I don’t know if I could foster. I’m afraid I’d get too attached.

That is one of the reasons some people give as to why they don’t foster or are hesitant to foster. If I might be blunt for a moment: It’s actually a pretty lame reason.

When you foster children, the goal is to be temporary parents while the children’s biological parents seek to make changes to their lives in order to have their children returned to them. As a foster parent, you are there to be a support for the family, both the children and their parents.

In other words, you are meant to play on the same team as the biological family. When rights are terminated and children are made available for adoption, it means that something has gone wrong. The hope is to avoid this. The hope is to play your role of positive support until the children return. The hope is reunification.

When Children’s Division did our training and home studies, a part of the emphasis was on personal loss and how we cope with it. A practical reason for this is that you do get too attached to the children.

And that’s not a reason to avoid fostering. That’s a reason to jump in.

Not long ago, we said goodbye to our most recent placement. One child was very young when they came to live with us for three-quarters of a year. My wife and I took turns rocking her to sleep at night, singing lullabies, while she drifted off in our arms. We took part in experiencing many of her firsts–sitting up, crawling, standing, walking, and talking. When the time came to say goodbye, it wasn’t easy to place her and her sibling in their car seats for the last time, surrounded by boxes and bags of clothes and toys.

Your heart breaks. You cry. You face the pain of loss.

But it’s worth it to see the joy in their parents’ face as they get to welcome their children back home.

Children need attachments. Even though it is not meant to be a permanent situation, when they’re in your home, they should feel safe and loved, and like they belong. They need foster moms and foster dads who will love them like their own, albeit for a season. Even the children who have faced much trauma, who have been badly hurt, and have yet to learn healthy ways to face their pain, need someone who is willing to bear their pain and in return pour out a heart full of love.

I keep pictures of all our foster children in my office. It’s been over a year since our first placement went with family. He was only with us a few months. Still, when I see his picture, I miss him.

That will never change.

When a child lives in your home, you love him or her the best that you can, and they return home, go with other family, or change placements, a piece of your heart leaves your home and you’ll never fully fill it. It hurts.

But fostering is not about you gain or keep. It’s about what you give to a child and his or her family in the hope that their future will be brighter.

Dare to get attached. Dare to pour out your heart. Dare to face loss.

Dare to foster.

I’ve written before about how saying goodbye is tough. And as I think of our current foster kids, when reunification day comes, there will be tears. Yet, I’ve found there’s something even harder about fostering…

The hardest part of fostering is realizing there are some children that you cannot help.

One of our previous fosters was a tough case. To protect that child’s privacy, I won’t get into the details, but needless to say it didn’t take us long to realize we weren’t equipped to help the child. Part of it was training and experience. We simply have not yet advanced far enough to feel like we can handle certain behaviors and needs. One day we’ll be able to take trainings on challenging behaviors and elevated needs, but until that day, we had to learn our limits.

Now, while the child was still with us, we fought as hard as we could to get needed help for them; but ultimately we had to trust another foster family to do what we couldn’t.

Another time we found a sibling set on an adoption website that piqued our interest. We inquired, and were selected to take part in the adoption staffing meeting, where a team of people would determine which family they thought would be the best fit. The basic profiles made available to the public are often generic in these situations. When we received the more detailed, private profiles, we noted some issues but nothing that scared us off.

At the meeting, those involved with the siblings’ case expanded on some issues, but still nothing beyond what we thought we could personally handle. The problem came when we discussed resources available in the school and community. These siblings were in an urban environment and their school had several different resources to ensure personalized care in an effort to help the children succeed as much as possible. We, however, live in a rural community and in speaking with our school, we discovered that we simply did not have the same type of resources available.

Hearing this, the staffing team even asked us if we’d be willing to move closer to the city. We replied that we were not in a position to do so at the time, and so we had to withdraw from being candidates for an adoptive placement. It wasn’t an easy decision, but we felt it was the best decision.

There is something about being a foster parent that makes you want to say yes to any placement, any child. But the reality is some children need more than what you’re able to provide. It’s hard to say no, because every child deserves a home where they can feel safe and loved, a home where they can be given every opportunity to succeed, and you want to be that home. But sometimes you have to say no, because of your own limitations.

That, I believe, is the hardest part of fostering.

The latter months of 2018 came with big news for the FosterDadAdventures clan–in mid-2019, FosterDad will also be a BioDad. Since announcing that we’re expecting for the first time, the question has come up on more than one occasion: Are you going to continue to foster?

Yes. And we never had the inclination otherwise.

From the time my wife and I were seriously dating and discussing our dreams for our future family, these two realities co-existed within each of us: We wanted to have biological children, but we also wanted to foster and adopt.

Two main reasons drive this:

1. We don’t see fostering as an end to fulfilling a need within us. Yes, I’ve spent the better part of nearly 4-decades of life wanting to be a dad. Chasing a soccer ball around the yard with one of the boys or having bedtime snuggles with the baby girl makes me happy. When we had a gap of a couple of months between placements, the house felt strangely empty at times.

Yet, those things are not our primary motive in foster care. We didn’t get into fostering to serve as a placeholder until we could have children of our own. We did it for the second reason…

2. The need will always exist. In a perfect world, we wouldn’t need other families to spend weeks, months, or even years raising and caring for someone else’s children. The world we live in, however, is far from perfect. Sometimes Children’s Division has no choice but to remove kids from their home for a period of time. When that happens, and no other family is available to take in the children, then the kids need and deserve a good home to feel safe and loved.

Having a biological baby doesn’t change that reality, and it doesn’t change our desire to provide such a temporary home for children in need.

And I want to encourage you, as well, dear reader: If you have never considered fostering, then please think and pray about it, whether or not you have your own biological children in your home. Maybe it’s not right for you or maybe you’ll find that you can help meet this need as well.

Sometimes waiting is the hardest part.

When my wife and I were first licensed as foster parents, we waited over three months before we received the call for a placement. (We do live in a less populated area, mind you. And after the first call came, there was a sudden bursts of phone calls from different circuits asking if we could take placements.) Now, having had our placements move on, we wait again.

Sometimes I feel frustrated in that wait. We have this house. We have these rooms. We signed up for this. That’s when my wife gently reminds me that it’s okay to not get a phone call. While we want to be there for kids in need, it’s a better thing to not have children in situations where the state must remove them.

Sometimes the system itself adds to the frustration. Recently, we were asked if we could take a large sibling set on a placement change. We said, “Yes,” and we started to prepare our house–a new set of bunk beds, a crib, booster seats… We even almost bought a car to accommodate. Then we received the news, “We decided we’re not moving the children at this time after all.”

All of this creates a roller coaster of emotions while we wait.

Patience is a virtue, they say. So, instead of dwelling on the frustration, what are some positive things that can be done while you wait (if you find yourself in a similar situation)?

You can play catch up. We all have favorite hobbies and past times. TV shows we like to watch and books we like to read. Foster parent, adoptive parent, or bio parent–having kids changes the amount of time you can devote to such things. Drastically. The quiet moments of the in between can be a time to catch up until you happily get behind again when the next placement comes.

You can work on “you”. We all have growth to do. We can all be better men and women, better dads and moms. Having children can expose some of your weak points–things that make us impatient, upset, or lazy. The in between can provide space to evaluate yourself and your strengths and weaknesses in care-giving. Then you can work on these, seek to improve, and seek to be better for the next round.

You can work on “us”. If you have a spouse, a significant other, or bio or adoptive children of your own, then the in between can provide a great opportunity to grow as a parent or as a couple. Fostering impacts your relationships. It can add joys as you work together to help children in need, but it can also add stresses as you face the trauma experiences they bring into your home, not to mention the change of environment and routine that comes from adding new people. Use the in between to recover and grow. Go on some extra date nights. Take a trip as a family. Spend one-on-one time with each of your children.

You can pray. As followers of Jesus, prayer is important to us. I’ve found the in between to be a good time for focused prayer, and maybe you’ll find it to be the same. You can pray for the children who have been in your home, that they might find peace, stability, and healing. You can pray for the children who will one day be in your home (even if you don’t know their names or faces), that your own hearts would be prepared to nurture them, provide them safety, and help them in their healing process.

What do you think? What other suggestions do you have for the waiting time of the in between?