Foster Parent Well
Jump into "Foster Parent Well with Nicole T Barlow," where the adventure of Christian foster and adoptive parenting gets a little easier, a lot more joyful, and deeply fulfilling. Nicole's here with a mission: to guide you in parenting with a heart full of steadfast faith, unshakable endurance, and infectious joy.
This podcast is your cozy nook in the vast world of parenting, blending laughs, learning, and lots of love. It’s where self-care meets faith-filled encouragement, and mindset shifts help you navigate the rollercoaster of fostering and adopting. For every parent out there looking to refill their emotional and spiritual tanks, Nicole's got you covered with stories, tips, and expert advice that speak directly to the soul of a Christian foster or adoptive parent.
With "Foster Parent Well," it's like sitting down with a good friend who gets it—the highs, the lows, and everything in between. Nicole dives into the unique challenges and beautiful moments of parenting children with trauma, all while reminding you that taking time for yourself isn't just nice; it's essential for providing the stable, loving home these kiddos need.
So, why not make this journey together? Join Nicole and a vibrant community of faith-driven parents, all dedicated to transforming their lives and the lives of their foster and adopted children. Tune into "Foster Parent Well with Nicole T Barlow" for your weekly dose of encouragement, laughter, and wisdom. Hit subscribe, and let's start fostering and adopting with faith, endurance, and a joy that lights up the room.
Foster Parent Well
Navigating Ambiguous Loss: Grief as a Foster Parent
What happens when welcoming a new child into your home brings both immeasurable joy and profound heartbreak? Journey with me, Nicole T Barlow, as I recount my personal experience with the unpredictable waves of fostering and adoption. I open up about the bittersweet reality of forming new bonds and routines, only to face the heart-wrenching process of reunification. This episode uncovers the unique struggle of ambiguous loss—a type of grief that offers no closure or societal recognition, leaving many foster parents feeling isolated and misunderstood. Together, we explore how leaning into faith and the grace of God can be a beacon of hope during such trying transitions, reminding us of the strength found in community support.
Throughout the conversation, I highlight the often-overlooked emotional complexities that foster parents endure, drawing parallels with biblical figures like Job who faced immense loss and suffering. By sharing candid stories and reflections, this episode aims to foster empathy and understanding not just for the children who endure these separations, but also for the parents who care for them. It's a call to embrace the messy and unresolved nature of these losses, without reservation, to transform our grief into compassion and deeper faith. My heartfelt prayer is for each listener to find solace and strength within our community, preparing us all for the important work ahead.
Connect with me on Instagram: @Fosterparentwell
@nicoletbarlow https://www.instagram.com/nicoletbarlow/
Website: https://nicoletbarlow.com/
Welcome to the Foster Parent Well podcast, where we have real candid, faith-filled conversations about all things foster care, adoption and trauma. I'm your host, nicole T Barlow. I'm a certified parent trainer, a certified health coach and an adoptive parent myself. This is a space where you can find support so that you can care for your kids with a steadfast faith, endurance and joy. I want you to, Nicole T Barlow, and today we're tackling something that's a little heavy, a little uncomfortable, but so necessary for us as foster parents to talk about. We're going to be talking about grief and ambiguous loss. Now I know you're thinking, nicole, I didn't sign up for a therapy session today, but trust me, this is something we all go through on some level on this foster care journey, and I promise you're not alone in it.
Speaker 1:Let's start with a little bit of story time. Imagine this you're cruising along in life, managing things pretty well Okay, managing some things well and everything else, with a lot of coffee. And then, all of a sudden, a call comes in hey, we have a placement for you, a three-year-old little girl. And just like that, your world changes. You bring her home and life becomes a whirlwind of hugs, tantrums, bedtime stories and new routines. She becomes part of your family. And then one day you get another call she's going to reunify with her mom. And then one day you get another call she's going to reunify with her mom and your heart drops Because in that moment the thing that you feared the most letting go has become a reality. That's ambiguous loss right there, the kind where you do lose something, but it's not like the loss of a loved one, where you get closure, you go to a funeral and people bring casseroles to help you grieve. Nope, this is different. It's messy, it's complicated and it comes with all kinds of mixed emotions Joy for reunification, sadness for your own heartache, and sometimes there's a little bit of anger in there about how all of it plays out.
Speaker 1:I think for a lot of us that's the big fear, right, we fear that our hearts will break into a million little pieces and, let's be honest, we worry we won't know how to pick them all up again. That's the fear that we hear the most from other people, right? People say all the time oh, I could never foster, I would get too attached and then I would struggle when they leave. Don't you love that? But the reality is is that we do get attached and we do struggle a lot sometimes when kids leave. We recently had one of the kids from our first placement come spend the night. This isn't new. He will come periodically and stay with us and we love that we still get to have that kind of relationship with them. But it reminds me of the loss. This kid came to us when he was an infant. He and his brother stayed with us for two and a half years before they were reunited with their family. They became our family and they still are our family. Their entire family has become our family.
Speaker 1:But reunification was so, so hard. When we were kind of going through the roller coaster that is foster care and we were kind of experiencing the uncertainty of the case, I remember I would worry all the time that they would go back home. And it's not that we didn't want reunification, we did want reunification. We love their family want reunification. We did want reunification. We love their family.
Speaker 1:But I was worried about my own heart, right, and I felt like God was showing me that if I worry before that loss happens, then I go through all the emotions of that loss without His grace, see, because if it hasn't happened yet, if reunification hasn't happened yet, then. He hasn't given me the grace yet to go through that process, but I had to get to a place where I was trusting Him that when I did or was called to go through that reunification, that his grace would be sufficient for me. And it was. His grace carried me through that season like nothing before, and my faith grew. My relationship with God grew to a whole nother level Now.
Speaker 1:It didn't take away the hard. It was still really really hard, and it's hard for a lot of reasons. Ambiguous loss can be really challenging for several different reasons. One of those reasons is being that society doesn't really recognize it as a loss, and so I found that I didn't get a lot of empathy from other people. Nobody really understood what we were going through. So after the boys went home, I remember I would get comments like well, you knew this was going to happen, right? Or this is what you signed up for, so you knew this was coming. And those kinds of things were really challenging, because even if you know, if you have a loved one that dies and you know that it's coming let's say they were sick for a very long time it doesn't change how hard it is when they're gone. And the same is true in these situations when we're taking in kids in our family and we're doing the day-to-day with them all day, every day. We're doing the breakfast in the morning, we're doing the rocking them to sleep at night, all of those things. And then all of the sudden that relationship changes. And even if you continue to have connection, it doesn't mean that that connection is the same. You don't have that same familial relationship where you see them every single day and you're part of their day-to-day lives Most of the time. You don't have that relationship and so it's a loss.
Speaker 1:At one point I had, at one point I had somebody come up to me and we were having like a prayer night for me and the kids and, um, my husband, you know our whole family, all of us. We had a bunch of ladies that came over and prayed over me. The kids and my husband weren't there, but we were praying for everybody. Just in the midst of this reunification and towards the end, I had somebody say it's going to be fine. I had a dream that you were going to get pregnant and so this is going to be fine. And I'm like wait a second. Um, I'm like Like what. That doesn't even make any sense. You know, even if I were to get pregnant, we were dealing with my husband and I have dealt with infertility over the last 13 years were looking at they thought the reason that I was sad that our kids were going home was because I thought they were going to be my kids and that answer to infertility. And that's just not true. It didn't matter if I were to get pregnant, it wouldn't replace those kids. One kid doesn't replace another. It was still sad because I was losing my relationship with these specific kids and the world just doesn't understand that.
Speaker 1:So it adds another layer because not only are you grieving but people aren't supporting your grief. For the most part you will have some people that understand to some extent what you're going through and will support you through that, but in a general sense people don't understand and they don't know how to support you through it. So it becomes hard because you're walking through the waters kind of alone and a lot of times not really given the space to grieve. You know, if a loved one passes away, you're given days or weeks off of work or whatever right People bring you food. There's this process for grief, but when it's ambiguous loss, it doesn't go through that same process.
Speaker 1:I'll tell you what this did, though. That loss, as painful and gut-wrenching as it is, is also what opens us up to better understand and love the children that come into our home. I think prior to that, with our first placement, I didn't really understand the loss that they experienced. I don't think that I gave them enough room and empathy for their grief and loss, because I didn't really look at it like loss when they came into our home. But also they still saw their parents on a regular basis and so I didn't see it as loss in the same way. But when I understood how it felt, when I understood the weight of how it felt, it changed how I helped kids that came into our home.
Speaker 1:After that, every child in foster care is going to deal with ambiguous loss. They've lost their homes, their family, their routines, their home and their family. Those things may still be there, but they don't have them anymore and those things gave them security. They know what it means to miss someone or something that they may never get back. And when we feel ambiguous loss ourselves, we're given a glimpse into that world. That heartache gives us empathy. It allows us to see beyond the behaviors, the acting out, and it allows us to see the brokenness and the pain that they carry. And what a gift that is to be able to love them more deeply, because we've walked through our own grief, and we can also trust that God will be there every step of the way.
Speaker 1:I remember that first reunification that we had. The night before reunification I called my case manager and I said you're going to have to go with me. I was the one taking the boys back to their mom. I was actually physically driving them there Because, again, we had a close relationship with mom and so it was a normal thing for us to be driving them there. It would make it a little bit easier on everybody. But I called my case manager the night before and I said you're going to have to go with me because I'm going to struggle to leave. And so she did. She rode with me, but, the grace of God, that day you guys covered me in a way that I will never be able to fully explain.
Speaker 1:There was so much joy, so much happiness in those moments for the experience that we got to have with them, for the time that we did get with them and also the joy in seeing them do what we had been working for all this time to be able to go back home and be with their biological family. The Lord really gave me a lot of joy and comfort and support through that whole day. So, again, it's not to say that it wasn't hard. It was still really hard, and the days afterwards were very, very hard. But in the same sense, we have to stop saying I could never, because the truth is is I could not have done that in my own strength, but I don't do things in my own strength. I have a Lord that supports me and comforts me and gets me through things that I don't think, I didn't think that I could get through, that I couldn't get through without Him, and I have to learn to rely on Him through that process, and it builds our trust in God. It builds our confidence that he is going to show up, that he is who he says he is, that he's going to comfort us in those moments. It was a really hard season, though, and, let's be honest, ambiguous loss can come in all shapes and sizes.
Speaker 1:Sometimes it is the loss of a child leaving our home. Other times it's the loss of the normal you thought you would have. I mean, there's a different kind of loss in adoption because our lives look different from now on. It might be the loss of a peaceful evening routine, and that may sound silly, but that's where we recharge a lot of times, and so the loss of that can be impactful. Instead of tucking everybody in bed at eight o'clock at night, maybe you're dealing with meltdowns until 11 pm because of trauma and and that is just the new normal that we have to get used to. Or maybe it's the loss of this idea that you are a good parent. I know many of us, if we parented biological children without that, don't have that trauma history. Maybe we thought we were really good parents before we got into this.
Speaker 1:I always say, you know, the Lord stuck me in the situation that we're in to kind of sanctify that pride out of me. I mean, even in foster care I thought I was a great foster parent and then we got placed with our five adopted kids and all of that went out the window. I had no idea what I was doing, and so there was the loss of this image that I thought I was a good parent, and now I'm really, really struggling. So those things can be losses, things that we have to grieve as well, and when those losses come, they hit us in ways that feel so messy, so unresolved. That's why I love how the Bible speaks about lament, about being honest with our pain.
Speaker 1:I think of Job. Job was a man who knew loss in a way that most of us can't even imagine. He lost his family, his health, his livelihood, all the things that made life feel secure. And Job didn't shy away from his grief. He cried out to God, he wept, he mourned, and what's beautiful to me is that God met Job in his lament. God didn't tell him to suck it up or move on. Instead, he listened and he was with him in his grief. I think that's such a powerful reminder for us as foster parents.
Speaker 1:It's okay to grieve, it's okay to say this hurts and I don't understand why this is happening. God is big enough to handle our questions and our brokenness, and when we bring our pain to him, he's there sitting with us in it. And do you know what happens when we allow ourselves to grieve like that? We make space for healing, we make space to love our kids more fully, to better empathize with their pain and to be a safe place for them to cry, scream and work through their own loss. So what do we do with all of this? How do we walk through ambiguous loss without letting it crush us?
Speaker 1:Number one let's name the loss. It's okay to say it out loud I'm grieving the loss of this child leaving. I'm sad that this didn't turn out the way that I thought it would. Naming the loss gives it space to be real. Also, I would say, find other people that acknowledge that loss as well.
Speaker 1:Number two allow yourself to lament. Take a page from Job, cry out, write down your prayers, let yourself sit with the hard feelings instead of automatically pushing them away. Number three lean into community. You don't have to do this alone. Find other foster parents who understand the journey. Talk with your friends and, if you need to see a counselor or a pastor who can help you process through your grief. Number four remember the bigger picture. Your pain has a purpose. God can use your grief to make you more compassionate, more understanding and more loving to the kids who need you most.
Speaker 1:Friends, ambiguous loss is hard. It is so, so hard, but it's also a powerful way that God shapes our hearts to better love the children who come into our home. It's okay to grieve, it's okay to let those tears flow and it's okay to find hope and healing in the middle of it all. Thank you for being with me today, for letting me share my story and for being part of this journey with me. If this episode encouraged you, please share it with another foster parent who might need a little hope today. Let's keep walking this road together, loving big and finding grace for every step. Until next time, friends, keep loving, keep grieving and keep leaning on the one who never lets go.
Speaker 1:As we wrap up, let me pray for us. Dear Father, be with us in our grief. Help us not to worry. Help us to trust that, when we are called to those hard moments, that your grace is going to be sufficient for us in that day. Help us lean into your grace and your strength and not try to do it all on our own. Surround us with community, lord, of people that will grieve when we grieve. They will mourn when we mourn, mourn when we mourn, and they will be joyful when we are joyful. Help us be more empathetic and be more comfort to the kids that are coming into our home. Lord, prepare us for the work that you have for us to do. Lord, we love you. We trust you In Jesus' name amen.