One Final Gift

When the kids moved in with us, they came with the stereotypical foster kids’ black trash bags filled with crappy, stained, too-small clothes, and a lot of broken toys.

We replaced almost everything. It was our pleasure to do so.

While they lived here, I never left the house without returning home with something for them. Often I didn’t make a big deal of it, tucking whatever I’d bought into their toy box, drawers, or bookshelves (so many books!) for them to run across later. I didn’t want to try and buy their love and certainly didn’t want them to become spoiled, but I really wanted them to have nice things.

Now, after all these months have passed, I am finishing up what I think will be one of our most important gifts to them.

Life books.

Life books are generally scrapbooks that tell the kids’ life story as best as it can be pieced together.

Their previous foster mom agreed in her ISP to maintain life books for them each of the 18 months they lived with her.

The kids came to us with nothing.

In fact, after the kids moved in with us, I asked her to please make me copies of the photos she’d taken of the kids so I could start the life books myself. She stated that she didn’t know how to do that, though I was welcomed to take the memory card from her camera and have them made myself.

She DID, however, know how to upload all those photos to her Facebook page, which is strictly against foster parent rules, by the way.

She simply didn’t want to pay the few dollars that it would have cost to have the photos printed.

Shameful.

As it was, I simply swiped the pictures off of her FB page and printed them out myself. There were probably only 20 photos each of the kids, but they were certainly better than nothing.

I then worked with birth grandmother who provided me stacks of photos from the kids’ earliest years.

I researched online and found photos of the kids’ sisters whom they have never met.

I found additional photos of the kids that birth father had put online from the one time he visited with them while they were in foster care.

I added photos of the hospitals where they were born, along with the dates, times, doctors’ names, their heights and weights at birth, and even what the weather was on those days. (It’s amazing what you can find online when you start poking around.)

I included copies of honors certificates and report cards and pictures they'd colored, along with letters written to them by the people they were closest to when they lived here.

Then of course, I added the ridiculous number of photos that we’d taken of them during their time with us, describing each one.

All told, each life book is well over one hundred fifty pages. Our caseworker will be picking them up in a couple of weeks and delivering them to the new foster family next month when she visits their home.

Given that all contact to/with the past has been cut off for the kids, I am quite certain that they will not see these books for years to come. I am hopeful, though, that foster mom will keep them for the kids to have when they are older (or send them with the kids if they are moved).

When the kids do see them, I hope they will understand that although some really awful things happened to them during their childhoods, they were also cared for by a lot of people who loved them dearly.

That’s what I hope, though I'll never know for sure.