Chapter Closed

I closed another big chapter of my life this week. When our longest-term placements of four years left, it created a huge vacuum. Overnight, I had all this time on my hands. Everything changed. The first day I left an unattended pen on the counter overnight and didn’t wake up to caveman etchings adorning the walls was a profoundly foreign experience. I couldn’t compute that I was a parent of two instead of a parent of four. For months afterward, when anyone asked me how many kids I had, I felt my eyes water. My awkward hesitation hung in the air as I sorted it out in my head: “Just the two,” I’d say as my voice cracked. It wasn’t just because I had to switch out everything automatic and status quo; it was also because I had no idea where those other two children were or what they might be going through. I desperately needed a distraction.

I found my new purpose teaching homeschool classes from my basement. I enjoyed that season very much, and I know God was in it. We started classes a few short months after the kids left, when we were still trying to figure out our new family dynamic. My biological children have a six-year age gap that was suddenly so apparent when it was just them. Classes provided friendship, people to do life with. It allowed us to continue opening our home, just in a different way. It’s been overwhelmingly positive. Even the parts that weren’t positive were good.

And you wouldn’t believe it, but I’m ending the program (at least for now, at least as it is), and guess how long this season lasted? I’ll tell you. Four years. I’ve been doing this for as long as we had custody of the kids… which also means the kids have been gone for as long as they were with us.

It’s a strange thing, the passage of time. I’m no longer heartsick every time I think of the kids. I’m no longer waiting in limbo, wondering if they’ll return. I’ve accepted that they’re not going to come back. And yet. I know we still mean something to them. We’ll see them tonight, and we have a sleepover planned in a couple of days. All the while, we have another foster daughter living with us, the same age as our former foster daughter when she left, sleeping in her old room, wearing her old clothes. I think there may be some tension there, but what do you do? Her old room can’t stay a museum of grief forever. It’s been four years, and I just started pulling tags off summer outfits I bought for her when I thought she was coming back. They’re half her size now. They fit my current foster daughter perfectly.

It’s madness to stay stuck. Not only has my season of raising these children passed, but the next season succeeding it has come and gone too. Every day is a new frontier and a new opportunity to build something we’ll look back on longingly someday. Some of it’s painful, like my former foster daughter vying for her place in our hearts, or me observing it happen with the combined knowledge I love her more than she could ever know, and there are series of days I get busy and she doesn’t come to mind at all. Some of it’s beautiful, like laughter x 4. Love x 4. All of it informs who we are today.

My homeschool program ran its course, and it was time. It’s refreshing not to be in a cleaning frenzy right now in anticipation of a dozen preteens bombarding my house tomorrow. I’ll miss it though, and I’m grateful for that. There was a time I couldn’t conceive of a life when the kids left. Turns out a full one was right around the corner. As I stand at another crossroads, I’m confident this time that the next chapter will be just as lovely.