Maybe the Village Needs to Be More Practical

I’m a mom of six, and if there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s that sometimes the most loving thing someone can do for you is just take something off your plate. Sometimes we need advice or encouragement, but oftentimes we need to know there are people that we can call on when we need help. But often, foster parents don’t really know WHAT we need… we’re just drowning. Sometimes we just need someone who isn’t buried in the thick of it with us to just look around, see the thing that needs doing, and do it.

Bring dinner on a Tuesday. Pick a kid up from practice. Fold the laundry that has been living on the couch for three days. Sit with the other kids so one child can get to therapy. Drop groceries on the porch. Mow the yard. Give a mom two hours where nobody needs anything from her.

We talk a lot about “the village” when it comes to raising kids. And I love that idea. But in the midst of raising six children, and spending years parenting kids who have experienced trauma, I’ve started to think maybe we’ve made the village more complicated than it needs to be.

Because families usually don’t need more people standing around the edges cheering them on (we probably need that encouragement too). But we REALLY need people willing to step into the ordinary stuff with them.

That’s especially true in foster care. Foster parents are navigating endless appointments, ever-changing caseworkers, heavy court dates, school meetings, visits with bio family, therapies, big emotions and behaviors that often have really hard stories underneath them. And then there’s still dinner to make WHILE you navigate how all of those things affect the people in your home…. Meanwhile, there are still permission slips and soccer practices and toilets to clean and approximately nine million socks to wash and somehow lose. And the emotional weight you carry… I can’t express the weight.

This is really where Foster Light came from.

I knew what it felt like to deeply love the children in my home and still feel completely overwhelmed by everything required to care for them well. I felt my mental health plummeting from the absorption of secondary trauma and felt myself burning out by the day, but knew I needed to stay strong for them. And at the same time, I learned that when someone took one ordinary thing off my plate, it gave me more of myself back to give to my kids. It gave me capacity to engage, to rest and have more to pour out.

When we wraparound the family as a WHOLE, provide respite, healing and relief for parents, we’re proving kids with healthy adults who can provide patience, presence and wholeness to kids in their home.

Maybe that’s what a village is supposed to be. Not encouraging words from the sidelines but people showing up to say and bearing the actual everyday burden with them. We’re the village.