Who Are Foster Parents?

I believe I am quite qualified to answer the above question. I was raised within the foster care system of Michigan from birth until I aged out. By the age of eleven I had been placed with eight different foster families, one family I was placed with three different times. Though I have very few memories of most the families, as I was too young, I have enough to know who the vast majority of foster families are. Let me tell you who they are.

They, the overwhelming majority, are not the monsters some people think they are. They don’t do it for money, or for fame, or for people to look at them or notice them.

They don’t do it to be popular or to be noticed by other people. Neither do they do it to obtain a privilege or a gift, or just for pity.

They are not the bad people of the system.

They are the ones that open the door of their home to what it is at that time just a story told by someone on the other side of the phone; just a faceless child in need.

That’s all they know, just a story of something that shouldn't’t happen, but it did happen. A thing that no one wants to hear or think about it, but that they choose to live with because an innocent heart has been broken. A heart whose only “sin” was to ask to be loved by mom and dad, but yet (in many cases) were punished, tormented or crippled by those that were supposed to love and protect them.

They are the ones that cry alone when it’s time go on with life and feel in their own flesh, because after all that is what their heart is made of, the pain of the physical, emotional, sexual and any kind of abuse that a child has suffered. The only answer they can offer in answer to the tear from an innocent heart that just asks why, is just another tear from the bottom of their heart.