Too emotionally involved. I have heard this a lot lately. Can you guess why? I am finding it to be a struggle to walk this very fine tight rope of foster care. To become licensed as foster parents, we have to have a total of 55 hours of training by the end of our first year. In the training, they discuss a lot of different things. One thing that is discussed is how as foster parents, we need to be welcoming of children placed in our care. We need to make them feel like they are a part of our family. We need to dress them like we would dress our other children..so they should not be in thrift store clothing while the bio children are wearing some really nice threads. From the outside looking in, no one should be able to tell that the children in our care are not ours.

I feel like there is no gray area for me. It's either I become a mama bear who loves these children, protects them, cares for them, advocates for them and makes sure they know they are loved by us or I do the bare minimum for them which in my eyes, is not doing them any justice.

We have had our foster baby for 5 1/2 months now. We got her straight from the hospital at two weeks old. She came to us with more needs than we were aware of when accepting the placement. When she was discharged, I had to do all the new parent videos just like her parents would have had to do. When we realized just how complex her health needs were, I was on the phone getting her in to various doctors for follow-up care. Looking at her now, you would have never known just how frail she was. But it has taken a lot of work to get her where she is today.

I feel like because this case has been so much more involved because of her needs, we have bonded much more quickly than I would have ever anticipated. I do feel protective over her. I feel like she deserves to have people pushing for her needs and making sure every single one of them are being met. Visits with her family have been inconsistent and because of that, that co-parent relationship we would normally have with them has not been there. That can make it hard to keep a good focus sometimes when I don't have her parents to talk to about how she is doing. I know they are doing their very best though.

Anyway, I feel like I am always defending where I am coming from. I wear my heart of my sleeve and this case has taken an emotional toll on me some days. There are days when we have visits and I feel like all I do is cry during the visit because of the twists and turns that have taken place. I have not figured out how to be there for her without being too emotionally involved.

I am hoping that with each placement this aspect will get a little easier to figure out but something tells me that probably won't be the case. Regardless though, I will try my best to stick to my role as foster parent but I am going to love on any child placed in our home as if they were mine until they can be reunified with their family.