J- and I have been differentiating “moving on” and “moving forward”. When we think about moving on, we think of recovery and coming back to ourselves. We think of just taking emotional space to recover from a really hard period of life. Not only are we resting and being still, but we are also taking on new projects that are unrelated to our life as foster parents that we find satisfying and exciting.
On the other hand, we are still keeping our lives open to parenting again. None of the decisions that we are making limit our availability for this. Moving forward for us has been the steps that we take to move toward having children again. We expect both of these to remain a balancing act that continues until we are parents again. Right now, much more of our energy is going towards moving on, but we expect that to gradually shift toward moving forward.
J- and I spend more time together than the average couple. We both work from home much of the time and also spend time taking our dogs out together. We can go days without being apart for more than a few hours. We manage to entertain each other pretty well and considering all of this time, we still have a surprising amount to say.
For a while, we were barely able to process what went wrong, although we both had some sense of the answers. Internally, we were already defining for ourselves how to move forward, but knew it was too soon to talk about it. What we did talk about was the loss; we noticed the moments that we missed them and we felt the emptiness and leisure of our weekends. We had spent 8 months talking only about adoption and kids and now there was overwhelming silence.
We supported some friends in their matching process and saw how much more critically we viewed everything that the social workers said than we had 6 months ago. We spoke with a friend that was finalizing her adoption who had learned (when all of her daughter’s CPS records were turned over to her) that she had only a tiny fraction of reality disclosed to her when her daughter initially moved in. With all of this, we were wondering if we could ever have a successful match. It is hard to imagine not being trigger shy based on any negative information that we received.
Eventually, we started just throwing out random thoughts about moving forward amongst ourselves and our friends. This eventually began evolving into a plan.
We immediately agreed that we would not be able to take two children at once again. If we were to have two children, it would happen one at a time. We also ruled out leaving A- County. The driving was so awful for us, we knew that we would not be willing to do it again. Lastly, we agreed that we would likely not go into a situation promising kids that we would be their forever family. We realize now that this is not a guaranteed thing and we cannot support the “leap of faith” that our agency asked us to take. If this means only being foster parents and not being fost-adopt, then that is how it will be.
