Today is the three year anniversary of the day our girls came to us. They were removed from an unsafe home on Nov 29th but then spent the night in a hotel with social workers because there wasn't a single open foster care bed in the whole county. On the morning of Friday the 30th their agency began reaching out to the counties surrounding them. The way the system in our state works there are multiple agencies that operate in each county. Each agency takes their turn at the top of the placement list each day.

Their home county happened to decide to go north and call our county first--they could've called any of the counties adjacent to them. When they reached our county, our agency happened to be at the top of the list. When our agency rep answered the phone, our names happened to be at the top of our agency's list. We'd been waiting about 3 months for our first placement. Our home was open to take up to 2 siblings, ages 3 and under. They were 1 and 3 yrs old.

Everything was perfectly aligned except for one small detail. I could not be reached. Friday, November 30, 2018, was the one and only day I was away from my classroom, out of the building, that whole school year. I was at a conference. And my cell phone was dead. And I had the absolute worst feeling about that but you can't tell your principal you have to leave the conference she paid before because you have a strong feeling that you shouldn't be there.

Our social worker reached my husband and told him what they knew about the girls. They told him the agency was desperate to place the kids before the weekend and he had 30 minutes to decide. Preferably less. If they didn't hear back then the girls had to be offered to whomever was next in line quickly in order to move through the whole placement process in one day.

He didn't know what to do. So he went to his icon corner and prayed. My husband is Russian Orthodox. We have icons and candles and incense in a sacred space in our home. I am not Orthodox but one of my favorite things is watching him pray. He is so still. So reverent. Listening with his whole heart. Teaching our children to be still and humble in the presence of God. Later, when he told me that his first action was to go and pray, I could picture exactly what his face and shoulders and hands and feet looked like as he went before his God.

He said he heard God speak as clearly as a voice speaking aloud. It said, "You know what you must do." (To which he mentally added, 'yep, and Sarah will kill me if I don't.')

He called the agency back and said he was on the way. He just needed to stop off and buy some car seats first (it was the last thing on our list we kept forgetting to do). So my very capable and loving husband drove to Target, bought two seats, installed them in the parking lot, and then drove an hour south to pick up two little girls. I asked him, later, if he was nervous. He said he was not. Once the decision was made he felt a deep calm.

The only weird moment came when he had to sign papers at the agency's office. It was then the impact of taking legal custody of someone else's children hit him. He said he felt such grief for this family he hadn't yet met. He knew they didn't know where their children were. It was such a sign of our broken society, our terribly flawed system, that two tiny girls would be sent off with a strange man they didn't know. He said the drive home was silent. The older one slept, exhausted. The little one stared at him, silently, the whole way home, her wide eyes terrified and unblinking.

Meanwhile, without knowing any of this, and yet somehow knowing, I was coming out of my skin at the conference. I could not listen; I could not concentrate. I began pacing in front of the sign-out table 30 minutes before it was over. The clerk finally had pity on me and waved me over, then muttered out of the side of her mouth, while surreptitiously pushing the paper across the table at me. I don't know what was on my face to clue her in to my inarticulate desperation but I have always felt grateful for her kindness. I ran in the parking garage. (I am not the type to run anywhere but I felt my feet lift and fly to my car.)

I drove home as fast as I safely could. I pulled into my driveway just as my husband was lifting the older girl out of the car. I pulled up next to him, hands shaking as I fumbled to put it in park. I opened my door. I stood and then froze on the spot. I could not speak. I locked eyes with my husband. He said, his voice choking slightly, "Here is your daughter. Her name is ___."

(I don't publish any of my kids' names here but I need to stop and share that this girl, who is just one month younger than our youngest son, has the exact same name we had chosen for him before he was born. We decided not to learn the gender of our last baby so we had a girl name and a boy name picked out when we went to the hospital. When he was born I felt that girl name fly away from me. Three years and three months later it flew back to us.)

Our older daughter was 3 yrs, 2 months old when she came. Our younger daughter was 20 months old. One month later, after just a few visits, all parental visits were suspended. Four months after coming to our home, in March of 2019, two days before the baby turned 2 years old, all parental rights were terminated. After that things slowed down. We didn't begin the adoption process till October of 2019. Their adoption wasn't finalized until February of 2020. March, 2019 to February, 2020 was the worst year of my life. I still have nightmares about the fears incompetent, petty, and downright stupid social workers brought into our home. They are as much at fault for the traumatized foster children and dearth of foster homes in America today as anyone else.

It took a full year for our family to heal from the stress of being a foster home after the adoption was finalized. I felt myself slowly coming back to normal, and it was so slow, but there was so much to heal from. Eventually, I began sleeping again. Then my vision widened from the panicked narrow-vision perspective of living with an impossible to-do list looming over your head like a guillotine, to allowing me to see and appreciate the simple beauty of everyday life. Finally, last of all, I began regaining my sense of humor. Sometimes I don't think that will ever come all the way back, though. I feel like I know too much now. My heart has been scarred deeply and permanently. Our family is different. Our older sons know things now that they didn't before. It is hard, sometimes, to bear the weight of knowing what our decision to do foster care and adopt did to them.

And, of course, three years after their arrival I now know my daughters in ways I could not for a long time. Now I feel the weight of their grief, too. November 30th is a complicated day. It represents the scariest days of their lives. Only just now is our eldest girl old enough to finally articulate how terrified she was of everything, everyone, every place, all the time for those first weeks.

Today, at the therapist's office, we talked about her grief. We talked about loss and love. She said that sometimes she does not love me and she's afraid to tell me that. We talked about what love is--that most of the time it's a choice more than feeling. I was thinking about how I could convey to her that I love her even when I don't like her. Even when I'm frustrated and angry at the ways she seeks to sabotage our relationship in her incessant need to test whether we mean it when we say she's our daughter or if we, too, might one day when she least expects it suddenly send her away to a new family.

I was thinking of that day 3 years ago. The urgency to get to her before I even knew she existed. The feeling deep in my soul that something was not right.

To be honest...I'm not sure that feeling has ever gone away. I'm three years into the knowledge that something, still, is not right. She's healing. Slowly. But she's not okay. The scars will always be there. For her most of all. For her little sister somewhat less. For me and my husband and our marriage and our family, too. No one has come out unscathed.

But here we are, nonetheless. Determined and steadfast despite it all. Still doing the old bedtime routine and grocery runs and trips to the playground like always even on days when things really, really are not okay.

She asked me what love was and I gave her as many examples as I could think of. I watched her mull it over, crying silent tears. Then, when she was done, she put her wadded up, snotty tissue in my hand and stood up to put on her coat. And I took that white, squishy ball of snot without hesitation, added my own used tissue to the handful, and carried them across the room to the trash can. I wouldn't have even thought about it except that I happened to catch a smirk on the therapist's face. I silently furrowed my brows at him in confusion and in response he nodded at the disgusting tissues I'd taken from my daughter without hesitation. Isn't THAT love, his look seemed to say?

Yes, it is. I, her mother, take her tears--literally and figuratively--without complaint, without hesitation, even. Because this is the choice we made three years ago today. We chose to live out our love. And we keep on choosing, day after day, even with the uncomfortable feeling that things are not right. But in hopes that they will be. Someday.