Our friends were young—in their twenties— brand new Christians and recovering from a miscarriage, when they felt called to the risk of raising a foster child.
Fostering was to become an ordeal for their lives.
An emergency placement at the age of four, raised in neglect before foster care, then torn away from several substitute mothers, Pamela* was the difficult-placement product of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome/Reactive Attachment Disorder (FAS/RAD).
But our friends did not know it. Actually the syndrome/disorder had yet to be identified, in those days. Nevertheless, they had chosen her, and they chose to encourage her through all her difficult days.
Armed with little but the explanation that Pamela had “loved and lost one-too-many times”, our friends charged ahead, directly into the risk, assuming all she needed was constancy in love. They were told that their home was her last chance, that her next stop was placement in a mental institution, and they were determined to give her the happy life she’d never had, instead.
No pressure, there.
Unable to love, unable to be loved, but most of all, unable to allow anyone else to love or be loved, Pamela entered our friends’ child-starved home, and the war began. And it wasn’t just them who had to fight down her demons: Every place she went, everyone who encountered her, encountered trouble, unmanageable trouble.
They had to teach her every aspect of civilized life.
She fought them every step.
Failing public school, and later expelled from private school, Pamela actually was the reason they began homeschooling, since the experts were positive “all she needed was a little love”.
Believing she would feel more loved, if adopted, they longed for the predicted day of her release, when she could fully become “theirs”.
Still, Pamela remained incorrigible, and ten years after they first rescued her from institutionalization, they were forced to institutionalize her in a professional home for wayward teen girls. Everyone hoped she (and they) could have one last chance at sanity. Those professionals, however, called within a week, begging for help with managing her, and calling her “dangerous”.
Facing the risk.
Between the beginning days of blooming hopes and those last days of acknowledging failure, lay nearly 4000 days of utter testing. Days of our friends knowing people thought they did not love her. Days of total care, as in, having to be awake most of the time, to ensure everyone’s safety. Days of continual explanation and apology to offended people who’d encountered her. Days of never being able to find someone willing to risk being their babysitter.
All the normal things anyone might do to help or to please any child might have helped and pleased her, if Pamela had only been “any child”. Twenty years later they would learn about FAS/RAD, and wish they could go back . . . .
The other risk.
We learned of our foster child in 2014, and despite the pain our friends had shared with us, we knew God was also calling us to risk fostering.
Ours was an anemic teen boy from a drug-ravaged home, with a failing school record, whose hair was as long as mine and stank, bless his heart, and needed a safe place. Oh. Dear. Not our friends’ cute little girl, but a scary teen boy.
What on earth would God do with us (to us?) with this child?
The answer, in a word: Reward.
Who would have thought it could be easy? This child was easy. Fun. Compliant. Grateful. Willing.
He’d chosen us two old people, and we all three knew it would be for a short time, maybe a year. His mom would return. I could educate him and maybe he could learn something in this new adventure our home offered.
He found in us the dad he’d never had, and a mom who always was awake during the day. He learned car maintenance, wood splitting, carpentry, and vacuuming, along with what to do with skillsets for rulers, fractions, algebra, grammar, and all science to the moon. He loved history and—although feeling the urge to quit—actually wrote several essays.
He went to church. He went to men’s meetings. He cooked. He ate steak.
He bloomed.
He gave in to Christ.
Then just after that, it was over. His mom had recovered. He went home. Mom found employment. He entered a private school and fast-tracked to an engineer degree, or maybe acting . . . .
What we risk.
And the risks of fostering are: You can experience a heart that is cold, aching, and wrung out, or you can experience a heart that is strangely warmed, although emptied.
But you will know you had a heart.
* Not her real name.
Katharine Trauger is a retired educator and a women’s counselor. She has spent 25 years managing a home and school for children who would otherwise have been homeless, and has worked 15 years as contributor and/or columnist for several small professional magazines, with over 60 published articles. She blogs about the rising popularity of “being at home” from a sun room on a wooded hilltop in the Deep South at: Home’s Cool! and The Conquering Mom and tweets at Katharine Trauger (@KathaTrau). She is currently working on a self-help book entitled: Yes, It Hurts, But . . .
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