by Foster Parent though Catholic Community Services. This post is sponsored by Catholic Community Services. Call Catholic Community Services at 253-999-9144 and start your road to discovering where you fit into the foster care story.
Our family has been fostering for almost three years now. We have had around 30 kids in our home, some of them in sibling groups. It has been a fun, tiring, challenging, and rewarding journey. We look back at each child with great fondness. We love and miss even the most challenging ones. We have been lucky enough to keep in touch with some of the kids we have had in our home. We have found it so much easier if we establish a relationship with their parents. It puts their parents at ease when they understand our goal is reunification and this relationship makes it easier on the kids.
We once had a child who really pulled on our heart strings. She was a fifteen year old girl who grew up with her parents who suffered from substance abuse. She was responsible for taking care of her much younger sibling who had special needs. She felt alone and isolated, which lead her to make the difficult decision to report her parents to CPS. She struggled with the guilt of reporting her parents, however she felt that she had to do it for her sister and herself. This is when she came to us.
Foster care gave her and her parents a chance to heal. Now she is a straight A student and dreams of college and what her future holds. Her plan is to keep straight A’s and to do running start and graduate with an associate’s degree.
Her resiliency and determination have inspired us so much. To see this young woman face what she has been dealt in her short life and having the strength, determination, and desire to make a better life for herself by reporting her parents just does something to our hearts I cannot explain. We are so proud of her and so glad we were given the chance to be a part of her life and help to change her story.
While she was placed with us we were in good communication with her parents as they started their road to recovery. We let them know that we wanted to support them and their reunification. We established a good and lasting relationship that lead to them asking us to be an emergency contact for their daughter when she returned home. We are so thankful that we get to be a part of her life forever and cannot wait to see what is in store for her future.
This is why we love what we do. This is why we foster, to give and to gain.
Do you feel called to Foster Care? Call Catholic Community Services today at 253-999-9144 or visit us online.
