42 Quotes About Foster-care

Adoption is a lifelong journey. It means different things to me at different times. Sometimes it is just a part of who I am. Other times it is something I am actively going through.

Denny thought our parents needed a combination of material goods and temperamental changes before he could return home. “If Dad buys Ma a car, then she’ll love him, and they’ll get back together and she won’t be all crazy anymore,” he said. For years he held out the possibility that those things would happen and all would change. “If we had more things, like stoves and cars,” he told me at night in our bedroom, “and Ma wasn’t like she is, we could go home.

I came to this house for safety. They came because the foster care system ran out of homes. We stayed because we were stray pieces of other puzzles, tired of never fitting.

Here we go. The Harlequin moment when mother and child meet for the first time in twenty years. Spare me the drama, please. I had enough of that in the foster homes they dumped me in.

And like a grieving spouse who sleeps in the shirt of a lost loved one, I thought that by cooking – handling ingredients again, breathing in their aroma as they bubbled – I could somehow be reunited with my mother again.

One afternoon Walter brought Izzy to the house for lunch and, pointing to me, he said to Izzy, “He’s one of your tribe.” Dobkins lifted his head to look at me and after a few seconds said, “I don’t see it.” “The mother’s a Jew,” Walter answered, as if he were describing the breeding of a mongrel dog. “Then you are a Jew,” Izzy said, and sort of blessed me with his salami sandwich.

We're just different, that's all. That's all a freak is. someone who's different."The Very Worst Thing

Then I remember social workers don't care.

...it takes a special person to be a great foster parent, someone who realizes that the child he or she is receiving isn't perfect and probably is carrying a lot of heavy emotional baggage and bad habits. But that understanding and acceptance are essential if foster parents truly hope to bring any sense of normalcy to the child living with them in their home. The rest is all uphill from there.