[mamala]

We had fostered for a bit before we got an adoptive placement. We were licensed for both (which means they write the homestudy 2 different ways and send one to the adoptive unit in Trenton, and one goes to the local resource office for fostering).

So we had a harder time explaining to them that this one was staying.

Fostering was really good for feeling out the family's reactions to other races. When we fostered, we made sure that everyone (including ourselves) assumed the child was going home no matter how hopeless it looked... (and even the most hopeless looking case DID go home). We set the expectation that the kids WOULD leave and that our role was to help them in their time of crisis and need. People who said "what if they have to leave" were told "there's no 'what if'... fostering means they WILL leave. Giving them the love and support they need while they can't have their family is more important than crying for a few days." We knew that if a placement went adoptive, it was way easier to deal with that change than having kids come in, have the family & friends get their hopes up or be on that roller coaster and have the child leave.

We told people that fostering would help us 1) feel like a family until we got our "forever" child; 2) would help us learn how to handle common issues with children from foster care (and truly--it did), and 3) would help us understand what ages we could really handle and felt most comfortable with. They took it as a mutually-beneficial situation because they saw where we were getting something out of it even if the kids left.

For whatever reason, people left us alone about it when they felt we were gaining something out of the situation when all they could see was what we would lose. Does that make sense?