In foster care, changes either happen very quickly or tend to drag out.  Both situations require patience and flexibility in different ways.

In the first, we receive a phone call for a waiting child who (if we accept placement) is delivered to our door by a social worker or pickup by us is arranged within a very short amount of time, typically an hour or two.  It is a like a tornado with the fabric of our lives being changed in the instant of the phone call.  We launch into action mode, no matter what time of day it is, and begin collecting the things we need, setting up sleeping arrangements, alerting our tribe of friends and family of the things we need, and quickly cleaning in readiness to add another person to our lives.  I can give many examples, but the one that comes to mind the most easily is when we were called for Jonah.  The social worker called me from the courthouse, asked me if I was willing to take a medically fragile 6 week old baby.  I asked a few questions and quickly said yes.  She said “Great, I have the baby in my arms right now, see you in ten minutes.”  With virtually no time to prepare, to wonder, to wait, this tiny life was brought into our home and once again the dynamic shifted.

The other circumstance, the waiting, is what I am going to focus on today.  So many things are uncertain in this world of fostering, one of which is the ever changing situations which a child is in when they are ‘in the system’.  Sometimes the social workers will ask the placement agency to find a foster home when they are not 100% certain yet if a child will actually be placed in foster care.  There are many plates that are spinning when a case is under investigation – determining if a child needs a placement outside of the home, if a suitable relative can quickly be found, what type of needs the child might have, and if they need a foster home, what would be the best fit.  So there are times when we are called for a placement, we say yes, and then we wait.  There is often little information shared beyond age and gender – we are told as much as they know but the reality is they just don’t know right away.  We understand as foster parents that we are the fall back plan, as it should be.  If any family can be found, that is the most ideal, any relative home would be a more familiar place for a child than a complete stranger.

But the waiting –  from the perspective of the foster family – is slow torture.  You say yes, then sit and wonder what the child looks like, how he/she will fit in the family, how your life is about to potentially change in a big way, what his/her bio-parents are like, etc.  We think about how long the placement could go, what happened (we don’t usually know much if at all), and just how are we going to make the dynamic in our home work with a new addition, all the while knowing that in the space of a quick phone call or email the situation can change yet again in one direction or another.  It’s excruciating, especially when there’s little to no communication the workers can offer in the middle of sorting out what direction the case is going.

Learning to wait – hopefully patiently – is what God is in the middle of teaching us so far in this leg of our foster journey.  As I blogged last time we waited and prepared for about a week for a tiny preemie who never ended up coming to our home since he thankfully ended up having a willing and suitable relative home to go to.  It was right, but we were of course a little bummed after the week of mental gymnastics trying to sort out how it was all going to work.

And now we are in a similar place of waiting once again.  I can’t share much but am hopeful that we will have a relatively definitive answer today and an end to the wait.  We accepted the tentative placement on Friday and today is Tuesday.  I know that doesn’t sound very long, but a long weekend full of wondering and dreaming and obsessing and sorting out how this particular situation would change our lives felt sooooo long.  I wanted to start preparing, to round up what we would need, to shop and post about it to borrow the larger items we know we will need so we can feel prepared just in case; that desire feels much like nesting in the final stages of pregnancy to me….wanting to ready the space to receive a new life into it and have everything we need, but without the certainty of a fairly definitive yes, we held off on preparations.  In many ways, this placement would be harder and a bigger change than the preemie, but we know we are up for the challenge and God has spoken very clearly to Ryan about it.  I will share in a later post once this is resolved, how big and clear and amazing it was to hear a yes from my husband on this one, but it would be impossible to blog about it without giving some details I just can’t share yet.

And so we wait….I have a feeling today is going to be a LONG day.