The joy and pain of being a Catholic foster parent

The first time Stephen and Paige Sanchez took their boys to Mass, the children had lots of questions. The boys were 2 and 4, and this was the first they had heard of Jesus. They saw a statue and asked who it was.

Mr. Sanchez told them it was St. Joseph, the foster father of Jesus. The boys looked at each other.

“Jesus was a foster kid?” the older boy said.

Mr. Sanchez said he was, kind of.

To himself, he thought, Man, the church loves us.

The two boys are now the adopted sons of Mr. Sanchez and his wife, but at the time they were his foster children, and everyone expected them to go back to their birth parents. The Sanchezes also have an older son, who was also adopted through foster care.

Stephen and Paige first began exploring adoption after five years of struggle with infertility. Then they discovered how many children in their area needed placement through foster care. They took a class, just to learn more.

“We started thinking God was asking us [to go down this path],” Mr. Sanchez said. So they kept going.

The day after they received their fostering license, they got a call asking them to take a child.

“We decided we’d say yes, just like if we were having our own children,” Mr. Sanchez said.

That child, who came to them deeply traumatized, stayed only a few days before moving to specialized therapeutic care. But the agency immediately asked about another child, a boy whose birth parents’ parental rights were going to be terminated. Would the Sanchez family accept him, and eventually adopt him?

They talked it over for 10 minutes and agreed. The boy joined them the next day.

Two weeks later, the agency called again. This time, it was two half brothers who needed a temporary home until they could be reunified with their parents.

That was the plan, as it usually is with foster care. The reunification goal got pushed back more than once. The birth parents, who struggled with addiction, were unable to get clean and create a safe environment for their boys. Finally, after two years of limbo, the court legally severed the birth parents’ rights, and Stephen and Paige adopted the boys.

The Sanchez boy who was 2 years old in the church that day is now 15, and since that day when they first met St. Joseph and “his foster kid,” the boys have learned volumes about their faith.

But one of their first lessons was that God had a son and sent him to live with another family because God loved his son and trusted the family. It became a way for the Sanchezes to talk about Catholicism, and about the relationship the two boys might have with their new parents and their birth parents.

“St. Joseph became a clear patron,” Mr. Sanchez said—for the boys, and also for him.

Sacrifice and Stability

The Sanchez family story seems to have as close to a fairy tale ending as possible. But the foster father analogy only goes so far. And the family’s story also demonstrates some of the things that make foster care so hard: the legal and psychological limbo.

In foster care, the goal is to reunite the child and their parents, but it is not always clear how long that might take. And that goal is ultimately met less than half the time. Sometimes the timeline is changed several times, and sometimes the parents’ rights are legally terminated without another family ready to step in and offer care. The future of a child frequently hinges on the sustained efforts of people who are already in crisis, in dire poverty, suffering domestic violence or in the grip of addiction.

The practice of foster care is also widely misunderstood, leaving foster families isolated even among communities that could be helping the most. But experienced foster parents often say two things: Foster care reveals things that are true of every parenting relationship. And fostering is intensely, inherently pro-life work that should be much more vigorously supported and promoted by the Catholic Church.

Foster parents will also speak of a profound joy and satisfaction that keeps them doing this work over and over again, as long as they can.

Approximately 400,000 children—enough to fill Yankee Stadium eight times over—spend time in foster care every year in the United States. Each year around 60,000 children see their birth parents’ parental rights terminated, and around 50,000 children are adopted from foster care each year. About 25,000 children every year age out of the system, and 20 percent of these become instantly homeless.

Despite the great need, foster care can be a hard sell, even to families with the resources for it. Many foster parents say friends tell them they would love to offer foster care, but they are afraid of getting too attached. They are afraid they will fall too deeply in love with their foster children, only to lose them.

“In [American] culture, parenting is a little bit possessive,” Mr. Sanchez said.

Catholic culture puts great emphasis on the sacred bond between parent and child; and Americans often cultivate and cherish their identity as parents, emphasizing self-sacrifice in the name of forming lifelong attachments with their children.

None of this meshes easily with the goal of foster care, which is to relinquish children back to their birth parents. If foster care works as it is designed to, that sacrifice will lead to goodbyes.

The tension can be brutal. It’s also profoundly Christlike.

Holly Taylor Coolman, assistant professor of theology at Providence College, the author of Parenting: The Complex and Beautiful Vocation of Raising Children and the adoptive mother of five, including one by way of foster care, said foster care is the best example of the kind of love Christians are called to.

“We’re called to love people and will the good of them, even when it requires self-sacrifice. Maybe even especially when it requires self-sacrifice,” she said. “It’s a kind of hospitality that may be very difficult for the host.”

The two youngest Sanchez boys call their adoptive mother “Mommy Paige” and their birth mother “Mommy H—,” and once poignantly suggested that their birth parents could live in the backyard, so they could visit back and forth.

Mr. Sanchez reminds his sons that it’s good to love your birth parents, and such affection doesn’t hurt him and his wife. What did hurt Mr. Sanchez is seeing times when his boys’ birth parents withdrew affection and didn’t seem to care. This is where the analogy of St. Joseph as a foster father falls short, Dr. Coolman said.

Mr. Sanchez said that when his boys are mad at him, they’ll pointedly ask how their biological parents are doing. He laughs, but also feels the sting. He knows it’s normal for the boys to have conflicted feelings. Dr. Coolman said that those feelings will likely continue throughout the children’s lifetime.

“Foster kids know better than anybody else that there really is an idea of being raised by your bio mother and father. They know it in their bones,” she said. They need to know that people who have not been raised in the so-called perfect family are also beloved and precious and are not fundamentally broken; that their biological family may not be whole, but each member can be a whole person.

“Brokenness is not the ultimate description of who they are,” she said. And yet it is essential for the new parents to affirm the children’s undeniable loss.

The Ties That Bind

The possessiveness of American parenting as described by Mr. Sanchez sometimes leads to stigmas against the foster children themselves. More than half of Americans, for instance, believe that kids are in foster care because they’re juvenile delinquents, not because they were previously in unsafe homes.

Mr. Sanchez said that some Catholics he has met have absorbed unwholesome cultural ideas about heredity or destiny, and they harbor an unspoken fear that when you foster, you’re inviting a problem into your house. “Like they come from bad stock,” Mr. Sanchez said with disgust.

But while people are not their genetics, our biological connections are important. “DNA matters, which means biological ties to parents matter,” said Dr. Coolman. “I think Catholic theology should be ready to stand up and say: These relationships with the person whose DNA you share, or the person in whose body you spend the first nine months of your existence, really matter.”

This reality is an underexplored facet of St. John Paul II’s theology of the body. “You don’t just remove a baby from the body in which [he] lived and act like you’re just taking a baby from a petri dish,” Dr. Coolman said. She added that it was, in fact, at the urging of a social worker at Catholic Charities that the country began to question its practice of closed adoption. Today, approximately 95 percent of adoptions are open adoptions, a practice that works to allow children to maintain a healthy connection to their biological family of origin.

When a child is removed from their home, the smells, the tastes and their whole physical reality changes, and it is a shock to their system. And as they grow, things like their physical appearance and their genetic predispositions will continue to assert themselves. You cannot simply sever the link, and acknowledging that this is so is profoundly Catholic.

But Catholics have a long way to go until foster care is perceived as a central dimension of pro-life activity. While it is true that Christians are twice as likely to foster or adopt as the general population, it ismore often Protestant churches that sponsor foster care ministries, not Catholic parishes.

The theology is lagging, and so are the logistical supports. Catholic foster parents will tell you that while individual clergy members, schools or parishioners may be supportive, it is rare for a Catholic parish to offer robust, organized support for foster families, or even to offer information about how to get involved.

There are some Catholic communities that get it right. In South Bend, Ind., where the Sanchez family now lives, foster care has been unusually integrated into parish life.

“It’s seen as how we participate in the culture of life: Not just by being politically active, but by taking care of each other,” Mr. Sanchez said.

He also said that the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd was a helpful resource. This Montessori-based faith formation program gave the boys a space to talk freely about God and family as they played, and it became a kind of religious play-based therapy.

At one parish the family attended, the congregation had been deliberately instructed on how to behave around foster families. They knew, for example, to give children autonomy by asking, “Who is this you have with you?” rather than asking, “Is this your mom and dad?”

But in other situations, people made clueless blunders, asking in front of the children if their birth parents were on drugs, which provoked long follow-up conversations between Mr. and Mrs. Sanchez and their children.

It Takes a Village

The Sanchez family’s faith was deepened immeasurably by their experience with foster care and adoption, and they constantly relied on their faith to sustain them through the difficult parts. They say their faith has strengthened tenfold since they took that leap.

Mindy Goorchenko’s story went the other way…Read the rest of my cover story for America Magazine. 

Image: by Matthew Henry (Creative Commons)

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