Another anecdote in evidence, perhaps less trivial because it involves actual suffering. A couple years ago we switched health insurers and I began seeing an osteopath who helped me get sufficiently on top of the causes of my chronic pain that I’ve been able to get by without the prescription painkillers I used to take. But then social services placed that newborn in our home, and, with two other and not much older children in the house, I stopped sleeping much. I can get away with six or less hours of sleep a night for a while, but after a couple months, my back ached and my knees started complaining big time. That already had me concocting ibuprofen-Tylenol-Aleve cocktails. Then, just shy of the three-month mark, the old repetitive-motion injury in my wrists showed back up. The drugs may have been what knocked my stomach out of alignment, or maybe it was the green chili I had for breakfast. At any rate, I stopped eating and slept a great deal for two days, which, along with the fact the baby is sleeping more soundly, put my pain levels back in abeyance.
Now, this is pretty much standard fare for middle-aged parents, but the kicker is that my investment in this child in sleepless nights and extraordinarily distracting levels of pain could very well come to naught. The baby’s mother seems to have lost interest in her, but her social worker tells us a new father has been identified through DNA testing; it’s once again (this happens to us a lot) possible that this baby (of whom we cannot help thinking as ours, no matter how desperately we try not to) might end up living with genetic kin rather than our family. If she does, she will never remember us and, very likely, never even know who we are.
Obviously, then, foster parenting is our cross.
The amazing thing is that the foster parents I’ve met don’t seem to have noticed. Every time I listen to other foster parents, their focus is always on the kids, on what can be done for them. We go to support group meetings about once a month, and there are no martyrs in that room. If anything, these people feel privileged to be able to do something, anything, to help children who have been been done gross, unspeakable injustice by this fallen world.
And I can’t believe I’m saying this, since I’ve known myself to be a whining, moaning, egocentric pathetic excuse for a human being for just about as long as I’ve been self-aware, but even with all the very, very real pain, my wife and I are neither heroes nor martyrs. We are parents.
Now, this is pretty much standard fare for middle-aged parents, but the kicker is that my investment in this child in sleepless nights and extraordinarily distracting levels of pain could very well come to naught. The baby’s mother seems to have lost interest in her, but her social worker tells us a new father has been identified through DNA testing; it’s once again (this happens to us a lot) possible that this baby (of whom we cannot help thinking as ours, no matter how desperately we try not to) might end up living with genetic kin rather than our family. If she does, she will never remember us and, very likely, never even know who we are.
Obviously, then, foster parenting is our cross.
The amazing thing is that the foster parents I’ve met don’t seem to have noticed. Every time I listen to other foster parents, their focus is always on the kids, on what can be done for them. We go to support group meetings about once a month, and there are no martyrs in that room. If anything, these people feel privileged to be able to do something, anything, to help children who have been been done gross, unspeakable injustice by this fallen world.
And I can’t believe I’m saying this, since I’ve known myself to be a whining, moaning, egocentric pathetic excuse for a human being for just about as long as I’ve been self-aware, but even with all the very, very real pain, my wife and I are neither heroes nor martyrs. We are parents.
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