This morning our almost four year old foster daughter “A” asked if she could have a dessert when she finished her breakfast. “Of course,” I replied. A few minutes later when she walked up with the ice cream sandwich she had selected for her breakfast dessert, I choked back every parental instinct I had, and asked her to please sit down at the table to eat it and not make a mess.
After more than 20 months with our family, A is getting ready to move across the state to live with a great aunt and uncle that she is just getting to know. My heart is breaking and hers is about to. And so, in consideration of the heartbreak that awaits every child in foster care who has moved in with strangers and learned to live with them and love them, only to be moved to a new family of strangers in an unfamiliar location, we loosen the rules and try to make her last days with us as fun and carefree as we can. Ice cream for breakfast? Sure. Don’t want to take a nap? No problem. Want to go swimming at bedtime? I’m getting out my bathing suit.
Over 15 years of being a foster family, we have developed rituals that help us say goodbye. We make a garden stone with each child’s handprints and footprints. We get a copy of “Oh, the Places You’ll Go” and write a message for now, and for the future. I always add our phone number, and to this day, we keep a landline in our home so we can answer if they ever call. We collect photos and make a scrapbook. We invite our extended family and friends over for a party and one last hug goodbye.
As I sit in A’s room and pack up her things, a vision of every single one of the children we’ve cared for in 15 years plays over and over in my mind. Z laying on her new bed, crying and asking why we were dropping her off and not her sister. L who was in the background of every phone call with the aunt he moved in with, yelling for me to ‘pick him up.’ R running through the front door of his apartment, closing it, and then opening it back up to make sure we were still there; S and M driving away with their goldfish in their laps, and their aunt’s van piled high with the toys and clothes they had accumulated over two years in our home. Changing C’s diaper, and then handing him off to his new adoptive parents….driving R to California to live with his dad, and the sight of him on his tricycle in my rearview mirror.
Children in foster care deserve so much more than ‘the system’ has to give. It seems like the least we can do is have ice cream for breakfast.