We are two weeks away from Fostering Panel, and I’m getting increasingly worried. No, not about panel. After attending Adoption and Matching Panel, Fostering Panel it’s just another day at the office. What worries me is what comes with fostering and my role as a main foster carer. It’s about my family and its ability to adapt. And it’s about Ben and how he will cope with it. Now that we are so close to panel, I have to wonder if this is the right choice for us.
Life with Ben is a roller coaster of great days—even great weeks at times—filled with laughs, happiness, love and joy, followed by the anger, defiance, provocations, temper, and the rage of the bad days. Don’t get me wrong, I think we have more good days than bad ones, not that I ever counted them, really, but so it seems.
Our is a happy life, but in constant need of adjusting, returning, and twitching to remain so. Our life is a structured one, made of weekly planners, set times, timer countdowns, and lots and lots of patience. When things start to go bad, we need to make swift changes to repair the situation before it collapses. Sometimes I feel like a bit like a magician, always with a new trick in the hat, but what if I run out of tricks in a middle of a placement?
Diego and I keep going through the pros and cons of welcoming foster children in our home, and how this will impact on Ben. He is still little, and we will be asking so much of him. He will need to learn how to share his toys and playroom, how to share us and our attentions, sharpen his social and communication skills, and become more independent from a very early age.
As if all that wasn’t enough, he will need to deal with the conclusion of each placement: we’ll lose a foster child, Ben will lose a brother or sister.
As a parent, I want to give the best I can to my son, and I want him to be happy and satisfied with his life. Ben will have so much to gain from fostering, some I can predict, and some I can’t.
This will be, for Ben, an opportunity to learn about being tolerant, open, outgoing and kind. A chance to learn about new cultures, new habits, and new emotions. Above all, I hope understanding about life in care will help him making sense of his own adoption story, and process his own losses.
You are right to consider these questions. Fostering can be hard, for me and for my son. It’s all he’s ever known, so I don’t know how different things would have been if I hadn’t been a foster carer as well as his mum, but I do know that some placements we have had have been incredibly hard on him, and we’ve counted the cost of that. There are pros and cons. If I wasn’t fostering, as a single parent, I’d have to go out to work and he’d be in daycare. That would bring its own problems. Like you, I hope that at the end of it all, the sum of the positives will outweigh the difficulties. For us, it’s constantly under review – we take it placement by placement.
Dear Suddenly Mummy,
It feels like one of these sliding doors moments, in which whatever decision I take today will ripple over the years. But if I had to get it wrong, I’d rather get it wrong trying to help others. The alternative would be to cower and to wonder for the rest of my life what it could have been. It’s going to be intersting either way…
I am full of admiration that you are going to foster. As you discuss, there are pros and cons for your son and family if you do it or don’t do it, but I guess it’s better to think of it as both options as ‘right’ ways forward than wrong, if that makes sense.
Hi Claire, what a nice way of seeing things; I’ll keep it in mind. When the job description includes “a good sense of humour”, you just know it’s gonna be a difficult one. But I’ll set my fears aside and give it my best shot. There will be a good time to draw conclusions. Thanks for commenting.