What Foster Parents Carry

My foster parents had me for seven months when I was a baby. I have no memory of that time, but I've heard enough about it since to know it asked something enormous of them.

They loved me the way you'd love any child in your house — fully, without a discount for the fact that it might not last. And then it didn't last. I was adopted, and for forty-one years they didn't know if I was alive, married, happy, or thinking about them at all. They kept buying me birthday cards anyway. Forty-one of them, never mailed, because they never had an address to send them to.

I used to assume foster care was mostly about the child's side of the story, because that's the side I could tell. But spending time with my foster parents as an adult taught me how much of it belongs to the adults in the house too — the ones who show up for a child knowing the ending might be a phone call that says it's time to say goodbye, and who do it again anyway, or who carry that particular kind of missing for decades because there was no proper way to grieve a child who wasn't gone, exactly, just gone from them.

I don't think foster parents get asked often enough what that costs, or credited enough for paying it. This isn't a post that tells you foster care is easy or hard, good or bad as a system — I'll leave that argument to people better positioned to have it. It's just a thank-you, written a little late, to two people who kept a place for me even after they had every reason to stop.