What About My Other Children?

A mom of three asked me this question as we were getting to know each other at a volunteer event. She and her husband were considering foster care but were uncertain of the effects on their children. Having searched the internet and found no answers, they had paused their efforts. She had no idea I not only had lived this out in my own life, but I had also spent my doctorate program studying this very question. 

So here’s the answer she couldn’t find.

But first, can I put the question a different way?

What about my family?

If we only consider how our children will be affected, we aren’t considering the whole picture. We aren’t considering the whole system that is inevitably affected by the process.

So, here’s the reality: your family will never be the same after adoption or foster care.

The family you know now won’t exist afterward. Every member of the family will change, and every way you interact as a family will shift. It’s best just to recognize this reality up front. 

But let me tell you something else I know unequivocally to be true: the changes in your family will be both good and hard. You will simultaneously grieve and rejoice. Parts of your family will be destroyed while also being rebuilt. You will know what it means to both lose and gain in one singular experience. 

After living this life and hearing the stories of hundreds of others, no one can make me believe differently. I believe there is joy and sorrow mixed together so completely in adoption and foster care that they cannot be separated from each other. And I don’t know if it is helpful to try to separate them. 

I gained a whole lot through adoption. Most obviously I gained seven siblings who will forever be part of my family. They are the most precious, most valuable, and most noticeable gain from adoption. 

But I also gained other things just from living with them, next to them, beside them in the same home and family. I knew unconditional love in a whole different way when they came into my home. My little brothers were obsessed with me in a way I never deserved. They praised my existence, were excited I was simply in the same room as them, and never stopped making me feel like the most important person in the world to them. Many times, I was a frustrated, annoyed older sister, but they didn’t care. They forgave before I was even sorry. They forgot before I ever stopped. And they loved just because I was theirs. 

I also didn’t truly understand joy until I watched my siblings live it out unexplainably. They delighted in the smallest of things I found the most ordinary. They laughed with their whole selves, fully joyful and unrelenting, in a way that would make you never believe they had lived their own stories. But I knew the stories they had lived, and I couldn’t understand how they could laugh and dance and sing and live with such untamable joy. 

I gained empathy and compassion and maturity that directed all of my steps while I lived with them and when I moved away from them. My siblings taught me to see the world differently. They showed me trauma. They displayed the effects of their histories in their brains and bodies every day. I knew the things they had endured that I could never endure. I knew their losses that would have left me empty. And yet they kept living, loving, breathing in their own brave ways. More than anyone else ever could, they revealed the brokenness of this world to me and showed me how to keep moving forward in it, not allowing the devastation to overrule my life.

Through their lens, I began to see the world and my life in a whole new way. No longer could my life be about me, what I wanted or deserved, what would make me happy. Instead, my world became so much bigger than me. I had seen exactly what it meant for seven different people to experience things they had never wanted, hurt in ways they never deserved, and I couldn’t unsee it. So my life took on a new richness, purpose, and meaning simply because my siblings taught me the beauty of turning away from myself to focus on things so much bigger than me. 

And while I gained all of these things and so much more, I also lost a lot. I lost the family I had known for the first 16 years of my life. My parents weren’t the same, my siblings weren’t the same, I wasn’t the same. We interacted differently, we talked differently, we responded differently. This change in my family was something I wasn’t prepared for. I naively thought we were just adding a few new family members; I had no idea adoption would change the way we functioned. I had to grieve the loss of a family that still surrounded me every day, in a whole different way.  

I also lost my innocence. While I gained empathy, compassion, and maturity, I also lost ignorance and innocence from being exposed to this world’s brokenness. I had a whole new way of seeing the world, but yet my friends weren’t seeing what I was seeing. I was alone in the shift, viewing the world through my own unique lens, without anyone next to me. And I was witnessing things happen in my own home with my family that I had never seen before, that were hard to hear and see and understand. And this witnessing made the effects of trauma so big and real and devastatingly unfair to me. 

In it all, I turned inward, losing my voice and remaining silent through all the change and loss because I didn’t know how to say anything. I had no words for my thoughts, feelings, or experiences. I was overwhelmed and overwhelmingly aware of the effects of this whole experience on my whole family. So I kept the grief and loss to myself, only isolating myself more than I already was.

But here’s where I want to be the clearest. The losses don’t negate the gains, the gains don’t outweigh the losses. They both exist. There is good and hard, destruction and rebuilding, joy and sorrow. 

So, what about your other children? What about your family?

Adoption and foster care will affect your children, your family, even [especially] you. There is no way the process won’t change your family. But it’s up to you to decide how it will change your family. 

When there is grief, where do we go with it?

When there is loss, how do we talk about it?

When there is hard over and over again, how do we make sense of it?

When there is change, how do we prepare for it?

Your family’s answers to those questions will tell you all you need to know.