What I would have told myself about grief
Once upon a time, back when Josh and I were first considering doing foster care, I sat at my computer and typed “How will doing foster care impact my bio child” into a search engine.
I didn’t find much. Of course I knew I wouldn’t find a forecast for the future; what I really wanted was community, shared experiences, and hope that I wasn’t going to hurt my family too much by saying yes.
I’ve revisited this over and over in my mind as I’ve sat down to many conversations with potential foster parents. It’s a heavy weight trying to talk to someone considering foster care. What if I turn them away by the experiences I share? That’s a big responsibility. What if I DON’T turn them away by the experiences I share? Maybe that’s an even bigger responsibility.
I’ve revisited this too as I have grown a deep and beautiful network of relationships with other people who live close to trauma: adoptive parents and foster parents, parents of children with special needs, individuals with disabilities, individuals with their own traumas, and so many others.
I’ll say one thing for my trauma network: I have never been so known as I am in this community. I have never felt so much hope while the pain of our reality is still so heavy. There’s a mark left on people who have carried heavy grief and it’s a mark that can quickly be seen and known by others who also carry it. It allows us to speak with the same language. It gives us a foundation and a connection that we could not otherwise share, with our very different lives and experiences.
I hope and pray that my children will feel the same. That they will not fear people different from them. That they will be more afraid of not being present than saying the wrong thing when someone is grieving. That they’ll be the kind of people who show up to babysit or do laundry or mow a lawn rather than taking “I’m fine” as an answer when someone’s life is crashing down. That they will not be limited to people of their age or experience for friendships or community.
My children bear the mark of grief. Not just the one who was in foster care once; all of them. They’ve been afraid in their own home. They’ve seen their parents falling apart. They’ve wondered if children they love will be safe; they’ve seen that sometimes that answer has been no. They’ve felt deep fear that someone they love will not be okay and they’ve experienced the grief of learning that their fears were valid. They’ve lost family and friends to the conviction that silence is not enough when people are being oppressed. They’ve lost activities and adventures time and time again because sometimes we can’t even leave our home safely, even now, three years after we made the decision to stop being a foster family.
Today this is fresh on my mind. As two of my kids were playing Minecraft, one of them showed me something special: the very most precious element they could find, searched out for “two weeks of Minecraft days,” carefully placed with a sign and a name. A gravestone. My kids made a gravestone monument in Minecraft for someone they loved who was lost to an overdose last year.
I wonder what that earlier version of me would have thought of this. Would it have turned me away? Would it have grieved me too much to continue?
I don’t know. But here are some things I would have told myself:
It will hurt more than you can imagine. But don’t imagine. Today’s grief is enough for today. Move forward in hope and let the grief catch up only where it needs to.
You will carry heavy grief. But there is a little boy whose burden is heavier than your own, you will carry that grief alongside him, and your pain will show him that both his pain and your love are valid.
There is no understating how costly it is to devote your life to a person whose needs are far greater than even your 100% can meet. Your world will break in a million ways, but it will be better than it ever was or could have been without him.
Those people who hurt your kids - who hurt you - you will love them. LOVE THEM. You will wonder what could have been different if they’d had someone loving them before their kids entered care. You will spend a lifetime trying to see the before picture so there doesn’t have to be an after where families are broken and hurting. You will see that they were made wonderfully in God’s image and you will love them so much.
You will not even recognize yourself in a few years. And you would never want to go back. Because now that you know and see, you want to be here, in this place, with these people. You want to be on the inside loving a community that is hurting, not on the outside making guesses about what it’s like. The grief doesn’t go away if you don’t feel it. The pain doesn’t disappear because you don’t see it. It’s there. Don’t ignore it. The best way to bring hope to a community is by being part of that community.
Doing the hard things will change everything. And that will be brutally painful and wonderfully good.
That’s what I would say. I’m sure in another ten years my answer will change once again, but I suspect that the takeaway will not.
The best things are the hardest things. Don’t be afraid.
