13 Days

"Tough Decision: Ending Our Foster Journey After 13 Days. Just dropped off FD that we only had for 13 days. I can't stop crying. Long story short, we will not be fostering again. We will leave home open for respite. That being said, I believe I'm better to be active in advocacy. To advocate for better fostering system, the matching of homes for the kids and the fact that bio parents have too long to get their stuff together. I know this may be an unpopular opinion but it hinders the permanency for these poor kids."

I saw this post in a foster parent support group and I have not been able to stop thinking about it.

Thirteen days.

All the training. All the paperwork. All the home visits and background checks, classes and signatures. After thirteen days they were done. The child was dropped off like a package at a doorstep and that was it.

I want to be clear about something before I go any further. I am not here to bash this family. I do not know their full story and neither do you. What I am here to talk about is what just happened to that child. Because in all the posts and all the comments and all the crying and the advocacy talk, the child is the one nobody is really talking about.

Think about that child for a second.

They came into foster care, which means something already went wrong in their world. Something serious enough that a judge or a caseworker decided they could not stay where they were. That alone is a life-altering event. Their whole world flipped upside down and they did not get a vote.

And then thirteen days later they were moved again.

I can almost guarantee this was not that child's first placement. Most children in foster care have been moved before. They know what it feels like to pack their stuff. They know what it feels like to be in a strange house with strange people trying to figure out the rules and what is safe and who they can trust. And just when they were starting to breathe, just when they were maybe starting to figure out this new place, they got moved again.

Do you know what that does to a child?

It confirms everything they already believe about themselves. That they are too much. That nobody stays. That love has an expiration date and theirs comes faster than most. That no matter where they land they are eventually going to get dropped off somewhere else.

Thirteen days is not just a failed placement. Thirteen days is another scar on a child who was already full of them.

Now let me talk about the family.

I am not going to pretend that fostering is easy or that every family who leaves did not love that child or did not try. I know better than that. I have been in this world long enough to know that good people with good hearts walk away because they were handed a situation they were not equipped to handle and nobody around them knew how to help.

That is the real problem.

Not the family. The preparation. Or the complete lack of it.

Training teaches you the process. It does not teach you what it actually feels like when a child screams at you for two hours because you bought the wrong kind of juice. It does not teach you what to do when a child hoards food in their room or cannot sleep or flinches when you raise your hand to wave. It does not teach you what secondary traumatic stress feels like in your own body or what it does to your marriage or how to regulate your own nervous system when everything around you is on fire.

The training checks a box. It does not prepare a heart.

And when families go in underprepared and unsupported and hit a wall at day thirteen, the child pays the price. Not the system. Not the agency. Not the training program. The child.

Now I want to address something specific from that post because I cannot let it go without saying something.

The post mentions becoming an advocate for better matching and for giving birth parents less time to get their stuff together.

I understand the frustration. I really do. But thirteen days does not give you the time or the experience to advocate on a child's behalf. Advocacy in this world is built over years. It is built by sitting in court hearings and case plan meetings and supervision visits and state conferences. It is built by knowing the law, knowing the system, knowing what actually happens to children when placements disrupt and timelines shift. You cannot advocate effectively for someone whose world you have not had time to understand yet. Advocacy without that foundation is just opinion. And children in care deserve more than opinion.

And the birth parent comment. I need to sit here for a moment.

My mother never got her stuff together. She struggled with addiction almost all of her entire life. She was in foster care herself as a teenager. She had me at seventeen and could not take care of me. She died when I was eighteen. I spent my entire childhood wondering why she could not just fix it. Why she could not just choose me.

There was not a single day I did not think about her. Not one.

My kids, the four children I adopted, they think about their birth parents every single day too. They talk about them. They miss them. They wonder. My daughter tells me she wants to go live with her mom someday. My son asks questions I do not always have answers to. This does not go away. It does not get easier just because a judge signed a paper.

I will be honest with you. There are days I wish their birth parents had gotten it together. I wish it with everything in me because I know how my kids feel and I know how that particular ache never fully leaves you. But wishing it were different does not make the timeline the problem. The timeline exists because children have a legal right to know that every reasonable effort was made to keep their family together before that door was permanently closed. That matters. Even when it is painful. Even when it is slow. Even when it feels impossibly long to the family waiting on the other side.

Birth parents are not obstacles. Most of them are people who came from hard places themselves and never got the help they needed either. That is the cycle and if we want to break it, we have to understand it first.

The matching piece is also worth addressing because it is real and it is complicated.

Families absolutely need to know themselves before they say yes to a placement. What ages can you realistically handle. What behaviors. What level of need. What history. Those are not small questions and the honest answers matter enormously.

However, here is the hard truth. When a child comes into care for the first time there is often little to no information available about them. Workers are doing their best with what they have. Placements are made quickly because children need somewhere safe to sleep tonight. The system is not built for perfect matching. It is built for urgent response.

Which is exactly why the preparation has to happen before the call comes. Because by the time the phone rings it is too late to figure out who you are and what you can handle. You have to know that already.

So let me say what I say every single time someone tells me they feel called to foster.

Feeling called is the beginning. It is not the qualification.

Calling got you to the door. Now you need to actually prepare for what is on the other side of it.

Read the books. Go to the trainings and when you think you are done go to another one. Find a therapist before you need one desperately. Talk to foster parents who have been in it for years, not just the ones who make it look beautiful on social media. Talk to foster youth who have actually been in care and listen to what they tell you. Find your support system before that first placement call comes because you will not have time to build one after.

And before you say yes, before you fill out that first form, I want you to do one thing.

Think about that child first.

Not your calling. Not your empty nest. Not the child you are imagining in your head. The actual child. The one who has already been through something. The one who is going to come into your home carrying things you cannot see yet. The one who needs you to stay.

Can you stay? Not on the good days. On the days that break you. Can you stay?

Fostering is not for the faint of heart. I do not say that to scare anyone away. I say it because it is the truth and the truth is what these children deserve.

This is someone's life we are talking about. A real child with a real history and a real future that you have the ability to either steady or shake. That is not a small thing. That is everything.

Thirteen days is not a foster care story. Thirteen days is a warning. And I am tired of watching children absorb the cost of adults who were never truly ready to pay it.

Get ready. Get support. Get honest with yourself before you say yes.

That child is counting on it.

If you are in the preparation stage and want to go in equipped instead of hopeful, that is exactly what Low Tide Lighthouse was built for. Start with The Shore Walk or explore Before the Tide at lowtidelighthouse.com.