Miss B is the second infant that we have fostered. Daniel was the first and only! Miss B, however is the first newborn from the hospital and it has been a fun experience. It has been amazing to watch her grow, put on weight, and become more alert.
Everyone asks me how Daniel is doing with a baby in the house.... He is not all that interested in her. He thinks her funny faces are kinda neat and her clothes are unique, and other than that he pretty much ignores her. He has been amazingly patient though with sharing attention and with the days where she has been more fussy than content.
The big question I get when people learn that Miss B is in foster care is "how will you let her go? do you just try not to bond/get attached?" My honest answer is.... I don't know. Daniel was the only infant I've fostered and I didn't have to say good-bye. I thought about the issue of bonding and I realized that yes, I am attached. I can't speak for other foster parents, but I can't NOT get attached. Sure, it might be safer for my heart to stay detached but I love to love! As I sat with her in the middle of the night a couple of nights ago I realized that God designed that attachment for a purpose--it's the only way a parent could get up night after night to feed and attend to a helpless baby. I love to sleep and I am a heavy sleeper, so being interrupted every few hours is very unnatural except that I love the baby!
I take one day at a time, enjoying each day and trying not to think too far ahead to figure out what will happen. Everyone asks how long we will have her. We don't know. I don't try to guess those things because there are so many variables. With Daniel we were told he would go back to his parents within 6 months to a year, and now he's mine forever. We thought Little N would be with us for months while his mother worked a treatment plan, and it was less than three weeks. Miss B's case is a complicated one that I don't think will be resolved easily or quickly (but I could be wrong!)
Sometimes as I'm holding her and watching her sleep so peacefully I get tears....She's so innocent, so helpless. She doesn't know of the chaos and uncertainty that surrounds her life. She doesn't know that her future is contained in a file on a caseworker's desk and that a judge will be reviewing her case every few months to make decisions that could affect her whole life. That's the part of fostering that I don't like....that's the part that makes me think that maybe I can't keep doing this....I want to protect the little ones from anything that's harmful or from a future full of instability. I don't want to see a series of broken attachments or think of a child being moved from placement to placement. Those are the times when I wish I didn't care so much and could just have a tough heart.
At night when I'm feeding her, I pray. Because if I don't I sometimes worry. As hard as it would be, my preference if I'm fostering, is that a child goes back to their biological parent if that parent is willing and able to parent well (i.e. successfully completing a comprehensive treatment plan) I would find it very difficult to see a child moved if after several months a relative came from nowhere and wanted a child. Or in Miss B's case once I found out that she had Cherokee blood I started to worry that the tribe would want to move her to a Cherokee home. I am 1/2 Native American--not Cherokee--and I have known of other foster families who have had children removed suddenly because the tribe decides they should be in a Cherokee home. So I keep casting my worries on God.
But for today we are enjoying this little dark-haired doll baby :-) and now Daniel seems so big and even more boyish by contrast!! I just love God's beauty in creating babies and children!
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