I just wanted to briefly clarify exactly what I had gotten myself in a lather about in the previously described "public castigation" incident.

You don't hear a lot about foster care or foster parenting outside of the bad news. That is the way things generally are - you hear about the fire department when they accidentally burn down the orphanage during an oily rag fight, but not when they save a couple dozen homes of ordinary joes. But I feel like foster parenting has gotten a really bad and undeserved reputation. I hear people insinuating or even directly saying that people do it for the money. Let's just do the math...most foster parents are paid around $180 a month for keeping a child 24 hours a day for an indeterminate time period. This amount is meant to cover their food, clothes (beyond a small initial allotment), entertainment, school supplies...basically everything that a kid needs is on your hands and if $180 doesn't cover it, you do. $180 a month works out to about 25 cents an hour. It is a job that you never get to leave. Even at the toughest jobs I have had I could console myself that at the end of the day I could go home and recharge and be ready to face it again tomorrow. You home becomes a sanctuary, but not for you. You can count on cleaning up a wet bed every single morning and meeting with teachers when the child acts out in school. You can count on the fact that you are not, will not, and should not be the person the child loves and bonds with. That role is reserved for the parent and you are working at every angle to get the child and parent into a state where they can live together. Your ultimate hope is to make yourself unnecessary. For the money? Patently ridiculous.

My family has been a foster family from the time I was 10 years old, and for the last ten years they have taken on severly emotionally and behaviorally disordered teenageers as a primary ministry. I have seen the incredible sacrifices made by not only my own parents, but all of the large network of other foster families we know intimately.

Yes, it is rewarding, as it always is, to be doing what God had told you to do, but it is also so hard. My mother has had her ribs broken, her life threatened, her furniture destroyed, her walls kicked in. She has become physically and emotionally exhausted dealing so intensively with the bottomless needs of these kids, most of whom have nothing to give back. She has literally poured out her life in love. And not a mushy, emotional love that talks well and does little - a servant, sacrificial love that is in the hardest part of caring for broken and angry people every single day. A kind of love so unbeliveable and self-forgetful that most people cannot understand it and have to assign some sinister motive. To hear people deride foster care or foster parents as money-grubbing, child-abusing, slave-aquiring creeps - well it offends me in the deepest way possible. Arg.

I'm sorry that it gets me so defensive and emotional. I don't think I would be so passionate about defending myself as I am about my mom.

At least I hope not.