"Loving too much"

Yesterday Raizenboys had a post on a topic near and dear to many of our ... bile ducts. You know, that comment where people tell you that THEY could never do foster care because THEY would love the children too much, or get too attached? Oh yeah, THAT topic. Raizenboys, are you listening? The sound you hear is the collective gnashing of teeth and general groaning of everyone who has given back the cold hard stare at the piece of silliness who has just suggested that we are somehow more shallow, less loving, than they are.

I want to hasten to add that this is not the same, at least from my perspective, as the person who has decided to wait to be matched with a child for adoption and does not want to do foster-to-adopt. People who have made this choice have usually thought about it more carefully and not thoughtlessly toss out the opinion that their love is deeper and stronger than those of mere foster parents.

I have no trouble when people tell me that they have decided that they want to spare their children the very real grief of losing a sibling, or say that they themselves just don't want to go through that particular experience if they can help it. It is an extremely unpleasant experience.

The problem of course is the assumption that it has anything to do with too much love.

There is no one way that we cope with pain of saying goodbye to kids. When we love them deeply and believe they are going where they should be, then it is easier. Some of us have found that that though we miss the child, we are surprised at how much our joy for the child compensates. When a child leaves and goes to a home that you don't feel is safe, well, that bites the big one. That hurts and hurts for a long, long time. Loving the child is of course part of that, but so is anger. Since I am in a program that rarely take kids who are going home, I have not had to deal with that one.

I have had to deal with accepting that I was not able to meet a particular child's need. A child has left not because they were going to their legal or "forever" parents, but because they were not making it here. That emotion, and I know it, is not the simple missing of a child. For me it is feeling inadequate, feeling guilty for the pain I have caused or added to.

This is too simple, but there is joy in seeing a child move to the family they love and where you know they will thrive, and there is pain in seeing a child go to a place where you think they will be unsafe, or leave because you could not give them what they needed. Those things hurt.

But the answer is not in loving them less, in caring about them less. A foster parent who can watch a child go back to a possibly abusive situation and feel no pain because they do not love the child much is ... I want to say a monster. Certainly a very, very bad foster parent.

It isn't easy. Not everyone can do it.

But being good at it does NOT mean loving less.