When my first husband died suddenly in a car wreck, I missed him so much my insides ached… for years. When I thought of him, the pain took my breath away, just as my love for him had done the same before his death. I spent a year or two trying to learn to breathe again, and then I focused on loving and learning from God and passing that love on to my two daughters. These two miraculous girls had saved me from despair, and I wanted more children.
I decided that I needed to remarry to have and love more children. I am not a gentle person. I am not understated or laid back. I am passionate and willful. I am rash and impetuous and then sometimes regretful. I generally immediately say “yes” or “no.” I do not weigh things carefully.
God is gentle and passionate. He never manipulates or tricks, never forces or betrays, is never rash or imprudent. He is constant, and wise, and present. He is Love. I want to be more like him. But, alas, I’m a work in progress.
Remarrying and hoping for more children
After almost 10 years of widowhood, I met a man whose wife had died of cancer. They had been childless due to her illness. We married very quickly without knowing each other and began our life together, hoping for more children. God has done the best He can with us and our marriage.
When it started to become clear that biology was not cooperating with us, we decided to pursue adoption, first international and then local. I, like many people I knew, would never consider fostering children because I did not understand it and thought only of the pain and uncertainty it could cause me. As we went through the required classes for adoption through the state of Oklahoma’s Department of Human Services (DHS), God opened my heart to fostering. How could I think about MY pain when these innocent ones were suffering?
My entire focus changed from me to them… and then to their mothers. I saw and heard many examples of these young mothers who were mostly only children themselves. These mothers longed for their children hidden away in a system that was impersonal and extremely faulty, but would unfortunately repeat their harmful behaviors again and again with all of their children.
The author, Nici Hostetler. Do not reprint.
Choosing to foster
Fostering is not just about helping lost and lonely children but about helping their mothers. It’s about ‘bridging’ between those children who need the protection of safe homes and the mothers who might harm them, but at the same time love them. It’s about giving your heart completely and totally to a little one who is supposed to be taken away from you to be reunited with the mothers God created for them.
These children are many times the only thing standing between addicted mothers and death. Mothers work long plans, go to boring classes, pee in cups, and wear drug patches. They have to go through a humiliating gauntlet of things to be certified fit to have their children returned. It’s not easy. They are not monsters who want to hurt children. They are broken, sinful people trying to do the right thing for a change. Sound familiar? To anyone who is human, it should.
God led us to sign up for fostering through a foster care agency. They helped us, led us, and trained us. They were there for us when DHS was scary. They listened to us when we had our moments of doubt, and they tried to make placements that would be best for the children and our family.
The foster care journey
We had our first foster placement and fell in love. This precious 3-year-old boy lived with us for a little over a year. We met with his mother and facilitated visits. We celebrated birthdays with her and her little boy. Over time, her trust in us grew a little. We told her we wanted to help her and we wanted to love her son.
When he went back to her, I cried and cried. It hurt, and I missed him. But we were successful. We had helped a mother get her child back. He never ended up back in foster care. She has contacted us several times over the years and they have both grown.
Then, we had our second placement, another little boy. He was a little older, 4 years old, and he was living in a shelter when we met him. He was so scared that he hid behind furniture and wouldn’t look up from the ground for the first year. He actually came to live with us about a month after our first little boy came. They were like brothers for that year and he hurt when our first foster son went back to his mother.
With this boy, there was no bridging. It was not allowed. I met his mother one time and she cried. She did love him, but she was further along on the road of self-destruction.
This little boy is now my strong and brave, loyal and true son of 13 years. He is a gentle soul who has learned to look people in the eye, stands up to bullies, and won’t take anyone’s stuff. He is knitted into our family completely, and I love him beyond words. We keep him in touch with some of his siblings and some cousins. This is important, and I wish he could have more contact with them, but everyone is busy. Because of those connections, we know sad things about his birth mother, his birth father, and his oldest brother. We are blessed he is with us.
After we had adopted our son, we were asked to foster a brother and sister. And we did. They had been through the most trauma of all. We were asked to bridge again with their mother, and we did. We saw her family and that it would be difficult for this mother to stay off drugs. But we prayed and hoped they could go back to her — at the same time we wanted them to live with us forever.
READ: Former foster child and pro-life advocate crowned Mrs. Universe
After living with us for about a year, they did go back with her. We were tired, and we told our foster care agency we needed a break, probably permanently. We wanted to enjoy our two daughters and our son and not have the craziness of fostering for a while. But, we made it clear that if anything happened with our sibling pair and their mother, we would take them back without hesitation.
A couple of months later, our two little ones were picked up in the middle of the night in terrible conditions and brought to our house. They have been with us ever since. These two youngest are strong, loving, and sassy.
Our youngest daughter has struggled with dyslexia, but she refuses to give up. She wants to succeed and she will. She is the most nurturing person I have ever met and babies our dogs and even her older brother.
Our youngest son sees the world through different eyes. He is a born builder and makes the most amazing things with Legos and other building materials on his own. He’s also very loving, coming in to give me good night and good morning hugs and kisses every day.
Not one of us is ‘perfect’
All of these children fight with each other, like most children, but they are loyal and stick up for each other in the face of adversity. We love our crazy family that God has made. None of us are perfect, we all have trauma, and we all miss people from our past. We have honest and open discussions about things, and we all go to Mass on Sundays. We are sinners and do wrong things, and we sometimes even manage to do some good things.
Fostering and adopting are not for the faint of heart, but loving these little ones and their families will make your heart grow. It is about giving over all control of our lives to judges we didn’t know and young, overworked caseworkers we didn’t completely trust. It is humbling and scary. How much easier should it be to give control of our lives to the only One we can trust, the only One who knows us completely? It changes everyone in your family. It makes you more Christ-like, more Marian, to care for these children and their mothers instead of yourself.
And, like all of God’s plans, it is the hardest thing you will ever LOVE doing.
