Welcome to my blog post! I’m glad you are here, and I hope you visit often. To give you a little background on our situation, my husband and I have been married for 13+ years. We got married when we were both 30, and we never really thought we wanted children. We lived a good life, thinking only of ourselves. We lived in a big house on a lake, drove expensive cars, had a big boat, and spent money like we would have it forever, traveling and partying with friends. We thought we had it all! We owned a business, and when the recession hit, we struggled, to put it mildly. About three years ago we had to file bankruptcy and give it all up. We were humbled, to say the least. We moved to a smaller house, my father-in-law gave us two 10-year-old cars, we both got jobs, and we basically started over.
It was at this time of self reflection that we decided we wanted a child, but by then we were 40! So we started to research adoption. We decided that international adoption was too expensive, and even traditional domestic adoption was not in our budget. A friend suggested we contact a local foster home. I was not excited about fostering a child. How could I love something and then let it go? But we went through the foster parent classes because they promised us they would only introduce us to children whose parents had already TPR (Terminated Parental Rights). We became licensed foster parents in March 2011. We agreed that we wanted a girl, toddler age, and we would consider siblings.
Early May 2011, the foster home contacted us because they needed someone to keep a 9-year-old boy while his foster parents went on vacation for a week. We agreed, and the week went well. A few weeks later they called us again, asking if we could keep him for Memorial Day weekend. We did, and that’s when we fell in love with this little boy. He was placed with us permanently in July 2011, and he started at his new school last week.
He has brought us much joy and some heartache (that we didn’t expect). He is loving and sometimes hateful, but I cannot imagine our lives without him now. I know he was hurt emotionally and physically by his parents for the first eight years of his life, and it will take much longer than those eight years to “fix” what his parents have done. And we will stick it out with him and love him even when he yells that he hates us and doesn’t want us to adopt him. I intend to tell it like it is on this blog– the good, the bad, and the ugly– because honestly…I cannot talk candidly with anyone else except my husband. Please feel free to give me advice, or call me crazy. I can take it, because I am a mom.
