Are You Kidding Me?!

Welcome back to Taylor Talks.

I have had a little girl living in my house for most of this year. She is my foster sister, and she is a part of our family. She turned two a few months after being placed with us. Now, I found out that she will be leaving us next Thursday.

Being part of a foster family means being prepared for sad good-byes and never getting to see your siblings again. It’s a way of life that I have grown up with, and as difficult as it always is, I am used to the way that this process works. In the end, the child goes home to their biological parents, or a grandparent, or an aunt or whatnot. We have helped the child for as long as we can, until their family is prepared to take them home. However, that is not the case this time. For reasons that are not clear, and certainly that don’t make sense, my little sister is being removed from our home and placed into another foster home.

The foster care system *CLAIMS* to look out for the best interest of the child in all situations. Are you kidding me?! How in the world is this looking out for the best interest of my little sister?! She is being removed from a home in which she has people who love her, playmates, all of her needs taken care of, and where she is JUST starting to finally feel at home and feel comfortable after being here for almost a year, and being taken to another home with people that she has never met before, who don’t know anything about her, and are not related to her in any way. They are total strangers. I know that we were strangers in the beginning, but she wasn’t old enough to grasp what was going on. Now, I feel like she’s old enough to realize that she’ll be living in a different home, and that she’ll be scared.

I have been trying to prepare myself for the fact that by March my little sister would most likely be going home to her biological mother, but nothing has prepared me for this. How do you possibly explain to a two-year-old that she is going to be living with strangers now? That you’ll never be able to hug her again, or that she’ll never be able to play with her sisters again? That instead of going home to the mother that has been fighting to regain custody, and who has seen her every single week at a visit, she will instead be leaving the only family that she knows and going to live with people who she has never seen before? How is this looking out for the best interest of the child?!

And why is this happening? Well there’s a lot going on that I can’t talk about since this is an ongoing case, but I feel like the system is screwing up this little girl’s life. There are too many conflicting schedules and I guess no one could take the time to sort everything out.

I feel bad for our family, because we’re going to miss this little girl like crazy, but this is how our lives work, and we’ll just always remember our memories with her. But our pain is absolutely nothing compared to the pain of this little girl. I feel like she is going to feel so alone, and scared, and sad, and confused, and I wish there was some way for me to protect her from the hurt.

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Thanks!
Taylor

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