His Mama... Always

 

He looks out the window and says "Mama"... 

He knows his worker is coming soon, to pick him up and take him to his visit.  

I stop and notice, then question, the twinge of pain running through my chest.  Am I jealous?  Am I disappointed?  Why does it hurt that he wants her? 

I'm thankful for this reminder, and others like it...

Like the countless nights I would hear sniffles from the next room, my foster daughter quietly mourning and missing her Mommy.
Or the far off look in my foster baby's face when he heard the soundtrack his mom used to play for him.  

Heartbreaking moments like these remind me why we are NOT doing foster care:

We are not doing foster care because these kids don't love their parents; nor because their parents don't love them.
We are not doing foster care because they don't have parents.  They do.
And we are not doing foster care because we can fix them, because we're the answer to all their needs and desires and pain...

It's a mistake to think that foster care is taking a child, like a missing puzzle piece, and placing them into our family to complete it.
No, foster care is stepping into another family's puzzle--scattered, broken, and marred--and trying to help them find wholeness again.  No amount of love, care, late nights reading books, or early morning snuggles will ever take away the fact that they belong to another puzzle.  

Are there situations where children are adopted into a new "puzzle". Of course. And it's a beautiful thing, what God can do, to heal the brokenness and help them attach.

But only God can do that. In his timing. We don't shove and squish to try to make them "fit" and be satisfied in our families.  We grieve with them.  We acknowledge that they will forever and ever be formed from and tied to their biological family.  That's God's design.  

I can hear this little boy ask for his "Mama", and I can walk alongside him in his confusion, but Lord help me not try to be what only you can be for him.