All my life I wanted to be a mother. To me there was nothing better than to eventually have someone call me Mom. I told a boss once about my aspirations to be a stay at home mom one day and she told me that only uneducated women wanted to do that. I felt so sorry for her narrow feminist viewpoint. In her world a woman could achieve success only by being a success in the corporate world. I’d like to see her try to wrangle a toddler and an infant.
My dreams were not as easy to achieve as I thought they would be. I thought that when you wanted to be pregnant, you stopped preventing and you would be pregnant. Such was not the case. My husband and I tried for over seven years. We tried IVF and it didn’t work. We tried IUI three different times and it didn’t work. We tried Clomid and it didn’t work. We managed to spontaneously get pregnant twice, once after trying for a year-and-a-half and then two-and-a-half years after that, but both pregnancies ended in miscarriage.
We looked into Chinese adoption, but it didn’t look like the right road for us either. Then we were led to foster parenting. After the first infant was placed in my arms, I no longer wanted to be pregnant. The need just left my body. My husband came to the same conclusion. These children needed us and we were available to them.
Foster parenting has been the most rewarding and hardest thing we’ve ever done. The first placement was the most difficult. She was the one whom we had to learn a healthy level of love and detachment. I encourage anyone who feels led to foster parent to look into it. It will change your life.