Someone To One Up You

One of the things that people sometimes gloss over (or don’t think will be a big deal) is the trauma that children in foster care have endured. 

Dealing with the trauma is hard. 

I know folks whose children endured trauma on specific days or around specific events of the year.  So, for those children, those days or events and the time leading up to them, are pretty rough emotionally.  And rough emotionally often translates to difficult behaviorally.

For other children, trauma may have been on-going and not specific to certain days.  For these children, once they feel safe in a home, the “honeymoon” period is over; the trauma and trauma-related behaviors surface.

It’s here where the rubber meets the road.  When a child’s trauma surfaces, will the parent(s) stick by them?  Will the parent(s) show them a better example than have others?  Or will the parent(s) cast them aside just like others did?

What has been interesting and saddening to me, are to observe the people who no longer support the adoption my child has some difficult things to address.  Most people won’t say it out loud.  But their actions speak very loudly.

It comes down to this:  God has put me in this child’s life.  If I run away because things get hard, I am no better than the people who have rejected him in the past.  If I run away when things get hard, I don’t teach him to live in the real world.  Life is hard.

Everyone messes up sometime.  Sometimes when people mess up, they negatively impact the lives of others.  For children in foster care, there have often been multiple people who have messed up and impacted them. 

I’m not perfect and I never will be.  But by God’s Grace, I am still here and have the capacity to have some sort of positive impact.  And this is where I will stay.

One of my co-workers did foster care for many, many years.  He told me when this whole thing started that if I ever needed some perspective, he was certain that he would have stories that would “one-up” anything I encountered.  That’s a good perspective to have.  Things might sometimes be rough around here sometimes... but they could be much worse.

I hope and pray that people can look past the difficulties to see the kid underneath that is dying to be loved.