Most of
us have felt the pain of loving someone who has refused to love us back even if
this was just the transient and loosely rooted puppy love of elementary school
soap operas. There are, however, deeper loves that can leave profound scars.
When my friend and his wife followed the calling of God to
begin providing foster care for infants, the fear of unrequited love was the
farthest thing from their minds. Infants are not emotionally dangerous. They
love you if you hold them, feed them, and de-poopify them. But my friends’
emotionally sterile plans were soon plopped into the diaper-pale of good
intentions as God placed a very non-infant older girl into their home.
Things
quickly got messy. Yeah … there were the typical messes that, like rotting
fruit off a tree past its season, drop from every orifice and appendage of
small children. Cheerios once again found their way onto the car floorboards
and into previously unknown upholstery crevices. However, the messiness that
really mattered was the conflicting emotions and deep attachments that rapidly began
to grow in their hearts toward this child.
Our love for another person is no guarantee
that they will love us back, and in the messy and dysfunctional dynamics of
most foster care relationships the children have an understandable reluctance to
bond with their care providers. This is because foster children often feel that
to love their foster parents is to betray their birth mom and dad.
This dynamic played itself out
with agonizing textbook predictability between my friend and his
