I'm a foster mom. Here's what people get wrong about 'real' parenting.
I became a foster parent in my early 20s, which is not the route most people expect. In my more nihilistic moments, I have considered compiling a list of the comments I hear most often as a foster mom, near the top of which would be some variation of, “what wonderful practice that is for your real kids!”
It is, admittedly, a difficult remark to answer without being obnoxious. I was previously unaware that the children currently occupying my house were holograms, though I do have some feedback for their manufacturer, as there does not appear to be a mute button.
The joke, however, only works because the comment is so obviously ridiculous. Foster children are plainly real. Yet the absurdity of the remark points toward an assumption most of us hold without thinking. The distinction people are instinctively reaching for is not really between real children and fake children. It is between children who belong to me and children who do not.
I understand the intuition. Foster children eventually leave. Biological children, we imagine, remain. Foster parents are temporary custodians. Biological parents are permanent ones. One set of children belongs to the state; the other belongs to us.
Except that Christianity has never permitted us to think this way.
One of the most illuminating essays I have ever read on parenthood was not written about parenthood at all. In Learning in War-Time, C. S. Lewis is answering what seems, in the midst of catastrophe, to be an almost frivolous question: Why bother studying Aeschylus with Europe in collapse? His answer is that war has not fundamentally altered the conditions under which human beings have always lived. We have never existed apart from uncertainty, mortality, or the possibility of sudden loss. War merely makes those realities more difficult to ignore.
Anything worth doing in peacetime, he argues, is still worth doing in wartime because the fundamental conditions have not changed.
People sometimes ask a similar question about foster care. Why willingly invite that kind of instability into your life? Why love children you could lose?
I have come to think the answer is much the same.
Foster care does not introduce a fundamentally different kind of parenthood. It merely strips away an illusion that biological parents are more easily permitted to maintain. Foster parents know from the first day that the child in their home may not remain there. Every court hearing reminds them that the future is contingent. Every packed suitcase, every supervised visit, every phone call from a social worker makes visible the limits of their control.
Yet those same limits govern every parent; foster care simply makes them harder to ignore.
For all our language of having children, they have never truly belonged to us. We cannot call them into being. The long and painful road of infertility, and the extraordinary lengths to which many couples go in the hope of conceiving, bears witness to that reality. Even after they arrive, we cannot guarantee a single additional day of their lives. Childhood cancer does not consult family calendars, and accidents do not always distinguish between the prepared and the negligent. Nor can we ultimately determine the shape of their souls. They may embrace the faith we have spent years teaching them, or they may reject it. They may remain close to us, or they may walk away.
Every parent, after all, is simply a temporary custodian. We simply spend most of our lives pretending otherwise.
The philosopher and martyr Edith Stein helped me understand why this illusion is so seductive. Long before she was murdered at Auschwitz, Stein reflected on the distinctive vocation of women. Women, she argued, possess a remarkable inclination toward the personal — to cherish, nurture, and attend to persons rather than merely accomplish tasks. Yet every virtue casts a corresponding shadow.
“This feminine quality for the personal,” she writes, “is often accompanied by well-known feminine defects: The desire to possess people for oneself.”
The observation is painfully recognizable in familiar miseries: One thinks of the mother-in-law who cannot release her son into the new family he has formed, or the hoverer who cannot permit her child to fall or fail, or the quiet resentments that accumulate in families when children become extensions of parental identity rather than persons of their own.
Like every created good, the greater the gift, the greater its capacity for distortion. The desire to nurture, when not surrendered, quietly becomes the desire to possess.
But Stein offers the corrective in a single remarkable sentence. Children, she argues, are to be raised “not as a personal possession but sent from God for God.”
I learned that lesson, not first from Stein, but from foster care.
There are experiences for which one is never adequately prepared. Buckling a child into a car seat knowing she is returning to circumstances you believe are neither safe nor stable is one of them. Standing one hearing away from adoption only to discover that the future you had begun imagining will never materialize is another. Foster care requires parents to open their hands long before they would ever choose to do so.
For a time, I thought those sorrows belonged uniquely to foster care. I no longer do.
The Christian image of motherhood is not ultimately the Madonna and Child. It is the Pietà.
Mary’s vocation reaches its culmination not in cradling Christ, but in offering Him up. Her motherhood is defined not by possession but by surrender — not because she loved Him less than any other mother loves her son, but because she loved Him rightly. Even the Incarnate Son came to her as a gift entrusted for a time before returning to the Father.
Every mother, whether biological, adoptive, foster, or spiritual, is called to the same suffering. The particulars differ, but the fundamentals don’t. Some release their children to adulthood. Others to estrangement, illness, or death.
But motherhood, from beginning to end, is an education in surrender.
However my family continues to evolve, foster care has made it impossible for me to believe that any child is “mine” in the way our culture so casually assumes.
They come from God, and they will ultimately return to Him.
My task is not to possess them, nor even to secure every imaginable good for them. I cannot save their bodies from suffering any more than I can save their souls by force of will. I can only receive them with gratitude, love them faithfully, bear witness to Christ before them, and accompany them for as long as God, in His providence, allows our paths to intersect.
That is all any parent has ever been called to do.
Liza Ashley is the Director of the Charles Malik Institute. She holds a B.A. in Humanities from The King’s College and an MLitt with Distinction in Terrorism and Political Violence from the University of St Andrews. She writes regularly on topics concerning religion, foreign policy, higher education, and the Western tradition.
