at your child. Or worse, you may feel frustrated, overwhelmed, bitter, resentful. Sometimes you have to work for attachment. But then sometimes your love for your adopted kids feels a lot bigger and deeper because it’s so desperately fought and sacrificed for.

 

Sometimes love looks like “fake it until you make it”. Knowing that love is a concrete verb, not an abstract noun, sometimes you go through the motions even when it doesn’t feel like it. You kiss the boo-boos and snuggle and play and compliment. You clean up the vomit, you scrub the poop that’s been smeared intentionally on the walls, you endure the tantrums, the lying, the sneaking, and you act {in love} even when you don’t feel {in love} at all. 

 

Sometimes love looks like understanding your kid’s triggers. Knowing their past, and connecting it with their present so that you can respond well in the moment. Sometimes love looks like apologizing when you don’t, and trying to repair even more damage, knowing it’s not a quick fix, but that you might have sent them into months of regression. 

 

Sometimes love looks like learning six different hair textures, the fifteen different daily products needed to maintain those six hair textures, and twelve different combs and brushes. Sometimes love is recognizing how important it is to learn the hair. To always keep learning the hair, even if it means you spend a small fortune, and it takes up half the room in your bathroom closet. 

 

Sometimes love looks like education. Learning, and researching, and un-learning. Learning about trauma. Learning about the foster care system. Learning the differences in parenting kids from hard places vs. kids who haven’t endured as much. Researching adoption law. Researching the rights of your child and your own rights. Researching the effects of transracial adoption. Un-learning parenting ways that would work just fine for others, but will exacerbate your child’s trauma. Un-learning your bent towards preferences and rights to be in accordance with the law and the system. 

 

Sometimes love looks like processing guilt. That you get to see the inches marked off on the wall, that you get to see the first steps or the first day of school or the first date. That you didn’t make or grow these kids, but you get all the benefits. You get the smiles, you get the hugs, you get the “I love you, Mommy”, and somewhere, there’s a mama who’s missing it all. 

 

Sometimes love looks like advocating. No one else is going to do it. No one else can do it. The caseworkers are overworked and underpaid, the teachers may not understand the triggers, the lawyer may not hold the case as priority, the doctors and therapists may not rush the appointments. Love inside your home isn’t enough. It’s also a lot of {demanding} work outside your home. 

 

Sometimes love looks like awkwardness. It’s walking into a place where you’re the minority, where you know nothing, and asking for help. It’s trying to delicately explain the needs while also respecting the privacy. It’s telling people that your kid’s story is theirs alone to share. It’s asking teachers to change family tree assignments or baby picture assignments. 

 

Sometimes love looks like listening. To former foster youth on what it’s like to be in the system. To birth moms on navigating their loss. To people of color on what it’s like to grow up Black. To therapists and caseworkers and lawyers and teachers and barbers and moms who have walked this road before. 

 

Sometimes love looks like pursuing and navigating relationships you never would choose, for your child’s sake. For their first family’s sake. For their culture’s sake. For their heritage’s sake. Because those ties, once severed, also sever something in your own relationship with your child, and you can’t get it back. 

 

Sometimes love looks like building a community. It’s finding someone else you don’t have to explain why or how your kid is triggered, or how hard it is to love your kids sometimes; they’re not judging. It’s forming relationships and becoming best friends with people who understand things like TPR and court continuations and PTSD and subsidies and licensing and putative registries and RAD and paperwork… so much paperwork. It’s having someone else who “gets it”- who gets fostering and adoption and all the ways it’s different than typical parenting, without having to explain or educate. 

 

Sometimes love looks like being your kid’s safe place. So all the hurt and all the anger and all the injustice and all the trauma is locked and loaded and fired your direction- because they need to know, no matter what, you won’t leave. 

 

Sometimes love looks like sunshine and a literal rainbow of a family. 

Sometimes love looks a lot like hard work.