It has been a long, often frustrating road of red tape; however, our house was officially licensed for fostering in October. We held off on actually activating our profile as foster parents until I had healed more fully from my surgery. As I have been feeling great these past few weeks, the other day we decided to tell our case worker that we were ready to take in a baby.
And now it’s time to wait.
Five weeks? Two days? Three months? We have no idea how long it will be until we receive a placement. Even though we are hoping to receive a child into our home, it is with the grim understanding that it will only happen through an awful circumstance that surely will be traumatic for the child.
Ryan has detailed a little of his journey to our decision to foster. I suppose this is the time to explain mine. Like he said, both fostering and adoption have been on my heart for a very long time, since I was a young child, in fact. During our engagement, Ryan and I discussed adoption, even specifically foster-to-adopt. However, getting pregnant two months after we got married put that idea to the side for awhile.
It didn’t return to my heart for a couple more years. I have a distinct memory a few weeks after our miscarriage in which I was rocking Philomena to sleep and praying fervently for the future of our family. Very clearly on my heart I sensed God telling me that there was a bigger plan at work in our lives, specifically adoption. Immediately I told God that I would be open to the idea, but I needed a year to try have another natural child before we could take any concrete steps to pursue this route.
The year that followed was certainly a spiritual and emotional roller coaster. Doctors, fertility treatments, painful let-downs every month. And yet, there was something profound happening in my soul. It is hard to explain, but it was deeper than all of the disappointment and tears. I was heart-broken, but I sensed God using the brokenness to build something beautiful. [Does that sound corny? Sorry.]
We were experiencing it differently, but God was working similarly in Ryan. He was so strong, so certain that all of this was for a purpose.
Around November of last year, Ryan and I started talking seriously about adoption. I remember a specific Sunday morning we were just talking about the possibility at the table after breakfast, and both of our eyes filled with tears. They were the kind of tears that aren’t out of sadness, but rather a sign that we knew this moment was of utmost [eternal?] significance. Ryan took my hand and said, “I’m all in, Sarah. If this is what God wants of us, I’m in.”
We looked into a few different adoption options, but honestly we only ever seriously considered foster-to-adopt. Many people pursue this route, because it is a lot less expensive than traditional adoptions. Of course that was a factor for us, but even more we knew we wanted to take in a child that may be overlooked by others. We wanted to take on an innocent person’s sufferings as our own.
Finally in May we began the classes and the mounds of paperwork to be certified as foster parents. It was during this process in May and June that God worked on my heart once again. At first, I only wanted to be open to children who were already free to be adopted. However, the Lord used some circumstances beyond our control to change me. It’s a long and ridiculous story, but basically the odd layout of our house meant that we only could be certified to take children two years old and younger; they actually would prefer us to take children under 12 months. [Originally we hoped to take in children four years and younger.] Because the process to be free for adoption is so long and drawn out in the foster system, very few babies [maybe none?] are already free for adoption before they are 12 months old.
Basically, if we wanted to continue this process, we would have to be open to just-fostering, which means we would take in babies whom we may or may not be able to adopt some day. Ryan was completely open to this, and it was through his witness that I too became open.
I remember talking in the car after one of the classes, and he said something like, “even if we only have a child for one month or six months or whatever, we can still show him unconditional love. He won’t be old enough to remember it later, but it is still objectively good for him.” Then on another evening, I made some whiney-selfish comment to Ryan like, “but, after having a child in my home, I couldn’t bear to give him back!” And Ryan immediately responded, “It’s not about you! It’s about the child. He is not yours. The child is ultimately the Lord’s, and he is still someone else’s son or daughter. It is not about what you want; it is about what is best for him or her.”
He was right, sooooo right.
We went from “we feel called to adoption” to “we feel called to foster, and maybe God will allow us to adopt one day.”
One thing that I always knew for certain was that I didn’t want adoption to be a “consolation prize” for us, a “lesser” choice to having natural children. I wanted to be certain that we were called to this, regardless of our infertility. I can honestly say that we are in that place right now. I am certain God used our inability to have another child to bring us here, but He did, indeed, bring us here. I am certain that even if I found out tomorrow that I was pregnant, we would still take in a foster child if we received the phone call that very same day.
When a baby is placed in our home, we have no idea how long s/he will be with us. He or she could be part of our family for two weeks, two months, even two years, and then returned to the birth family [which is always the preference of the foster system]. Or, we could have him or her forever. Accepting this precarious unknown has taken much surrender on our part. This surrender is only in theory now. God only knows the difficulty of the reality of it.
And thus, here we are. Waiting.
sarahunfiltered 