It Takes A Village…

Let’s talk about SUPPORT!!!

One thing I wish I would of done at the beginning of my Fostering Adventure is gain more support early on.

This is one of the many things I wish I would of known about sooner then later, and my hope is, by talking about it, I can help someone else in navigating through this part of Foster Care.

Don’t get me wrong, family and friends can and often will be very supportive, some more then others, but getting support from people who are going through what you are going through is such an amazing and valuable tool to have. I’ll be talking some time later about your Foster Care Tool Box.

Aside from friends and family, having a network of other Foster parents around you is so important, they do the court dates, the visits, the extra doctors/specialist appointments, the visits with Case Workers, GALs, and CASAs. It’s a lot and not everyone gets it. Join a support group on line, there are great ones in person also. We have a wonderful one in my County called Foster Love, it’s filled with amazing, seasoned, helpful, loving people. They get it. They live it. And when it’s hard, they pull each other up.

Now, by no means am I saying that family and friends can’t do all that for you too. I hope your as lucky as I am to have that kind of support. But, you will have people who were eager to support early on and as time goes by it gets hard for them. Not only does life change and responsibilities change but sometimes the hurt that comes from children coming and going in your life can be very hard. We know this first hand, as Foster Parents we live this daily. If we could buy stocks in it, we would be billionaires. But it’s important to remember and to have some grace for family and friends, they didn’t sign up for this. They may have supported you and still do, they just have to do it in a different way. Or like my Mother in Law, they will be all in all of the time, loving them as her own, being a Grams to kids that just need additional love.