‘Too many children are alone,’ says one foster mother, ‘because we don’t think we have what it takes.’
‘Too many children are alone, because we don’t think we have what it takes.’
‘B e my Mommy!” the CVS window cried out from its display of surplus Baby Emma dolls. It was the fifth day of Christmas, and one of the petitions during Mass, which I’d attended shortly before stopping to pick up prescriptions, was for those who are struggling to have a happy, peaceful Christmas. We prayed for the sick, the grieving, the lonely. We didn’t pray for the orphans, though, I thought during Mass. I did, in my heart, but the Baby Emmas reminded me again.
Over a number of Christmas days, as it happened, I was in Omicron semi-quarantine (having been exposed but testing negative) and then on account of food poisoning. It was not what I had planned, and I wasn’t entirely happy about it (particularly the second). But I’m grateful because it got me thinking in a deeper way about people who are actually in a graver and more long-term isolation, and in particular the actual anguish of children in foster care who don’t have warm memories of love and security and joy — who don’t have memories of a mother and a father who love them and care for them.
Children wind up in foster care for many reasons, but it’s most often these days on account of adults’ use of opioids, which really wreak havoc on a person. My friend Darcy Olsen, who runs Gen Justice, a foster-care and adoption-advocacy group in Phoenix — and who is herself an adoptive mother from foster care — believes that a mother’s meth addiction should be an automatic reason for termination of parental rights. That comes from her experience of having to relinquish a baby who had been in her care to his biological mother, who struggled with meth. The child died in his mother’s care. That mother couldn’t care for herself, never mind that precious child.
There are many things that need to be done to help keep mothers from addiction. But there are also children right now in need of homes. A lot of people in child welfare today believe in kinship care before anything else. But that’s sometimes not the best option. I know a little boy who was near dead a year ago and is now flourishing in the care of the most loving foster parents, who happened to be the next-door neighbors of his elderly kin. We kind of believe God might have worked that one out.
If you even quickly scan recent foster-care headlines, children are being put in hotels in Texas and Oregon, and for long periods of time. These children tend to be those with mental disabilities or severe trauma in their background. One Texas report this fall found that children placed in hotels “may be exposed to sexual abuse, given incorrect or improper medications, engage in self harm, physically fight with other children and staff, or run away.” Many are teens who have spent time in psychiatric care. None of this should be happening, nor does it need to be.
My Christmas experience was a tremendous opportunity to focus on what Christmas is actually about: Jesus Christ coming to save humanity. And to focus on any human sadness for the absence of family, friends, tradition, and creature comforts — parts of life that a child in foster care may not even know to miss. And yet that longing for family, for belonging, for love, for some permanence, is there.
Alison and Jim Blanchet are foster and adoptive parents in Panama City, Fla. When they were dating, they went on a mission trip to Nicaragua and saw how the orphanage was the community those children needed. They decided they wanted to offer such community to children in need of homes. I know that makes them sound extraordinary — and they are — but we can all be. Again, the message of Christmas is about our poverty and God’s grace. That’s how the Blanchets do it. Alison urges everyone who has ever had a thought about foster care to give it some serious prayer as we begin a new year.
There are over 400,000 children in foster care today. Yes, it’s emotional work. Yes, you will get attached and may have to say goodbye. Yes, it’s messy. But all of that is true of biological parenthood as well. “Love is love” is not an ideology or bumper sticker but selfless sacrifice. Isn’t that how the Christmas story ends? The most awesome sacrifice of love that we celebrate at Easter.
Young lives matter. The Baby Jesus changed the world. And every life does — every life touches the lives of others. Watch It’s a Wonderful Life again if you need some inspiration on that front. And pick up a copy of Naomi Schaefer Riley’s book No Way to Treat a Child for a challenge and some inspiration.
What more are you and I going to do for children in foster care this coming year? Everyone has a role — supporting families who do step up to the plate, for one. “Consider learning more . . . about occasional overnight respite” for a start, Blanchet urges. “Too many children are alone, because we don’t think we have what it takes.”
We can choose to make “alone” a lie — or to abandon the most vulnerable.
This column is based on one available through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association.