Love.
Love is patient. Love is kind. Love keeps no record of wrong.
Love feels magical. Love feels effortless. Love feels like an anchor, a tether from one soul to the next. Love feels safe.
Or, at least, that’s the story I used to tell myself. Those are sentiments that I hear all around me. It’s how people assume I feel towards the children in my house.
Those beliefs about love are at the core of the sentence, “How do you ever let them go? I would get too attached.”
Never, not once, has anybody anticipated my answer when I say, “Sometimes it’s hard. And other times it’s really not.” (I tend to insert a funny joke here to lighten the harshness of my honesty.)
The truth is, it wasn’t until I became a foster mom that I ever understood love to be something deeper and far more sacrificial than anything I’d experienced up to that point. By the time I became a foster mom, had I loved and been loved? Absolutely. I’d been loved as a daughter, sister, friend, and wife. Most profoundly, I’d loved and been loved as a mother. A wholly different vein of love that felt endless in capacity. It was a love that changed me in the core of my being. It made me more “me” and at the same time, required more of me than I’d ever given. Without an ounce of hesitation, I expected that version of love to be the one that showed up when I became a foster mom.
Imagine my surprise when that didn’t happen.
Imagine my surprise when love - or the feeling of love - came easily with some kids, but didn’t come at all with others.
Imagine my surprise when not only did I struggle to love some of our placements, but I struggled to like them. The only tool of comparison that I have is how I feel towards my biological children… this felt WAY different. Sometimes. Not all the time. But sometimes.
When you’re already struggling with that internally, to get the messaging from the world around you about being a “saint” or how you should feel exactly the same towards foster children in your home that you do towards your bio kids… Oh, the guilt. The shame. The self-hatred. It starts to pile up.
When I think about that season of life, I wonder if I needed to struggle as much as I did. I wonder if maybe some struggle is good, necessary even, but what if we can shorten the process just a little bit by expanding our understanding of love? Perhaps love is a little bit like the line by Walt Whitman in his poem Song of Myself, 51, when he says, “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”
Perhaps love contains multitudes.
We’re going to talk more about that next week, but for now, if you struggle to connect with a kid in your home… if you’re locked in a shame cycle because you feel like you’re not loving enough, giving enough, being enough… I want you to know that you’re not alone.
I’ve felt those same feelings. Struggled with the same thoughts. You’re not alone, and you’re not a failure.
If you have a minute or two, think about grabbing a sheet of paper or opening the notes app on your phone and jotting down a few of your own beliefs about love. Start with “love is” and then let it flow out of you. Look at your list. What immediate emotion comes to the surface? Contentment? Fulfillment? Shame? Longing?
Pay attention to that.
You can stop there, if you’d like. Some days, that moment of awareness is all that I have tolerance for. But, if you can keep going you might consider asking yourself if your definition of love can be expanded. That sentence might start, “love is also…”
If you want to, I’d love for you to leave a comment with some of your definitions of love…