The painful lessons of being a foster-to-adopt parent

We sat down at the table, which smelled of chicken pot pie and sported a Santa with a tub of butter. Sarah (a pseudonym) stared across the table at us, her former foster-to-adopt parents. We had come to her new adoptive home for Sunday lunch a week before Christmas. It was the first time we had been invited for a meal since she had left us a year and a half earlier.

Her stare, filled with betrayal, burned into Al and me, her “parents” who had “abandoned” her the year before in November. That’s when the courts ruled she should leave us to be adopted by her maternal grandparents. That was after she came to us at 5 months of age and was in our continuous care for 2½ years.

Her deep brown eyes sliced through my heart, then bored into Al. Her pained befuddlement reduced us to a pool of vulnerability and powerlessness. Her rock-like stare seemed to say, What are you doing here? Why did you wait so long to come? Why did you send me here in the first place?

Under her steely stare, I bowed my head in shame to gaze at mangled peas, potatoes and carrots, lost in the gray-yellow gravy on my plate. I could no longer kiss her boo-boos or comfort her in the middle of a stormy night. In despondency deeper than any I had felt up to this point, I thought, I can’t heal her pain, so what business do I have showing up here now? We had no response to her questions. We could not make sense of the unfolding nightmare, let alone explain it to a child, soon to turn 3.

We had been selected by child-welfare professionals to adopt Sarah after her biological parents had relinquished their rights. But the maternal grandparents appealed the unanimous decision, made by a team of professionals who believed it best for Sarah to remain with us, her longtime family by this time. But after a review of the appeal, the agency administrators reversed their agency’s decision to place her with us. We appealed the reversal, and the case went to court, where the judge sided with the reversal.

Immediately after we lost Sarah, we saw her the first time after a week, then every couple of weeks. That lengthened out to a month, then several months between visits. I resented my lack of control over when and how we saw her. So when her family invited us for lunch, I at first dug in my heels, though I eventually decided to go. This was not my idea of a white Christmas, of chestnuts roasting on an open fire, of a happy family bowing in prayer around a holiday table.

A friend lovingly suggested to me that they were graciously reaching out to us, and this lunch could symbolize what Christmas was all about—bringing peace to a troubled world. Part of me felt she was right, but I still resisted. I did not envision the favored version of singing angels who sang joyfully above baby Jesus, sleeping unharmed in his mother’s arms. Rather, I imagined the oft-ignored passage that speaks of the sounds of Rachel weeping for her children, massacred by a jealous king. I could hear the wizened old Sarah in Genesis, skeptically laughing at a God who said he would peel open her womb, dead as a dried apple core, and make it juicy with new life.

God quieted Sarah’s laughing with a divine punch line, but just what was God’s plan for this Christmas lunch? God didn’t shield Mary of Bethlehem from Good Friday’s brokenness, and I wouldn’t be exempt either from the hard knocks of a Holy Week that got bad before it got better.

In the end, the three-hour visit didn’t turn as dark as I had imagined. She played horsey with Al. She preened for me in the new clothes we brought. She pasted stickers into her new coloring book that lay in a tangle of green and red tissue. She bounced between her grandparents and us like a lost ball that wasn’t sure where it was safe to land. And we adults tried to absorb Sarah’s pain as we visited cordially though coolly. We privately waited for a good moment to end the visit that had many loose ends likely never to be fully resolved or tied together with a neat bow. But there were moments when I realized that the gift of hospitality had been extended, even though I did not like the package of pain it unwrapped for me.

Several months have passed since that Christmas lunch. Lent and Easter have come and gone, and Mother’s Day is almost here. These months have been the most painful yet of my grief journey as a former foster-to-adopt mother. They have marked the year-and-a-half point of my loss. It’s when the gift of shock has stopped buffeting my heart against the collision and has left me to nurse the mess. As I survey the chaos I am striving to order again, I reflect on Rachel, Sarah and Mary, biblical heroines for whom mothering had its pains. Their stories have guided me into some new hope and healing in my mourning.

Rachel’s weeping and exiles returned

In Matthew 2:13-18, we transition from serenity and joy to exile and fear. A jealous Herod ordered the massacre of all the little boys in Bethlehem as he strove to kill the baby Jesus, an eventual threat to his kingdom. The unfolding drama echoed what the prophet had penned in Jeremiah 31, when he said that “a voice was heard in Ramah, sobbing and loud lamentation.” He referred to Rachel, the wife of patriarch Jacob, who was weeping for her children taken into exile at the time of the Assyrian invasion of the northern kingdom. Despite the doom, the prophet attempts to console the inconsolable by proclaiming that sorrow will have its reward. In verse 17, Jeremiah writes, “There is hope for your future. … Your sons shall return to their borders.”

I struggle with Jeremiah’s call to find hope in despair because it wasn’t until many descendants later that the hope was realized. Rachel experienced the losses that wouldn’t bring gain until centuries later. Similarly, a fork in the road was taken that brought losses in our lifetime. Sarah will never be a Robinson, and she will struggle to heal from the breaking of strong bonds and attachments that formed over a period that represented most of her young life. We will always feel the hole she left in our hearts when she left, no matter how much time and healing happen.

On the other hand, Al and I discuss the likelihood of an older Sarah returning to us, asking us to help replace the missing pieces of her life. We know that in our hearts she will always be part of our forever family. And we will always want to help fill in the empty spots with our ongoing love and nurturing in the appropriate times and places.
In the end, the Israelites’ exile was God’s way of shaping a new future for new generations. Our attempts to view our situation in this way include ongoing advocacy work through my book Forever Family (see “addtional notes” below). It chronicles our journey as foster-to-adopt parents and includes suggestions for making changes in the child-welfare system.

In the past couple of months, I have also talked with legislators at the Kansas State House. New leadership there with Social Rehabilitation Services is working hard to ensure that future generations of foster children and foster and biological families are not wounded by some of the same pains our two families—and countless others—have endured. I have new hope our future in child welfare need not look like its past.

Sarah’s laughing and a divine joke reversed

Sarah is the mother of the human family that led up to the exile experienced by Rachel. In Genesis 21, we read how the childless Sarah laughed at God upon the announcement that she would bear a child in her old age.

Biblical scholars tell us that Isaac, their first child, conceived at this old age, means “may God laugh in delight and smile upon.” This signifies a reversal of the earlier skepticism of Sarah as well as a healing of the shame she felt being childless in a culture that saw her worth as equal to the children she bore. At midlife, I felt I would “bear” a child in my older age through the adoption of Sarah. Al and I could not conceive. But through foster baby Sarah, we would finally take our place as parents who could take joy in nurturing a child and gain a new level of acceptability within our community.

In the midst of the reversal of our adoption plans, I have at times felt that God delivered a divine joke with a punch line I would never understand. I have battled with feeling that the universe is laughing at my audacity to hope for being a mother in my 50s.
God gave Abraham and Sarah descendents as numerous as the stars. But the story unfolded as God planned, not as they had planned. As much as being out of control has brought me feelings of shame, I strive to remember that God smiles upon our dreams of having a family and is not laughing at us. The same God who created stars in the vast heavens is the same God who created me, created Al, created Sarah, created her biological parents and grandparents, created families to love and cherish children. In our small way, though the timing seems skewed from this side of heaven, we did our part.

On my bad days, I cannot see stars through the clouds of my grief. On my good days, I can allow my faith to be stretched like a clear Kansas night sky that unveils constellations that have order and purpose. I can trust that additional chapters of the story are still unfolding within God’s ever-present and perfect timing. This God is a God of reversals, surprises, holy humor that smiles upon those who feel ashamed and brings them laughter.

Mary’s breaking and wholeness regained

As difficult as it was for Rachel to feel the sorrow of exile and Sarah to feel the shame of childlessness, still harder it was for Mary to feel broken over her son’s brokenness. In Luke 2, Simeon prophesies that Jesus, would be the cause of the rise and fall of many in Israel and that a sword would pierce Mary’s heart. We are told little about Mary, but we know that her suffering was intertwined with that of her son’s. Similarly, our greatest suffering was not our own but the suffering we watched Sarah endure.

The first week after she left our home, we were granted an hour visit with her. We took her to a burger joint. After taking her home, her grandmother told her to “tell Al and Laurie goodbye” Her face clouded in confusion and pain as she turned to me in a wave of sinking betrayal and cried, “I thought you were my mommy.”

We turned to go. Sarah’s wails could be heard outside as we got in the car. My wails also filled the black Ford Escort the entire trip home. I remained inconsolable for days. It was not my abandonment by a dysfunctional system that kept me awash in tears. It was her sense of abandonment and how it would likely haunt her for years to come. My tears were not shed for the hole in my heart that kept me peeking into her empty room, hoping to find her playing. It was the black hole of disorientation I imagined she felt by needing to adjust to being a stranger in a strange home.

As Mother’s Day approaches, I pray to be consoled with the same hope that was Mary’s—God created her child to fulfill a purpose and a mission. And Mary’s purpose was to nurture Jesus for three decades as he fulfilled his destiny. My part in directly mothering Sarah lasted less than three years. Like Mary, I was not given the gift of a set amount of time. Rather, I was given the gift of a child for whom God’s timing and purposes will always transcend my own.

Laurie Oswald Robinson is a free-lance writer and the author of Forever Family. The book is available for order online at www.talesofthetimes.com, phone at 316-284-0223 or e-mail at mrslory@sbcglobal.net. Cost is $12.95 plus $3.50 handling
for the first book. For two or more books, handling is $6.