Why is it that when you reach your 30s + and get one bad night of sleep, where you don’t close your eyes until nearly 2am and then have to get up around 8:30 the next morning, followed by not being able to take a nap and it takes approximately a month to recover? I’ve had a lot of late nights, followed by earlier than I would like mornings lately, though my sleep, or lack thereof, is not the point of today’s rantings.

At what point are fancy distractions not enough to satiate the loneliness that screams at women from an eternally empty womb, that they want to fill. Since our big trip to Europe, we’ve been planning our next one, if life had gone according to plan we would be getting on a plane in about four days, but as always expect the unexpected in life.

Back in April we celebrated our 11th Wedding Anniversary down in Las Vegas. During our lavish weekend, we saw three different shows, stayed in the Venetian a high-end hotel on the strip, visited the National Mob Museum, Gambled and lost the $11 in Brent’s wallet, ate some incredible food, and purchased an expensive painting by Michael Cheval for our living room. A weekend of fun and indulgence which catapulted me into a state of reflection of what comes next, do I hurl myself into school work for my master’s degree which contains possible future financial fulfillment, but is devoid of the full range of emotional fulfillment.

Earlier this year we finished the nursery, but we’ve been pretty hopeless about the idea that we will ever have a baby sleep in there. For the past three years, since designating the room as the Harry Potter room, we have been causally calling it the nursery. That is until my dad overheard us call it the nursery about eighteen months ago, he excitedly repeated the word to check he had heard correctly. Following this unfortunate word slip, Brent and I course corrected to exclusively call it the Harry Potter Room again. Hours of work, time, and creativity has gone into this room, but wondered if it would ever be used for its intended purpose.

This is most of the mural on one wall of the Harry Potter room, and 3 videos of other work we did in that room!!

Subscription Box wall!

Harry Potter Luggage Dresser

Board and Batten & Mural

We have since added a rocking chair and a crib!

For several posts now I have teased us having a side quest outside of our standard fertility treatments. So now finally the details of our side quest to parenthood: Foster care.

In 2022 Brent came home from therapy and said in quite a matter-of-fact tone “I think we should look into Foster care.” So we did, we started the classes, researched the process, printed and started the paper application, and then as it often does our calendar filled and we lost track of the foster trajectory.

Weeks later I had a tearful conversation with Brent about how we would never be parents, and kept asking why we gave up on becoming foster parents. His response though surprising was not entirely unexpected, essentially during one of the classes it had freaked him out that at a moment’s notice, we could be in charge of fully formed little people. Instead of having the opportunity to take a baby home from the hospital and start from zero in molding the little babe, we could have a talking, running, opinionated, trauma filled first grader show up on our doorstep, hours after accepting the fostering assignment.

Over a year and a couple moments of heartbreak on our regular fertility journey later and our foster journey began again. In December we took all eight of the required three-hour foster courses nearly 24 hours of classes, on subjects of trauma, relationships with primary family, how the children will react to various situations, setting schedules, and boundaries, managing food, sleep, regression especially after family visits, and other such topics.

After taking all the classes both Brent and I are convinced that every parent needs these lessons. After seeing what some of these children go through, it is insane that a woman has a baby and then if all goes well a couple days later they send them home with well wishes and an expensive hospital bill.

We then jumped through dozens of additional hoops, before we were put on a list of mostly couples certified to take in children placed in the system. Some families taking the courses like us had never had children in their home and saw this as a way to step into the role of parenthood, others had grown children who simply wanted to give some teens a safe place, others had upwards of eight children and yet wanted more. To me, those families with four to eight children presently living at home are being slightly selfish by putting their name in the hat to take in fosters when they had other children who need their attention at the moment. Also, priority should be given to those with 0-2 children, feeling nearly out of options to have a chance to be parents and have children grace our homes. That said people who work for the state know there are a good number of kids who come into state custody every month that need a safe space to call home even if only temporarily.

In February a friend and I held a Pride and Prejudice and Zombies Galentines tea party for several amazing women in the area. Some of them knew our fertility plight and a couple knew details of our side quest for children and were asking how the journey was going. I frustratedly unloaded about how long the process was taking to get certified. Below are a couple pictures taken at the end of the night because I always forget to take them before.

After we finished our required courses, the application, the background check request and fingerprinting, and CPR & First Aid training, we had been waiting for over a month for the background checks to come back. The state of Utah checks came back in about two weeks, but because we had lived out of state within the previous five years background checks and abandonment lists checks were needed for the state of California.

Finally, DCFS (Department of Child and Family Services) reached out about our home study, which they scheduled for noon on March 19th: 106 days from the day of our first class, this go around. Two Saturdays prior to the big day, some of my family had come to help mark off the last few things on the extensive requirement list of things like window well and outlet covers, baby gates (if the requested age range requires it). Besides this final work day we had cleaned and prepped and prepped and cleaned for weeks on end, only to finally be 100% done just hours before the foster care home visit. Only to need to basically do it all again a couple months later.

I saw a video recently of a lady who said you can absolutely have a clean house with a husband, children, and animals you just basically have to constantly be cleaning. There is quite a bit of truth to that, although some of the other organizing and decluttering work we did last year has helped greatly in keeping our house much cleaner on a weekly basis.

Finally, at the end of March, all steps were completed including the final interview done by our resource coordinator (The wonderful woman who confirms all the logistics of foster care are taken care of), and in April we received our foster licenses. Then it was time to wait.

The week we were licensed I was unbelievably sad. I kept receiving overwhelming feelings of uncertainty about whether I wanted to raise other people’s children, especially since in many cases we probably won’t be able to keep them. Even if perchance we were allowed to keep a child permanently, it is such a long road to get to that point. When the tears started coming, they seemed not to stop. They just fall and fall and fall, filling my oceans of grief. Perhaps on weeks like that one, I should consider buying a boat to sail off on my grief oceans.

In June our first experience as foster parents was a twelve-day respite (A short-term case where we keep foster children for their long-term foster family when they need to be out of town and cannot take their foster’s with them). It was nice to ease ourselves into fostering for such a short time, and also to help us decide if we wanted to continue fostering.

These children come with all kinds of behavior issues, and bad habits instilled in them by parents who made some terrible choices, whether by the example they set, neglecting them, or other even worse traumas these children must face, sometimes even at an extremely young age. Along with the notion that many of the parents with children in the foster system have lost their way, some of them probably shouldn’t have had children in the first place. How unfair is it that we who have made fairly good choices in life cannot have biological children and nonetheless those who didn’t take proper care of their children to the point of them needing to be taken away, may have had zero fertility issues, (especially those cases of families with three plus children in the system).

Our 12 days of respite in June. We took in two children, One a girl (A) turning three in July, and a boy (Z) turning 5 in December. A twelve-day whirlwind, and by the end we were exhausted. During part of the time my aunts and uncles were visiting, so we went to a couple of large family gatherings. The foster mom dropped them off with a bag of clothes, diapers for A. and necessities on a Monday night, and we put them right to bed. Which was a fun transition the first night, as they kept wanting us to be in the room with them to go to sleep, and read more stories.

At the first family gathering my aunt’s dog who approached no one and allowed no one to approach her except my aunt, uncle, and cousin, went right up to A and let her pet her and play with her. My baby sister who has attempted connecting with this adorable tiny brown dog with missing teeth and a tongue that constantly hangs out one side for nearly four years with no success. Upon seeing the interaction between A and the dog said “I’m so mad, and will never get over that she (the dog) just let A. play with her.” It was such a good moment, as our own dog, Muffler, struggles with little kids and did not like A or Z trying to play with him.

Also at that same family dinner we took a picture of my grandparents and all of their children and grandchildren in attendance, A and Z wanting to be included jumped into the picture, but due to foster regulations set to protect the children, we are not allowed to show their faces in any picture posted anywhere online. So instead of hurting their feelings placed them slightly behind a taller person, so you couldn’t see them in the picture.

Throughout the nearly two weeks:

• we visited the Draper Aquarium (where we have passes, so we only needed a ticket for Z, with A being under 3.
• We also went with my mom and various sisters and their child[ren] to Thanksgiving Point’s museum of Natural Curiosity, and Farm Country. They loved both, especially the pony rides at Farm Country, and the giant rope bridges at the Museum. However waiting for, well anything, but especially the train was very hard for them.
• Two family dinners
• The butterfly biosphere with my mom, but not with us because we went to the eye doctor that day. And then the carousel. We told the kids they could ride “Two times”, although they did not understand the concept of needing to get off, go through the exit gate, and walk all the way back around to the line to be able to ride the second time, which brought on some big tears from A., but we got through it!
• Splash pad and lunch with some friends in the neighborhood. In fact I didn’t tell one friend I was coming until I was on my way, and she was so excited to hear we had a placement, even though it was only short-term.
• Played with and covered themselves with chalk dust
• Parks and splash pads
• Playing at Grandmas (my mom’s)
• Reading books – at night we finally had to limit books to two, which usually meant Apples up on Top where they had to count every apple on every characters head through out the book, and another book which varied from night to night.
• Watching a small amount of bluey
• And so many snack times – these poor kids had a lot of food insecurity, in that they constantly asked for food and were worried about

Some other moments good and bad from the time:

• They often called us “Mom” and “Dad” because it was easier than distinguishing between their other foster parents and us.
• Z asked “Dad” (Brent) to turn the car, while we were on the freeway because the sun was in his eyes
• McDonald’s for some snacks after a visit to help them re-regulate after an overstimulating visit with their Mom
• When we had to leave somewhere where they were obviously having a good time, they would say that they were “NEVER” having a good time. Or they would cry. Transitions are hard.
• Nap time was hard, because no matter how much especially A needed one a couple of days she would just cry and cry and cry. On one particularly hard nap day, Brent rocked A. to sleep and he said “I do like the rocking babies to sleep part. Not the crying part, but the moment when you can feel them give up and start to fall asleep.”
• The closer A and Z were to their departure the more I could feel myself pushing them away a little. It was easier to distance my emotions on the last couple days, than to get too attached and then feel the heartache of “losing them”, after only having them for a few days.
• The last day we had them. A was in a mood and as toddler’s do, angry that I was having her help me clean up the toys, she looked me right in the eyes and said “I like daddy. He’s my favorite. I like daddy,” and then stormed off. And just as the verbal knife entered my heart, I took a couple deep breaths and was sad but okay with them returning to their other foster home.

Their long-term foster mom, must have done wonders the first month she had them because overall they were pretty well-behaved children, with no huge apparent traumas, besides the ever-present food insecurities. She did say they were super dirty and a little “feral” when she first got them. The experience luckily didn’t scare us off from continuing as foster parents.

A quick six weeks after our stint with A and Z, we received a text about another placement. We had taken an extra class that put us on a short(er) list for placements of 0-3 year olds. At 11:38 the text about a little girl (J) 18 months, hispanic. They were potentially looking for a placement that spoke Spanish and English, her two languages. Lucky for us, Brent is fluent in Spanish (2 years living in Mexico on a service mission for our church, and two degrees). We texted back within 5 minutes that we were interested. About 20 minutes after that I received a call from a casework to go over some details, and by 3PM I had an adorable, quiet, tiny hispanic person sitting in my lap. After signing some documents with us, the caseworker dropped off a bag of clothes, a small pack of diapers, a carseat and a baby, and then left.

We learned a few things very quickly. We knew nothing that she liked to eat. She understood approximately zero English. She was actually 20 months old and not 18 months. She is a ninja, and learned how to climb out of the pack ‘n’ play by the third day, so now she sleeps in sleep sacks so she can’t climb out of her crib. Cribs are meant to be built inside the bedroom. Breaking a child of co-sleeping with their bio parents their whole life is ‘muy dificil’. Creating a schedule for a 20-month-old who never had a schedule previously is more than slightly exhausting. Learning (Improving ones) Spanish at the same time as toddler is not ideal. She is excellent at crocodile tears.

Look at those crazy curls!! Left: J is trying to figure out how to hold both her water and ice cups and also simultaneously eat the ice. Right: Miss Sass is dancing around wearing an old pair of sunglasses. (I mentioned this earlier, but we are not allowed to show the faces of our fosters, which is why it is blocked on the right).

I often take her on little adventures, while Brent is working. We go to museums, the aquarium, parks, the Thanksgiving Point gardens, etc. We have not quite figured out food, as she is a toddler and hates everything she loved yesterday, and only ever truly wants chips or ritz crackers. She loves rides in her stroller. She loves books, but I don’t think she had ever held a book before coming to us. She knows about eight words, all of which are closer to Spanish than English, but most are not in either language. She is quite small for her age and often sports a size twelve-month onesie, and 9-12 month leggings.

We also learned that because her bio father did most things for her (diaper changes, feeding, baths, putting to bed, etc) J. prefers men, so for the first two weeks Brent had to do many things for her. We have had her for nearly two months now, and she still prefers Brent, which has been pretty hard for me. Sometimes, if she is particularly grumpy she will only let “mama” (Brent), feed her, or put her to bed. On difficult, no or very short nap, days the favoritism is much worse, as J is too tired to sort the complex emotions of allowing either parent help her reach the same level of need fulfillment, leaving “Mama” (me) feels stuck in that unappreciated middle. SIDE NOTE: She calls all adult caregivers “mama”. We had to send her to respite for a couple days to attend a Viking themed Wedding a couple weeks ago and she called both the mom and dad of the couple that watched her mama.

Pictures from the Viking wedding we attended. Costumes required. Brent was one of the groomsmen for our friend Nate. It was such a beautiful ceremony and an incredible weekend.

Misery envelops me whenever she pulls out her sad, sad crocodile tears because dad needs to change, or work, or I even pick J up, but she wants ONLY “Mama” (Brent). A on-going behavior which persists quite frequently from week to week. I’m told this preferential treatment of one parent over the other is normal toddler behavior, but it still feels awful when you’re not chosen as favorite parent as scrutinized under the rigorous qualifications set in place by your almost two year old. Brent often says “It will get better.” And it has gotten better, she does sometimes let me perform parental tasks, and hang out with her at times when previously only Brent could. Yet, as I have said before it hurts to want something so much and not be left feeling a little let down by your own expectations and the expectations you place on life situations, which you believed would turn out differently.

J has also been sick for the past couple of weeks which has made nap times non-existent, and bedtimes hard, sometimes she will wake up screaming and then be awake for an hour or two at a time. Plus her sad little cough, which has thankfully mostly gone away. Though, she will also sometimes mock our never-ending coughs, with a fake cough of her own.

Sometimes she will wake up in the middle of the night and say things like “Guau-Guau No!!” (Pronounced Wow-wow) which is what she calls all dogs and dog-like creatures. She LOVES dogs! This is hilarious because we always tell her not to bother Muffler. Though another thankfully moment, Muffler has been extremely good around her, better than any other children we’ve ever had visit our home.

Lady and the Tramp – (Newish live action on Disney), and Bluey. She loves her dogs!

Needless to say, we are falling hard for this little girl and secretly hope we can keep her forever, but with foster, only time will tell. Foster is a little selfish in that it holds our mental, and emotional states hostage, while we hold our breaths for what happens next. Parenting children who don’t belong to you feels quite other some days, but we seem to be settling into a rhythm with Miss J.

On the other side of things, it must be terribly difficult for some of the bio parents to fall so far in life that they have to give up their children. Some parents absolutely do not deserve or make the necessary effort to have their children returned. However, those who truly change and put forth the effort to have their children permanently returned, despite the difficult journey, absolutely deserve their children. The statistic is supposedly between thirty and forty percent of the children in Utah never reunite with their bio parents permanently, meaning that four in ten children who enter foster care could be in and out of foster care for many years, they could be placed in with Kin, or they could get adopted by a foster family.

Why are some humans who make bad choices, and sometimes teens not even fully prepared to take care of themselves let alone a baby or one-night standers allowed to reproduce? If it were simply up to God, the deserving, the desiring, and the prepared would have accepting wombs and working parts. What unfair circumstances the childless and those struggling with secondary infertility find themselves in. Though right now without foster care, we wouldn’t have the current opportunity to be parents, even if it is temporary.

The number one goal with every case is reunification with the biological parent(s), and some days I am more on board with that notion than other days. However, the longer we have J the more I want to keep her forever, even on the difficult days. This journey of otherhood, like motherhood has flashes of joy, but not the full spectrum of what it is to raise children full time, from birth to graduation and beyond. Is this the children journey we wanted, no, but this is where we are currently. Right now I am taking everything one day at a time, and will take Motherhood in whatever form it comes in at the moment. We are enjoying this new pseudo parenthood journey, but boy we are exhausted! Our fertility journey isn’t over, just on a brief pause which I will divulge the details of in my next post.