I don’t know if I am traveling to grieve, or traveling to heal. It is probably both.
In 2018 we made the decision to foster children. It was driven by our desire to do more with the gifts and resources we had and if I am completely honest with myself, I think it was driven by my “hero complex''. You know, the “hero complex”, where you are doing something for others to “rescue” them from the deprivation of love that is their lives. It is “the knowing'' that you can make their lives better and can heal them with your own power of love. It is the arrogant worldview that you are crushing it at this parenting thing and that these children will just be so blessed to have you as a temporary parent. That worldview was rocked over the next 3 years as we got pummeled by our “hero complex”, and had to quickly adapt to understanding how inadequate we actually are.
We have loved and cared for 5 foster children in our home in the last 3 years. We have had endless court hearings, therapy appointments, caseworker visits, parent meetings, and a whole heap of trauma. At the end of each of these cases we celebrated. We celebrated the parents who did the hard work of pulling themselves out of desperate situations to reunite with their children. We also cried a lot. We cried before we got the kids, during our time living with the kids, and after they left. I would cry when I heard their story as the casework was preparing me for who was coming to live with us. I would cry the entire time they lived with us because it was so fucking hard to take care of infants and toddlers, let alone caring for infants and toddlers who have experienced and are impacted by the trauma they have experienced in their short lives. And I would cry everytime they returned home to their parents/caretakers.. I would cry for weeks after they were gone.
This is a hard kind of grieving. It is like grieving for something that no one else outside of foster parents could understand. Your friends and family watch from the outside as you run yourself into the ground doing this job. They look on as you look absolutely haggard and willingly put yourself in the muck of someone else's trauma that quickly becomes your own trauma. They hear you say that you are done and can’t wait for a break. Then they confusingly watch as you get ambushed by the profound loss you feel as those same children who brought all the hard stuff go home. They weren’t “your” children to grieve for, they aren’t even yours to let go. But they were.
Two of our foster children who were siblings lived with us for over 2 years of their lives. They came to us as babies, not children, they were babies. We spent the last 3 Christmases together and now they are gone. We foster infants and toddlers…so look at your 2 or 3 year old and think about giving them away. We were yo-yo’d the last 2 years from being asked to adopt, to being told they are actually just going to send them “home”. Home? Their little lives are with us in every fiber of our house and lives. They are in the funny family stories, they are in the holes in the wall, they are in their now empty beds, they are in their little strider bikes now just hanging in the garage. They are in their empty seats at the table, their bath toys, their favorite parks, favorite food, the words they mispronounced, and it fucking hurts. It hurts so much. I hurt so much.
It is complicated and unfair for everyone. I am a profound advocate for the reunification of families…actually I am a profound advocate of never removing the children in the first place if we can avoid it at all cost. But sometimes that can’t be avoided, because sometimes having a relationship with a bio parent and not having them be the primary caregiver is the best thing for the child. Here is what you can’t do, you can’t keep small babies and toddlers with foster families for years and then just rip everyone away. That is no longer doing what is best for kids. We say the system is broken and this is what we mean. We remove kids who we could have reunited back with their families in a few short weeks or not removed at all, but because we (aka ‘the system’) can’t seem to move anything along at an appropriate pace, or give actual help to families who need resources like food, shelter, and jobs, they live away from their families for months! We return children who have been removed multiple times, have spent years in foster care and have watched for years as their parents continue to struggle to keep their kids safe. Broken doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface. It is an overwhelming and desperate situation and while the intention is to keep kids safe, we are missing the mark.
So…we wait and wait and wait. We don’t know what is going to happen, we don’t know if we will ever see our foster kids again, but we hope. We hope and hope and hope that they are ok. It is a very strange kind of grieving. We are grieving a loss that not many will understand, we are still trying to understand ourselves.
This is why we travel, to just be in places that we have the opportunity to heal. Travel is where I feel God, she meets me there, with my kids, with my wife, as we grieve. It is healing to be in the mountains in the presence of God, she shows up in my kids’ beautiful joy as they play in the creek for hours a day. It is so healing to wake in the morning to have your coffee on the beach. All the distractions are stripped away and you are left feeling loved and able to maybe heal from all of this. The art of travel has brought me closer to the center of “meaning”, closer than I have felt in years. It is beautifully simple to just be.
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