October 21, 2013

October 21, 2013

After many doctor’s, therapy, tutoring and more it became very clear to me that the agency we went through did nothing to help our daughter or her 4 siblings.  At one point during the process I even contacted the governor of our state to investigate.  I was convinced that if the group of children had been neglected by the foster system there were more.  Fortunately, the governor did respond and investigated the agency and heads did roll.  We were foster parents for 5 years and in that time of taking children to the agency weekly for parent visits I determined that I could count the number of good foster homes on one hand.

When I reported one women who I witnessed weekly verbally and emotionally abusing her foster children I was told, she was one of the best foster parents they had.  She was single, worked full time and had 7 special needs foster children!  Shortly after I reported what I had seen, she was given a failure to thrive baby.  The baby almost died in the two weeks she had it, all because she would take it to the doctor, because she didn’t have the child’s Medicaid card.  Fortunately, they did investigate this women and shut her home down.

That is the worst case that I saw, but there were many others.  We had to stop fostering because our daughter was a lot of work.  I always said she was like having three children.  But I knew I wasn’t done, I just didn’t know what else I could do.  I spent many days crying out to God, “Why?”  I wanted to do more, but she took so much out of me.  For a few years, I even felt that my passion for children was gone and I didn’t know if I would ever get it back. 

Then one day I was walking with my dogs.  I ran into a women.  We walked together and towards the end of our walk she told me that she was a children’s advocate for a local county.  She also told me that she had vision for a children’s home, because she believed as I did that the foster system is so broken.  About 5 years before this conversation, I had a similar conversation with a mom of a boy who was in my son’s scout troop.  This was it!!  All the way home I cried out to God, thank you for revealing this to me.

Our daughter was becoming easier to handle, in fact we had recently taken legal custody of her biological sister. (that’s another story)  I was feeling like I needed to move on, I knew that when my son went to college I would need to go back to work.

I called my friend from years earlier and told her my ideas.  She agreed she would start praying about it.