All We Need is Love

(reprinted from The Violet online magazine)

     My journey to foster care began nearly ten years ago when I spent several weeks working in an orphanage in Brazil. It was there that I met a tiny two-year-old girl who called me "Tia" (auntie). All she wanted to do was cuddle, her head buried in my chest, one of her hands stroking my face. Her family had dropped her off at the orphanage when she was an infant, and the need she had for love was so clear. I so desperately wanted to give her the love she needed, and the remnants of that desire have stayed with me.

     About two years ago, my husband and I came to the conclusion that our first child should be adopted. As we tried to decide how we would go about adopting, we kept circling back to adoption through foster care.

     As of July 2011, our plan was to finish our certification, provide short-term respite care for a couple of months, and then accept a long-term/adoptive placement in possibly December or January 2012. Well, on a rainy Friday in September we got a phone call that put our plan in fast-forward. We were two steps away from completing our certification when our social worker called to see if we were interested in taking a two-month old baby boy. Despite the fact that this was five months earlier than expected, I answered "Yes!" without hesitation. The social worker told me we could meet the baby that same afternoon.          

     Let me back up a moment and clarify that when I received the phone call about this baby boy, I was coming out of a yoga class. I was sweaty, hungry, and unprepared. We didn't really have anything for a baby, and by that I mean we had only a second hand crib and one blanket. I was worried about bonding and attachment, and I was concerned that he would feel too much like someone else's child for me to feel like a mother at all.

Two hours after I received "the call," my husband and I walked into the short-term home where our sweet boy was staying and saw him sitting in his car seat.

     "We just arrived," the social worker said. "I thought you could take him out." I walked over to where he was placed, carefully lifted him up, and as I looked down at his darling little face we locked eyes. In that moment I felt flooded with a love that I cannot describe, but I'd venture to say that it's the love all mothers feel for their children. It was - and still is - all encompassing.

     As I reflect back on those first moments, I can see how that hour served as a preview into what has become our year in foster care: totally crazy. There we were with three social workers, an intern, and a brand new baby who was unprepared for his transition as we were. He had an ill fitting onesie, the too-big outfit he was wearing, and that's it. We filled out paperwork while Mason screamed his head off, and I desperately tried to look like the world's most competent first time mom.

In the midst of the chaos of that first hour, we fell in love. This love had nothing to do with his big, brown eyes or his soft baby curls. Actually, his adorableness didn't register with me until we took him home. I didn't even know if we could keep him, but I was his mother then and nothing else mattered.

     I used to hate the saying "all you need is love" because it seemed cheesy and too simplistic to be accurate. However, lately I've been thinking that it might actually be a little bit true. Because Mason's permanence in our home was uncertain, people often ask if this attachment is too hard or too scary, and the answer is yes. This last year has been the most overwhelming, exhausting, heart-wrenching year of my life, but I would do it over again in an instant.

     As I think about that cheesy phrase and how sometimes it might not be true, I can also acknowledge that this year - at the very least - it was. That sweet, screaming baby boy - who has since grown into a joyful, yelling toddler - needed love, and I found that I had an abundance. Even though our house is now fully stocked with baby gear and toddler toys, we always had the one thing we needed most.