The last few years, I’ve been lucky enough to be a part of the MOPS group at my church. If you don’t know what MOPS is, it stands for Mothers Of PreschoolerS, but it is really a place for all moms to come together, no matter how old or young the kids are. Each year, there is a theme that we focus on, along with a few supporting points. This year, the MOPS theme is Decide to Rise (appropriate with all the craziness of the past year, no?), with the supporting points Be Strong, Chase Joy, and Do Your Work.
On e of the past MOPS magazine was dedicated to Be Strong. The cover image of a mom kissing her sleeping newborn was so familiar to me and my life, and it got me thinking: What do I think it means to be strong? Should I be thinking of the physical strength I need to carry these babies in my arms or to get up again and again during the night to feed them and rock them back to sleep? Should I think of the soulful and mental stamina that most people associate with being a foster parent?
As a single ESH mom, I have a lot of different ideas on what it means to be strong. It would be easy to think of strength as a foundation to get everything done – there is so much work to be done when it comes to being a part of the foster care system, and that doesn’t even include all the things every parent needs to do to keep their house running and the bills paid. Or to think of strength as the way to face challenges head on as the ups and downs of foster care come day by day when things don’t go the way I want them to. But when I sit down and really think through what it means to be strong, it really all comes back to the same thing. At the core of it all is love. To me, being strong means choosing to love.
I choose to love deeply. As soon as I get a call about a baby who needs a home, I love them. Sometimes, a placement ends up falling through, and I don’t ever get to meet that little one, but I have loved them deeply anyways, sight unseen. On the good days, I get that phone call and get to meet the baby that I have already accepted into my heart. I get to take them home, welcome them into my arms, and love them in person. While it may seem smarter to wait until I meet a these tiny humans before loving them, I choose to love them with my whole heart as soon as I hear about them.
I choose to love without condition. There is so much unpredictability when it comes to foster care, and sometimes it feels like the unexpected is the only thing you can expect. But I choose to love no matter what the outcome of a placement will be – whether a baby stays with me for a few days or a few months, whether they are able to reunify with their birth parents or not, whether a baby shows me affection in return or not. I choose to love without placing any sort of condition that says, “I will love you if you…” (you can use your imagination to fill in the blank).
I choose to love the very people the world tells me I should hate. As a foster parent, even as I love my babies deeply and without condition, I also choose to love their birth parents in the same way. I choose to see them not as people who want to hurt others or as a threat to my relationship with my babies, but rather as people who also love the very same little ones I do (and who even loved them first). We get to come alongside and love the same tiny human at the same time, even if it is not in a situation we would have chosen be in if it were up to us. I choose to deny the world when people say birth parents must be awful people since they had their children taken away from them. Instead, I choose to see them as humans who are just as human as I am and are doing the best they know how to do with the choices their life has given them.
I choose to love even when I think I can’t. When it’s the middle of the night and I’m trying to rock a crying baby back to sleep and I haven’t slept in days and I feel like I could not possibly have any love left to give to this babe, I choose to ask God that His love would shine through me in that moment when I have nothing good left in my heart. In these moments of my own human limitation, when I feel like I am just too tired or too busy or too hurting to love well, God shows up and pours out His love to my children and to me, and it is exactly what I need to continue on loving.
There are so many moments as an ESH mom that I am faced with a decision: do I choose to love right now or not? It is not easy to love deeply or unconditionally or with people who enter my life through less than ideal circumstances or when I already have given my all, but if it was easy, then it would not require strength. So even though it’s not easy, I will continue to be strong and choose to love, each and every time.
ESH Mom Life 