I Didn't Adopt My Foster Daughter, And That's Okay

There are some moments you never forget. Those times in your life—happy, tragic, heartbreaking—that are forever seared in your memory. Vivid details, emotions…time freezes, and you know for the rest of your life, you’ll know exactly where you were in that moment.

That’s what it was like when I got the text message from the social worker. I was standing outside my car, waiting for my husband to leave work, one day away from giving birth to our third baby. At the sound of the soft ding, I looked down and read the message. “We got the order!” it said. And before I could stop myself, the tears were slipping down my cheeks. I’d wished and hoped for this moment. But standing there on that fall day, looking at that text message, all I felt was the wind being knocked from me. She’s leaving. Oh my God, she’s really leaving.

From the first day our foster daughter entered our lives—two days old, right from the hospital—I knew this moment was coming. It had always been expected that she would be adopted. We’re foster parents, this is what we do: take in children for a short period of time, love them well, give them a safe and secure home, and then send them home. We’d been doing it for years at this point; we knew the drill.

But we’d never had a newborn. Never raised a baby right from the beginning. I hadn’t gotten up in the middle of the night to feed a newborn, to rock a baby to sleep since my own babies. I hadn’t known the thrill of a first smile, first giggle, hadn’t felt the weight of a sleeping baby in seven years. It wasn’t hard to fall in love; it didn’t take long to wonder if we could adopt her.

I feel like we hear a lot of those stories, the ones where the foster family adopts a child. Or adoption stories in general. And we hear them so often for good reason—they’re good stories. Redemptive and hopeful, they remind us of what’s good in the world.

That wasn’t our story, though. We talked about it; I thought about it often, but it never felt as though it was the best decision for us. A few months into her placement, we found out we were (unexpectedly) pregnant with our third child. That news certainly contributed to our decision, but at the core of it was the sense that adoption wasn’t to be our story.