Couple receives extensive foster care support, and gets a family
Our story is simple, it’s about about our little family, made up of just two ordinary dads and our (highly opinionated) son.
It’s a common question when we introduce our son James to people, “Oh, that’s lovely! So when did you adopt him?” It’s easiest to give a dismissive response but that doesn’t articulate the situation. Instead we tell the story of how we became foster carers and, in turn, a family, a situation that has arisen with large similarities to adoption, but also vast differences. We hope by telling this side to our story that perhaps more people will become motivated to become foster carers as well.
There are some things you will always remember clear as day for many years to come and the day we decided to become foster carers was one of them. We were driving home from the movies on a Saturday afternoon chatting about our future, after a relationship heading towards the pointy end of a decade and an engagement just shy of 12 months old, when we discussed children and the rest of our lives together.
Given the lovely state we reside in within Australia, adopting a child for heterosexual couples is a logistical and expensive nightmare at the best of times and a legal impossibility for a gay couple, so our discussion moved to surrogacy and those options presented to us. Over the years, many of our very wonderful close friends had offered their services to help us bring a child in to this world and we began to talk about these
The process is always focused on reunification with the families, making your role as a carer absolutely vital in helping to re-establish positive relationships between the children and their families.
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people and those options. We quite honestly couldn’t find a situation we were equally comfortable with. Amongst that discussion was the morality of bringing a child in to the world when we have the opportunity to provide for a child who is already in need, an interesting point that led us in an alternate direction. After a lengthy discussion as to whether we could actually legally be foster carers, we turned to the wisest person in the car and asked Google. We left a message for the government’s foster care department.
Some days later I was surprised with a call from the department agent, who completed a simple 20 minute phone interview on our motivations to become carers. The interviewer then forwarded our details to their register of foster care agencies and within a few weeks a flyer had arrived in the mail inviting us to attend an informational evening. With some trepidation we arrived and were welcomed with open arms and discovered, most notably, that being gay was NOT an issue, our professional and personal life skills were of more interest. With our background in health and education we were regarded as primary candidates for becoming carers.
The criteria was around your skills and ability to care for a child who had experienced trauma, which nearly all children in care have. There was extensive training provided (nearly 9 months of training, with interviews and assessments), personnel support, financial support, and even emotional support to ourselves as carers and the children in our care.
What we really took from the training was the knowledge and understanding that most children in care will return to the care of their families and loved ones at some point, whether this be a matter of weeks from entering your care or even up to 2 years, but the process is always focused on reunification with the families, making your role as a carer absolutely vital in helping to re-establish positive relationships between the children and their families. 70% of children will return to home, while just 30% will remain in long term care until they come of age.
What was funny was this training and information prepared us to realistically understand that you don’t become a foster carer because you want to have a child of your own: you do it so that you can help to have a positive influence in a young person’s life. They prepare you to understand that this is not “your child”, but you are there to love them and care for them as your own.
It’s funny because we weren’t to know that we would in fact end up in that 30% and end up bringing a child in to our home who would not return to live anywhere else. We ended up as a family.
I want to tell our story and let people know just how beautiful and incredibly difficult this can be. I want to provide a snapshot of our life as it stands. I’m sitting here writing this as our son sleeps in his room; he’s been reading Harry Potter for most of the afternoon and has finally tired and fallen asleep. We’ve come back from a lunch for my nephews birthday, where he had been playing and running around with the rest of our family who accept him as one of our own. He loves playing in the backyard at home, he’ll spend hours in the sandpit digging and shoveling and calling out “Dad! Daddy!” and dragging us out to show us something he dug up.
He chose some time ago to stop calling us by our names and instead chose to select us each one as “Dad” and the other as “Daddy”, something he indignantly corrects us on if one responds to the incorrect title “No (he pouts), I wasn’t talking to you, I was talking to DAD, you’re DADDY!”. He attends school as normal, but he struggles with his work, in the afternoons we spend lots of time working with him on his handwriting, spelling and his maths, all of which he struggles with (the metaphor of “herding cats” is most appropriate). After a life of inconsistent care he has fallen behind in school and we work hard to help him catch up. He’s no angel and like all children gets in his fair share of trouble. He is cheeky, adorable and knows how to get his own way with anyone! But he is loved and for the first time in his life is really beginning to feel and understand it. He has become our son and we live together, as a family.
That’s awesome, my partner and I have been doing the same for 7 years now. However our placement and continued fostering arrangement is under threat from the recent changes to care providers. Wesley mission has been given a bulk of the funding to support out of home care. Wesley does not support same sex couples.