The possibility, hope, and uncertainty of being a foster-to-adopt parent.

Camping!

“You could have a kid who has issues even if they’re your biological kid. You still have to take them to therapy. Or you can have a kid with special needs and be dealing with that stuff. It doesn’t matter if you’re biologically related to them or not. With foster care, you have to deal with someone else controlling your life. That’s the piece that is the hardest for me.”

As a child, Tracy Hanna knew she wanted to become a parent. When she got married at 34, she and her wife immediately started trying to get pregnant. When that didn’t work, Tracy eagerly considered adoption — an enthusiasm her wife didn’t share. When their marriage didn’t work out, Tracy shifted to the idea of adopting on her own. “Honestly, one of my first positive thoughts after the divorce was, ‘Now I can adopt a kid. Yay! This is a good thing.’ So, within a few months of moving out, I started calling foster care agencies and trying to figure out when orientations were and got started on the home study.”

Becoming a parent — biological or adoptive— always involves waiting. But the nine months a pregnancy takes is relatively predictable. You know how long that wait is and a lot about what you’re going to get at the end of it. For Tracy, so much was completely unknown as she moved through the process of becoming a foster parent. During foster parent training, home study, a waiting period, and visits to her social worker’s office, Tracy had a lot of time to think about becoming a parent. “Since I had no idea about how old this kid would be or what gender they would be or how many there would be, I really didn’t have any concept of how to think about it.”

Every month, Tracy would go through a list of available children with her social worker and prioritize those she thought were a good fit. Her social worker would contact the kids’ social workers who, when interested, would send questions for Tracy. She would answer them immediately, but get no response. This went on for months — choosing, answering questions … then nothing. Tracy was held in a continuous loop of possibility, hope, and endless uncertainty.

Then she learned about three sisters, ages two, four, and six, who were the youngest of five siblings all in foster care. When she put them on her list, things moved quickly. Less than a week later, Tracy picked them up for a three-night visit.

Already in a temporary foster care situation, the girls were told that their foster mom was leaving town for a few days and that they would be staying with Tracy. They were not told that she was a prospective parent.

“I don’t know that I really knew what to think about having three kids at once. I was so focused on really quickly getting my house ready to be approved for these kids coming a day later that I didn’t have much time to think about it. Then when I picked them up, they were so friendly and instantly sweet and chatty… I think we went into this whirlwind of excitement with each other and, at the time, it just seemed so much fun and exciting. It just felt like instantly we got along really well. They did some slightly nutty stuff for the weekend, but they were actually mostly really easy kids, and so it felt like ‘Oh, this is great!’ Then I had to take them back to their foster mom, and after I dropped them off, it was suddenly so quiet. I was sad and felt really empty. It was an intense crazy weekend. But the kids were great, and I could totally see them being my kids.”

After that, Tracy visited the girls once or twice a week for an afternoon in their home or to take them on outings. It was fun and exciting, but not necessarily enough, she says in retrospect. “It’s kind of a weird set up because you’re seen as the fun parent. You don’t really have the opportunity to deal with the discipline issues because you’re just out to have fun, and you’re not just hanging around the house trying to get stuff done on a given day. It was an interesting experience to get to know these kids, but only on a very surface level. I think for them, it was this exciting new thing. I don’t think any of us realized at the time how traumatic this move was going to be for them, for their old foster mom, for me…for everyone who has to make this huge transition. It’s not all bad, but definitely like, ‘Whoa! This huge change is happening!’”

After that first weekend and during the period of weekly visits, Tracy diligently prepared her home for the potential permanent placement of three children. “The social worker was like, ‘I want to move quickly on this.’ So, during that time, I was doing things like rearranging furniture and painting their room and switching rooms because I used to have a big room and suddenly, I have three kids, not just one. So, I had to give up my bedroom and office to create more space for them.”

Once the girls moved in, Tracy began to realize that she didn’t have all the information about them she should have had to understand what they needed. Parents of newborns immediately join the process of their baby’s developing personalities, desires, temperament, etc., and have a clear sense of the emerging person in their charge. For adoptive and foster parents, the process of getting to know an older child can be much trickier. “For several months,” Tracy says, “it was just us getting used to each other, and I started to realize all of the stuff that the older one was dealing with and trying to figure out whether it was a situation where providing enough love would work. I was asking myself, ‘How much love can I give? I should be able to be unlimited. I should have unlimited love, unlimited patience.’ This is what I’d always believed, but I was realizing that I have limitations.”

Tracy began to understand, through her own experience and conversations with the girls’ former foster mother, that the oldest sister had needs that could not be met if she were in a household with other children. She was becoming a physical danger to her younger sisters, which concerned Tracy even more. “It was a really hard place to get to because I’d always had in my head that I’d never give up on a child. I would never send a child away once they lived with me. But here I was saying, ‘This is not a good situation. It’s not happy for anybody and it’s not safe. We can’t do this.’”

When Tracy made the heartbreaking decision to have the oldest sister move out, she struggled to talk about it with the child. “It was really hard to have those conversations with her because she was constantly just pushing and fighting. I think I knew at the time, and I know now, that she was doing it because she didn’t believe that anyone would keep her. Unfortunately, what it lead to was a situation where it really wasn’t safe to have her in the same house with her sisters.”

The eldest sister leaving created a lot of anxiety, initially, for the middle sister. “She went through her own phase of, ‘Am I going to get kicked out? I have to be this perfect child or I’m going to be gone, too.’ She told me she thought her sister had to leave because she yelled too much. I tried to explain it to both of them, but at two and four years old, how much did they get when I said their sister needed a lot more support and had her own path to take? They didn’t really understand that.”

After a few months of adjustment, the two younger girls and Tracy have really settled into being a family. With their older sister’s absence and Tracy’s enhanced capacity to devote herself to them, her daughters have blossomed. “They love to go on adventures with me — and I love to go on adventures. We are able to do stuff and hang out together and be social with other people. They’re easy in that way. They’re very sweet, and they want to cuddle up and hug me and love me.” She goes on to say, “I’m trying to figure out how to say this so it doesn’t sound like I’m emotionally dependent on my kids, but I before I had kids, I always felt a little bit lonely. Now there’s this piece of my heart that’s just full and that I really like.”

As Tracy and her daughters grow together, they also have to navigate the foster care system, which imposes restrictions on their lives. Tracy needs permission to travel out of state with the girls, and choices about their care and schooling are not entirely up to her. She and other foster parents she’s talked with are also frustrated by the lack of transparency they experienced with their children’s social workers. Many foster-adopt parents believe the system makes the process more difficult than it should be, as they struggle with issues like critical information being withheld about their children’s backgrounds and inconsistent updates on the adoption process. (Social workers, birth parents, judges, and others, no doubt, have their own valid opinions and perspectives on the foster care system as well.)

Tracy says, though, that the system is not all bad. Years of advocacy have created a few frameworks of benefits for foster children and foster parents. “There are different services you can qualify for, and for certain things — just because they’re foster kids — you get bumped up in line. For example, for Head Start and certain state pre-schools, foster kids are actually supposed to get ahead of the line and get access to those schools before other kids. Our local school district also bumps up foster kids in their school lottery systems, which made getting into the school I wanted a little bit easier. I can get access to free mental health services for the girls, although it’s limited and I question how much more it’s going to be around in future years. You also get free medical coverage until they’re 21.”

All of these benefits are helpful, but as a single mom, Tracy has much more significant supports — other people — in place for herself and her daughters. The family has a crew of friends who love playing the auntie role, like taking the girls on outings or watching them so Tracy can have time to herself.

Tracy’s partner, Amita, lives out of state but visits frequently, and the girls adopted her as a parent before she thought of herself as one. “Mariah* wanted to call her Mommy. It was too confusing, though, because she’d call me Mommy and we didn’t know who she was talking to. So, now she has a name for Amita that is Mithi. Only Mariah and Samira* are allowed to call her Mithi. No one else can.”

Amita and Tracy weren’t intending to co-parent. “She didn’t really want kids,” Tracy says, “but she’s actually come around, and sometimes she’s actually way better with them than I am. Perhaps it’s because she’s not always around. She has a level of humor in life that I just don’t have and says, ‘I’m kind of like the fun parent, right?’” Tracy believes that, now, it’s not a matter of if they will parent together, but when.

A long-time friend of Tracy’s also became part of the family. “When the girls moved in, Prema was unemployed and running out of unemployment. I was like, ‘Do you want to watch my kids? I need a nanny.’ From there, it’s just become this really sweet thing where she is clearly their family and has very much become part of my family, as a result. She’s not just a nanny who watches them. I’ve been really clear with them, when they’re with someone else who watches them on other days, like, ‘That’s not a member of our family.’”

In addition to being available for the kids, Prema is a model for Tracy. “It’s really helped me watching her response to things,” Tracy shares. “She’s really loving and respectful and expects the kids to deal with certain things. You can’t have a tantrum every day as soon as we walk into the house. Like, ‘There’s no reason for you to have a tantrum right now. You’re not hurt. You might be tired, but you can use your words.’ Amita and Prema together have worked within my sense of how parenting should look, but added their own flavor. That’s helped add this piece to my parenting.

Tracy, Mariah, Samira and their chosen kin are moving forward as a family, making long-term plans and dreaming new dreams, but Tracy knows she won’t feel totally secure until the adoption goes through. “I do have some legal rights now that standard foster parents don’t have because they’ve been with me long enough, and I know the person that I am that I would fight for them if their social worker decided to move them, but as long as the adoption is not final it still feels a little unsettled.” This is one of the downsides for foster-to-adopt parents. As Sharon Van Epps writes in the Washington Post, “Choosing to adopt through the foster care system means accepting that the process, and sometimes the outcome, can be uncertain. . . .[E]ven for prospective parents who come with eyes wide open, the experience can be emotionally fraught.”

Despite the uncertainty, Tracy is loving how being a mother is changing her. “I see the world in a slightly different way than I did before I had kids. I’m able to experience things in a new way even though they’re not really new to me. We went to the city yesterday morning and had breakfast and Samira was yelling about the buses outside. She’s like, ‘A bus, a bus!’ Being able to see the world in that way, I think that’s probably the most fun.”

*Names have been changed.

This piece is part of Family Story’s All Our Families story-telling project.

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