What Foster Care & Adoption Has Taught Me About Motherhood

I did not become a mother the usual way.

There was no carefully planned timeline (we tried that, it didn’t work.)
No matching nursery (only ever dreamt of what that would look like.)
No moment where life slowed down long enough to prepare.

Motherhood came to me through phonecalls
A child in crisis.
A system that I thought I knew what the inside looked like
And an understanding that saying yes would change everything.

Motherhood found me in the middle of uncertainty.

In courtrooms and treatment plans
In visitation schedules and emergency placements.
In lots of therapy appointments (shout out to my own therapist) and MANY sleepless nights.
In learning more about trauma in real life than any textbook could have taught me.

It found me holding children whose nervous systems were wired for survival.
Children who had already learned that adults can’t always be trusted.
Children carrying grief too big for their age and too complicated for words.

And somewhere along the way, motherhood stopped being about biology and became about presence.

About showing up consistently.
About staying calm in chaos (no matter how difficult this turned out to be.)
About learning how to love children whose experiences taught them more than I’ve ever been exposed to.

This version of motherhood is not polished.
It is layered.
Complicated.
Beautiful.
Exhausting.
Meaningful.
And at times, deeply heartbreaking.

There are no perfect endings in foster care.

There is grief.
Loss.
Attachment.
Hope.
Disappointment.
Repair.
And sometimes all of those things exist in the same moment.

And before anything else, I need to say this:

Children do not begin when they enter foster care.

They begin with their first families.

With mothers who carried them first.
With histories and stories and losses that matter.
With people who are often carrying their own trauma, poverty, addiction, mental illness, lack of support, or generations of pain long before a caseworker ever became involved.

The internet likes simple narratives.
But foster care has never been simple.

There are biological parents fighting to heal.
Foster parents trying to hold stability together.
Children navigating impossible loyalty binds.
Caseworkers carrying impossible caseloads.
Families grieving outcomes nobody originally hoped for.

And somewhere in the middle of all of it are children who deserve safety, connection, and adults willing to keep showing up.

That kind of love is not always visible online.

It looks like:
Co-regulation.
Court dates.
Advocacy.
Documentation.
Learning trauma responses instead of labeling behaviors.
Staying steady through rejection.
Holding boundaries while still leading with compassion.

It looks like continuing to love children even when love does not come back clearly or immediately.

And for many foster and adoptive parents, it also means carrying the tension of loving a child deeply while honoring where they came from.

That tension is real and HARD.

So is the grief.

So is the beauty.

May is Foster Care Awareness Month, and if there is one thing I wish more people understood, it is this:

Foster care is not a “feel good” story.

It is a reflection of very real human pain, systemic gaps, survival, resilience, and the extraordinary complexity of relationships.

But it is also a place where healing can begin.

Not through perfection.
Not through saviorism.
Not through having all the answers.

But through safe relationships.
Consistency.
Repair.
Emotional presence.
And adults willing to stay.

To the foster parents navigating the unknown:
I see you.

To the biological parents working to heal:
I see you too.

To the adoptees carrying complicated emotions:
Your story matters. I watched this personally at the most recent conference I attended and was BLOWN AWAY by this perspective…

And to the professionals supporting children and families every day while carrying the emotional weight of this work themselves:
Thank you.

This work changes people.

Motherhood changed me too.

Not because it was easy.
But because loving children from hard places taught me that healing rarely happens in grand gestures.

It happens slowly.
In ordinary moments.
In safe homes.
In regulated nervous systems.
In repair after rupture.
In staying.

And sometimes, staying is the most powerful form of love there is.