By Editor Holly Wagner
Holly@observernews.net
People often tell adoption stories as fairy tales. A child finds a family. A family finds a child. Everyone lives happily ever after. And while there is beauty in that ending, we cannot tell the whole story if we skip the beginning.
Before adoption is a gift, it is a tragedy. Before foster care becomes hope, it begins with heartbreak.
I know because I lived it.
I was a foster child who was adopted into a family that loved me deeply. Years later, my husband and I raised four biological children and then opened our home again by becoming foster parents and then adopting a teenager. I have experienced adoption from both sides, as the child who needed a family and as the parent who longed to give one.
Those experiences taught me something many people never see. Children do not enter foster care because something wonderful happened. They enter because something went terribly wrong.
A family fell apart. A parent could not or would not care for them. Safety was lost. Trust was broken. The very people who were supposed to protect them could not. Then, in what may have been the safest decision, they are taken from everything they have ever known.
Even if home was chaotic, even if it was neglectful, even if it was dangerous, it was still home.
Holly Wagner on the far left, with four of her five siblings
For me, being removed from my birth mother meant leaving behind someone who wasn't able to care for us the way children deserve. But it also meant something else, something that still hurts when I think about it. It meant losing my brothers and sisters. They were my world. We played together. We cried together. We survived together. They were the people who understood my life because they were living it beside me.
When I was taken away, I wasn't just leaving a house. I was leaving them.
People often assume that once a child is placed in a loving home, everything gets better overnight. It doesn't.
Yes, I was blessed beyond measure. God placed me with parents who loved me unconditionally. They gave me security, stability and a childhood I otherwise would never have known. I will spend the rest of my life grateful for them. But gratitude and grief can exist at the same time.
I loved my new family, and I missed my old one. I was safe, but I was also mourning.
Children in foster care carry complicated emotions that don't fit neatly into a happy ending. They may laugh at dinner and cry themselves to sleep. They may cling to their new parents while secretly wondering how their siblings are doing. They may feel guilty for being safe when the people they love are not.
None of that means they are ungrateful. It means they are grieving.
As adults, we often want children to move forward quickly. We celebrate adoption day, finalization, forever families and new beginnings. Those celebrations matter. But so do the losses.
Every foster child has lost something, sometimes many things: parents, siblings, grandparents, friends, pets, school — even the smell of a familiar home. Those losses deserve to be acknowledged instead of ignored.
Years later, after becoming a mother myself, I understood even more deeply what children in foster care carry. When my husband and I adopted our daughter, I recognized the emotions because I had once lived them myself.
Love does not erase loss. Safety does not erase grief. A forever family does not erase the memories of the family that came before.
Healing happens when children are given permission to love where they came from while learning to trust where they are going. We need to stop telling adoption stories that begin on adoption day. The story began long before that. It began with brokenness, with tears, with fear, with loss and then, somewhere in the middle of all that pain, someone opened their heart and their home.
That is where hope begins. Foster care and adoption are beautiful. They save lives. They change futures. I know because they changed mine.
But we honor children best when we tell the whole truth. Before it is a gift...it is a tragedy.
And when we recognize that truth, we can better understand the children who are learning to smile again while still carrying broken pieces of yesterday.
Sometimes the greatest gift we can give them is not expecting them to forget where they came from but to walk beside them as they learn to carry both love and loss in the same heart.
If you are interested in becoming a foster family, call 1-83-FosterFL or 1-833-678-3735 to speak directly to a foster community ambassador about the next steps for your family or visit Florida’s Foster Information Center — FL DCF Enterprise Portal at https://www.myflfamilies.com and someone will reach out to you soon.