Family

How to Survive Your First Day as a Foster Parent

Flint & Steel Two-Part Writing Challenge (Part Two)

Continued from How to Survive Your First Night as a Foster Parent

Your foster daughter is quick to unpack her bag to show you all her things and consider where she wants to put them. She has two fleece blankets (one with Dora and one with Spongebob), some clothing, a couple of books, and a bottle of liquid pain medication she no longer needs to take.

She has a little tube of Blistex with the initial of her first name written on the cap in black permanent ink: she shows you the initial and says it’s for her name.

You ask if she uses the potty by herself or if she wants help. She says she does it by herself. She’s tiny (you find out later that her height puts her below the lowest measurement on the growth chart in the pediatrician’s office), but she hauls herself up onto the seat, no problem. Her legs swing in the air as she sits there and talks to you through the doorway.

So much has gone blurry as you try to recall it all now, but you’ll always remember her love for the Dora toothbrush. Your partner took a picture of her holding it at the dining room table and smiling, and you in the photo, too, smiling at this little girl you’ve just met with your hair looking rumpled and your eyes looking tired. In the photo you can see her short hair from her surgery, but her scar is on the side turned away from the camera.

It isn’t about you surviving at all. It’s about her. She’s survived brain surgery and you don’t know what else because she’s too little to have described it to the social workers and the doctors.

Your partner tucks her into bed that first night, and you stand back and take a picture. Mr. Cat has come and lay down next to her in bed. Your partner kneels beside them and reads a book. When Mr. Cat stretches out, he and your foster daughter are about the same size. She pets his silky black fur and calls him her good boy.

When you and your partner go to bed, you call him your therapy cat. He stays with her until after she’s asleep, and then he goes downstairs and meows and one of you has to go and give him some cat treats and let him out.

You and your partner are exhausted, but you talk and talk about her, the little girl who came bounding up the front steps and then bounding upstairs to the bedroom your social worker had approved for her in your home study some months before.

The next morning, your partner is going to work, and you’ve never been alone all day with a child before. You’d never babysat as a teenager, never watched your baby nephew on your own but spent time with him and your mom when she watched him on certain days of the week when your brother and sister-in-law were at work.

Now your mom has promised to come over the next morning and help you. Really she’s just going to reassure you that you’re doing a good job, that you can be a mom, too.

When she arrives a couple hours after your partner has left for work, she’ll give a big armload of clothes to her new granddaughter, who will say “Oh, thank you!” and hold each piece of clothing up to her chest. It will come out as “tank you,” and it will be unprompted: just one of many things she’ll show you that she knows how to do.

This (true) story is part two of a two-part writing challenge from Flint & Steel. Part one was meant to end with a cliffhanger, leading to part two. The theme of the challenge is survival, and to write about a moment you weren’t sure you could make it through.