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To Boulderbabe and Mom2blessings...
I'm not sure that anything my foster parents might have done differently would have mattered. However, rereading my last post I can see that I gave the wrong impression about my foster parents.
Again, I don't think my foster mom ever deliberately meant to be unkind, but would sometimes say things that were disturbing nonetheless. Some days I'd hear things like "if your mom came back for you, we wouldn't let you go." That was reassuring, but even at a fairly young age I was completely aware of my situation as a ward of the state, and I knew they would be pretty powerless to interfere with the whims of a social worker I saw once or twice a year. On top of that, simplying saying so was another reminder that maybe my birth mom would come back and try to reunite me with my siblings. At other times I'd hear comments like "if you don't like it here, you can call your social worker and ask to be moved." To be fair, I have to say that she never threatened to have me moved against my will, but I didn't see it as being any different. I have to also say that I certainly must have been a handful for her. I was never in trouble with the law or in school (well, nothing more than typical kid stuff), nor was I ever violent or destructive, but I probably didn't pass up many opportunities for a fight, and she was a rather strict disciplinarian, so we meshed like mismatched sprockets.
As for my foster mom's attitude about my birth mom, I can only say it was unremarkable given the circumstances. In those days I doubt anyone considered the psychology of ripping on a kid's birth mom, and something like alcoholism was considered a character flaw, not a disease to be managed. My foster mom honestly believed that a woman's place was in the home and that "till death do us part" was non-negotiable, and it was simply unfathomable to her that a mother would walk away from a husband and nine kids.
Having said all that, the real problem is that I simply knew I wasn't theirs, and never would be, but that was due to the diffent times and circumstances, not to my foster parents. It was all quite matter-of-fact. I had a birth father, and a swarm of siblings I didn't live with, and an alcoholic birth mother incapable of caring for us, and was a ward of the state, and that was that. At the time, more or less permanent foster care was accepted as the solution. There was no time limit or insistence on either reunification or adoption as there is today.
Consider this in order to put the environment of the time in perspective: I had a foster brother growing up. From what I knew, his birth parents had vanished into thin air. I don't recall ever hearing of a visit, a phone call, or even a card. They were just gone. My foster parents asked to adopt him, and it took years to get it approved. They finally did complete the adoption when he was in his early teens. In my case, there was no point in even asking, because my father never gave up his rights (and in fact made a good effort to keep us as close as the situation would allow). They probably would have tried to adopt me as well, if there had ever been any hope of doing so. My life growing up wasn't heaven, nor was it hell. It was purgatory.
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