Respite: "You sent me away"

In foster-care classes, we were taught that respite was this holy arrangement, in which other foster parents would care for your foster children while you got a much-needed break from dealing with trauma.

The model was one of foster parents helping each other stay sane and refreshed to give these children our all.

Now let me tell you how my kids experience respite.

Because their bio mom will not allow us to travel with them, even for day trips, outside of a roughly 30-min radius, they have gone to weekend respite twice in three months. And they'll be going to respite again next weekend. Plus, our agency sent them to respite once to give us a "break," and they went to friends for all-day babysitting twice. In other words: it's been a lot.

We cannot tell the kids that this is because of their mom. So we tell them "the rules" won't let us take them, but we'd love to, and we miss them.

This has not worked at all.

After the last respite, the kids flew out of the house, shoes in hand, and ran barefoot to the car to buckle themselves in. They did not want to say goodbye, they did not want to help put their toys in the car, they wanted to GO HOME NOW.

It started slowly. They missed their beds. They missed their rooms. They missed the cat.

Then the real emotions came out.

Sophia: "I hate weekends."

Jacob: "I want to stay home with you."

Sophia: "You sent me away!"

Sophia cried and raged for most of the next two hours, through dinner and bedtime routine. The next morning she spent two hours sobbing inconsolably on my lap.

The bio mom told us that kids had a great time at respite and added, with a bite, that Jacob didn't misbehave there AT ALL. (The obvious implication being that we are the cause of his diagnosed mood disorder.)

The kids, meanwhile, begged us to never send them to that family again. Sophia was mainly upset because the family had other respite kids too, so she didn't get as much attention as she was expecting. But it's hard to feel like we're not abusing the kids when they come home crying and begging us to not send them away again.

The agency tells me I need to be a "partner" with the bio mom. But with each of these respites, I feel like the bio mom is forcing me to hurt her kids for her, is using me to get at them, and I just feel sick. We've canceled almost all of our summer plans to avoid respite, but some things can't be canceled. The agency thinks we're being ridiculous to think the kids are harmed at all by respite, and proposed "regular respite" to give us a break. They don't understand why we were like, OMG, no!

I could do without any more pathetic cries of "Please don't send me away again!"