What made you decide to foster? I was thinking about it for a while. Me and my husband even finished fostering classes but we never applied. First he got cold feet then I did. It is scary.

We have two kids, but we wanted a third. We wanted that baby bad, too. But, alas, it didn’t work. It didn’t work multiples times. Having to watch my wife go through multiple failed pregnancies was devestating to me, and i can’t begin to express what she went through both physically and emotionally. It was a very bad place for both of us.

My wife came across the idea of fostering, though, and she latched onto the frame of mind that we couldn’t have another of our own because we were meant to help others. This idea lead her out of that heartache. Me, though...i just went with it. I am not by nature a “nice person”. I am the kind of person who has to ask himself “what would a good person do” in a lot of situations and then try to fake my way through it. But i cherish and ador my wife...anything that helped her i was running with.

During the process of getting licensed, though, i heard about a little boy and his sisters. The boy was 11 (or thereabouts) and his sisters were younger...the youngest was 2, i remember that. These kids were taken from their parents for abuse and neglect...they were squatting and cooking/selling meth from one of their bedrooms. What struck me about the situation, though, was that the kids had to sleep in a CPS office because there was no room for them anywhere. No homes, respite families, facilities, even the juvenile detention center was packed...nowhere to go. I didn’t know thst was a thing that happened. I thought there was always someplace to go.

The Little girl was what got to me the most. The boy was old enough to know his life wasn’t great. That his parents weren’t great. They’d beat him. They’d let strangers beat him. They had no food, no running water, no soap, no clean clothes...and he was old enough to know his parents were responsible. He knew his life was probably going to improve a little...or i like to think he did. The little girl, though...you can be the worst person and your little toddler will probably not hate you. Little kids don’t hate their mommies and daddies...they only love them. Despite the horrible conditions she was livig in prior to being picked up by cpc, sleeping in a cot in a cps office building under fluorescent lights and being watched over by strangers was probably the scariest thing she’d ever experienced.

The unfairness of that situation won me over.

/r/Fosterparents Thread