Lunch with the family developer

I had lunch with the developer. I brought her a surprise -- all my paper work for license renewal 2 months early. She was appropriately thrilled.

She confirmed that there is a new kid in the program who everyone suspects is deeply closeted. He is also very religious, unfortunately committed to a religious tradition which is not going to make his life easier. I agreed that placing him in our house would not be a good idea. Even if everyone is right that he is gay and would be happier if he came out, he has to travel his own path.

It's sad though. Sad that we live in a world in which anyone would think that they they should try to be something they are not.

And she has no idea when they will come up with an appropriate placement for us.

She also wanted to pick my brain about how to recruit GLBT parents. Cool huh? I have her the names of a couple local groups and of the local GLBT monthly.

She talked about how difficult it is to give people an accurate picture of what this work is like. How can she be honest with them and recruit? How can she communicate to them why we do this?

It was so difficult not to tell her about the blogs, about my blog. I didn't though. I told her that there were some on-line support groups where people who were thinking about doing care could talk to foster parents confidentially. I told her that it was difficult for me to tell her about it because she was a social worker. She promised that she would not go searching on the Internet for foster parents and their support groups. I suggested that the agency could collect our stories and make them available anonymously.

It is difficult. The work is so difficult, so crazy-making, and so rewarding. There is no easy way to communicate that to people. The best way I know is to share stories, but sharing stories has risks. There are questions of confidentiality. We have to be careful.

She also acknowledged that there was something odd about trying to recruit GLBT families when they didn't even have one GLBT kid for me. I assured her that gay and lesbian parents are generally willing to raise straight kids.

She laughed.