Goodbyes Suck

We’ve had a child for the better part of a year. I haven’t written a single thing about the beginning or the middle, but I am going to write about the end.

Goodbyes suck.

Permanent, cold-turkey goodbyes suck. Those are the big and the little deaths; they’re the severed goodbyes that sting like an amputation. Someone passes, and you’re left to make one-sided peace among the living, or you cut someone off by choice and walk parallel but separate paths, aware the other is out walking and doing all the normal things… just not with you. There are slow goodbyes where you drift further and further apart until the space is too distant to traverse. And then there are the unfinished goodbyes of foster care.

There’s an unresolved nature to foster care. You prepare your goodbyes without knowing whether it’s a forever parting, a slow drift, or an eventual return. The door is always slightly ajar, even when your lips are moving to speak finality. And how do you cope with that? What do I tell my kids when we’ve been at a stop-and-go goodbye for months? It’s probably going to happen this time. Get ready to leap. Do we cancel plans because it may be tomorrow? Do we play chicken with “the end” dangling on a string, waiting to call their bluff that this time it’s for real and we won’t be baited and switched with a sequel?

Not long ago, I was sitting in a hospital room with my foster child. Blood and saliva smeared my shirt. My arm was asleep under the weight of a barely conscious toddler, and breaking the rhythmic beeping of hospital machinery, my phone rang. It was news from a previous placement’s relative that things weren’t going so well for the kids. My heart broke into a million pieces. Here I was in a sterile room cradling one child and feeling that familiar rush of unfinished, unsettled emotions for another. Is the door reopening? Could they be returning? It’s been 2 years, and I still long to be reunited. The unresolved nature of foster care means I’ll have to exist with doors to my heart always slightly ajar, if not swinging on their hinges.

We were supposed to have a final week of lasts. I was supposed to read the last book, go to the park for the last time, and even pick up the last mess. Instead of closure, we’re wrapping up the marathon with a quick sprint to the finish. That’s foster care. It’s unpredictable. It doesn’t provide the healthy resolution you want for yourself or your kids. That person you spent the entire school year with? Overnight, that person will no longer live with us and will no longer be your sibling. But don’t worry, we can do this all over again.