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He was just shy of three months old when the phone rang, mid-pandemic, asking if I could take in a little boy.

He showed up at 11 p.m. in a onesie and one sock, with three diapers, half a can of formula, and one broken bottle. The social worker looked at me and asked, “So I’m assuming you have experience taking care of infants, right?”
“Nope,” I told her.
She laughed, then she left.

Two years later, my sweet boy, and his brother who joined us soon after, were reunified. I was getting married, dreaming of redefining family as a sweet mix of the baby that would one day grow in my belly and the presence of the boys who were once mine as her honorary brothers. Their biological parents were our first wedding RSVP. We stayed close.

A year later, reunification failed, and the boys came back.

Now my oldest is five and a half. He’s spent four and a half of those years in foster care. We’re waiting on a verdict for termination.

Even standing here at TPR, I can say with certainty: the parents aren’t the enemy. The enemy is a system that fails families long before foster care ever enters the picture. The enemy is cycles of trauma and poverty and addiction left unaddressed. The enemy is when we feel when addressing these social justice issues with apathy instead of compassion. The enemy is not the system itself, but the fact that the system is so overloaded, caseworkers are overworked, services are backlogged, and it’s our children who pay the consequences.

I used to believe family meant the people who lived under your roof or those connected by biology. But I’ve learned it’s so much more than that. Family is the caseworker who has walked beside you for years. It’s the friends who have become your steady pillars of support. It’s the biological parents—no matter how complicated the circumstances—because they created the children you love with your whole heart. Family is messy, sacred, and ever-changing. And even here, in all the uncertainty, there is hope. Hope that love endures. Hope that cycles can be broken. Hope that family, in all its complexity, can still be a place of belonging.

#thisisfostercare