A single mom to three boys working hard to live my truest life. I hope as I share the beauty, the gratitude, the grief, the hard…you find inspiration + hope to show up to your life as honestly as possible.
All in Foster Care
The questions started the first outting my (former) husband & I took with our newborn. We were in his birth city & needed to go to the store.
“Ohhh, where did his dark wavy hair come from?” The cashier asked, straining her neck to see my brand new infant tucked up in my @mobywrap. She looked back & forth between L & I.
Parenting kids not born to us is a nice spotlight to see how imperfect we are 😅 I mean, parenting in general highlights our impatience, selfishness, low tolerance, it reveals trauma that may have been buried for years.
When parenting children not born to us (IMO parenting any kid ever), understanding TBRI is crucial.
Foster & adoptive mamas:
Whether your child was in your arms immediately after delivery or as a teenager, you can assume there is some layer of adoption trauma + loss.
I can tend to overwhelm my kids with heavier emotions & realities. It’s something I have to pay really close attention to, intentionally mother in the tension of honesty + age-appropriate conversations.
I believe part of the responsibility as foster & adoptive parents is helping change the narrative; for our kids. Lonnggg ago we created a narrative of saving & rescuing children from the Big Bad Wolf Parents, scooping them up meeting our own want & desire to become parents.
✨ save this as affirmations for your child ✨ I asked you what you want your child who was adopted to know, to their core. The resounding answer from dozens of you was: you are worthy, you are enough, you are loved, you can feel however you feel about your adoption.
When I had 5 kids, 4 of them biracial/Black, I was constantly given opportunities to practice responding to comments & questions.
My throat physically closes in on itself when asked or trying to be truly vulnerable & state my deepest needs. I find myself rubbing my neck, trying to squeeze the air through, sure the unsafe space is going to choke me. My whole body feels heavy and empty all at once, I want to dissolve into thin air and escape, hoping my inability to speak will make me invisible. I’d categorize this as the freeze response.
Oftentimes relationships change after we adopt & begin fostering... it’s unexpected. And it’s largely due to comments & questions from friends/family and not knowing how to educate them.
I had over 70 responses from adoptive + foster mamas sharing what they wish non-foster/adoptive parents knew.
Hey mama, if your children do not see you handling your own emotional burdens, they will not trust you can handle theirs.
Our kids have emotional burdens, no matter how wonderfully we (think we & want to) show up for them. Our kids are wise & intuitive.
Understanding trauma explosions + outbursts is necessary if we want to be good foster + adoptive moms!
I have had the privilege of really experiencing some intensity in this arena for some years. My evenings after the boys go down for bed are 99.9% of the time spent reading books + rewatching videos from Karyn Purvis on YouTube.
When we hold the privilege of parenting kids not from our wombs, there is trauma involved. If you haven’t spent years learning about & experiencing different types of trauma responses & the various ways it manifests, you may think some trauma is more visible/noticeable than others.
It’s important as adoptive + foster moms that we understand the various ways trauma changes our children’s brain pathways & bodily systems. Whats also important is knowing we get to support them during times of fight, flight, or freeze...which is also when their lid flips.
I’m a person who loves sentimental things…a person who sits in a chair and has ink etched into my skin by way of a needle to mark a change or a transition. Tattoos mean so much to me.
I am also a person that wants to do her best raising the kids entrusted to her. I don’t want my kids to be afraid of pain, unsure what to do when loss hits us, or uncomfortable talking about grief.
My favorite tattoo is of swallows. They represent the kids that will forever reside in my heart. Two of them are solid black, meant for Sage and Ira. The other five are just the outline — meant for two babies my body miscarried, two girls I fostered for over a year, and a baby girl whose adoption to us was disrupted. Each life as valuable as the next, all beloved.
‘Can you please stop talking about it? Why do you keep talking about it? Can you just stop?’ She slammed her cup of milk down.’: Foster mom’s emotional realization that ‘goodbye is coming’
“Never in my wildest imagination did I think I’d be taking family photos without a husband, my children’s father.
The 4 — and then 6… and then 7 — of us looked so good in photos together, we fooled even ourselves. Until one day I was brave enough to stare our marriage’s reality in the face and ask for help. We had 5 kids at the time and had just celebrated 6 years of marriage. The walls of our entire life crashed, the walls built with facades and fantasies I had construed to survive, because silently dying inside felt more livable than looking at the truth and what would come next.
I was informed today that goodbye is coming.
A date has been set, a plan kind of made.
None of us are ready for this goodbye.
But, it’s been looming over us since the day we said hello.
Something I've seen and even bought into until I became an adult with my own thinking is that society likes to stigmatize kids who are in foster care or who were adopted. I didn't even realize I bought into this.
They are seen as less than, unwanted, and often times "behavioral." They are labeled "the bad kid" by peers and even adults. Sometimes we don't even realize we see them this way, often it is implicit and subconscious bias deep within us...that's the trouble with our society. Things are engrained into us without even realizing it, and these things continue to churn the way our world works, spinning abusive and unjust cycles.
And sure, many of our kids's behaviors hurt other people. That is real. But, I'd argue that every single kid hurts another person with poor choices; they're all developing and learning what is okay and what is not.
We’re finishing up dinner time when our phones buzz and it’s our Group Text. You know, the place all our friends pile into the screen together to share gifs about dinner being like feeding a herd of rhinos or our sadness over not being able to afford to see Hamilton... but also share stories about our days filled with sorrow and strained relationships and stuff.
It’s our friends Kat and Luke, who have been short term-emergency placement foster parents for...what, three years now? They said yes to homing a sibling set of six First Generation Somali-American Muslim children, for just a couple nights, before they’re split up into various foster homes. Ideally, a foster resource could house all six long term; realistically, Portland is in crisis as it is, and these kids were in hotel rooms for approximately a week waiting for any home to take any of them. The moment they sent us the text, we all jumped in asking what they needed. Our community is the best. We were also all wide-eyed and grateful for the example of this family; their home isn't big by any means. Their biological daughter moved into their room while the other six children smooshed into two small bedrooms.
Slumberkins partners with Alliance of Moms and provides Hartley Bundle, May 1!
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