Homes can be broken in so many ways. Divorce, neglect, death, and many other reasons. I never related the feelings foster children have to the same ones as step children may have, until I felt like the step parent in my foster children's lives.
My husband and I are both from divorced parents. My parents got a divorce when I was eight years old. I don’t hold any hard feelings towards my parents for divorce. It was the absolute best thing for us. There is just so much children go through emotionally coming from a broken home in any circumstance. I relate so much of what my foster/adoptive children feel emotionally to children of divorced parents. Not that divorced parents have done anything at all to jeopardize their children’s safety, but emotionally connecting to foster parents and their bio/adoptive children, who are already in the home, has to feel about the same as connecting with step parents/step siblings. My husband and I wrestle with the same feelings as well. We now have an 8 and 10 year boy and girl who we love dearly. We are in the process of adoption now. We adore them, but the bottom line is they know their “real mom and real dad.” They love us with everything they have, but they also love their biological parents. We don’t expect any different from them, and we actually talk about their bio parents with them as much as they would like. We do have to be honest and real, but we never disregard the feelings they have for their biological family. We are all still working on this relationship, and in so many ways we feel like the “step parents.” The very loved and respected ones…which is perfectly fine. So the same struggles that the biological and step parents go through with blended families, we go through those on the daily. Only in some (hopefully more and more) divorced families, there are two sets of great parents. In our situation, we are loving kids and claiming them as ours knowing their biological family signed their rights away long ago. We are the ones “smoothing it over” and being the “bigger ones” when really we are the ONLY people who stepped up to the call for these two sweet, innocent ones. As always…loving on borrowed time.
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