May is national foster care awareness month… and honestly, this is the first year I have ever noticed the foster care village. Of course, I’ve known a few families who have fostered over the years, but my overall awareness of everything related to foster care has been very minimal up until a few months ago. I had no idea that there are currently 13,000 kids in foster care in Michigan right now and that more families closed a license in Ingham county last year than opened one.

Things that matter are hard.

– Instant Family

Xav and I were so blessed by a little foster care baby shower last month that a few dear friends and family members put on for us. I had the chance leading up to the shower to sit down and write out our journey of how we ended up here… working towards our license. As I read through the story over and over in preparation, I decided I wanted to share it on my blog in little pieces throughout this month.

We haven’t had the chance to sit down and share this with very many people, and we haven’t really talked about it that much on social media… it seems almost weird to talk about something that hasn’t really truly even started yet. There are still so many “what ifs”. But my dear friend, Dana, has been helping me realize that wanting to do any part of this journey on our own is dangerous.

In order for foster care to exist, there must first be great tragedy and brokenness.

– Jason Johnson

To give you a more full picture of what God has been doing, I need to start by backing up all the way to when Xavier and I were dating. We talked about  family quite a bit. We both had a very idealistic view of what we wanted our future family to look like and a rosy view of our personal upbringings. We ended up agreeing that we both wanted between 2-4 kids… all spaced out 24-36 months apart… evenly split between boys and girls… you get the idea. All stuff you can’t really control.

During that time, although I was far from being ready for children, I asked Xav what his thoughts were on adoption. It was something that had been on my heart off and on since I was a ten year old who wanted to start an orphanage in China. He said it wasn’t really something that had ever been on his mind as a possibility. Although I was still somewhat interested in the idea of adoption, I wasn’t necessarily pushing to become a mom. I liked my freedom and I decided that adoption wasn’t something I was going to push strongly for… if Xavier’s heart changed that would be one thing, but I didn’t even know my own heart so why would I try to change his?

About ten months after we got married, our ideal view of family began to shatter and crack. Family values, roots and establishments we had once held tightly to begin to wilt and fade. We came to a place where we realized the idea of a perfect family had become an idol in our lives. Our natural tendencies were to squirm away from difficult and awkward situations. And God was bringing painful brokenness into our home that we could not squirm away from. We saw firsthand that there is no formula for a perfect family or perfect life. Yet in the deepest brokenness, God’s faithfulness shone brighter.

In November of 2017, I began to nanny Luke, Olivia and Ella Hamlin. Even going into that job, I had such an idealistic view of what I wanted to instill in the kids. I made charts of where I wanted to see growth in them, things I wanted to teach them, places I wanted to take them and crafts I thought they needed to do. It didn’t take long for me to realize that, as good as those intentions were, I couldn’t make a perfect life for them. I couldn’t be a perfect nanny. And God continued to show me his faithfulness in the brokenness.

Last August, Dean Kershner came to visit our church and he brought the kids from Harvest Hope with him. They had talked about potentially finding host homes for the kids for a few months while they were visiting the US. On our way home from church, Xav turned to me and said, “Wouldn’t it be a neat opportunity to host one of those kids if we had the space?” Then he added, “I think I’m open to adoption now.”

The goal of foster care is not to put kids in the best home possible… the primary goal is reunification of the children with their birth parents. The other main goals are to find family placements and then the last goal is non-relative adoption to give them permanency, consistency if the children are not able to go home.

– Hallie Graves

To be continued…