foster mums
In the shadow of Christmas 2014, Boston-based emergency foster parents Kelly (Therapist Mum) and Jenna (Artist Mum) were asked to take in a six-week-old African-American baby (Tiny), just for the weekend. Two weeks later, his two-and-a-half year old brother (Mr T, for toddler) came to stay. Now, three years on, they’re officially a family, and their journey is only just beginning.
What first inspired you to start fostering?
Kelly: We’d known from when we first got together that we were going to be parents one day, but we always thought that we’d probably have birth kids. We weren’t quite ready to make that step yet, but we were committed to the social justice element of fostering, and it seemed like a natural fit. We were both working with kids who had been involved in foster care at the time, so we had a real awareness of the need for homes for these children, especially in a temporary capacity.
Jenna: We always knew that fostering was going to be an important part of our family and that there’d be a rotating door of kids in and out of our home, because we felt like we were really well suited to provide that space for them. But we definitely weren’t ready for the way it eventually happened. Why did you choose emergency foster care?
J: Now that we’re so far down the road of adoption, I can look back and say that, honestly, we had no idea what we were getting ourselves into. The way the emergency placement system works here in the States is that if a kid is pulled out of school for an investigation, or because someone has reported problems at home, and there’s nowhere for that child to go overnight, then they send that kid to a home like ours in order to give themselves time to find a more permanent solution. We felt like we were shoo-ins because of our professional backgrounds, but the welcoming of pain and chaos into your home is really different in practice than you would anticipate or could even imagine.
K: I keep thinking about the first couple of
