08/01/2026
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One of the hardest questions foster parents are asked is, “How do you keep doing it?” Sometimes it is asked with admiration. Sometimes with confusion. Sometimes after someone has watched another child leave our home and cannot understand why anyone would willingly sign up for that kind of heartbreak.
The honest answer is that there are days when we wonder too.
Because losing a child you have loved is painful. Not the kind of pain you simply move on from, but the kind that catches you unexpectedly when you walk past an empty bedroom, find one of their socks beneath the couch, or hear a song that takes you straight back to rocking them to sleep. It is the kind of grief that lives quietly inside ordinary moments, because the rest of the world keeps moving even when part of your heart feels frozen in the day they left.
There are times when foster parents are tempted to love carefully. To hold back just enough that goodbye might not destroy us. To remind ourselves that the child is not ours, that the placement is temporary, and that we should not become too attached.
But children do not need temporary love just because their placement may be temporary.
They do not need us to keep one foot outside the relationship so that we can escape with less pain later. They need to be held without hesitation, celebrated without reservation, and loved without constantly feeling the fear behind it. They need someone willing to say, even without words, “You are worth whatever this may eventually cost me.”
I have never looked back and wished I had loved them less.
Not once.
I have never wished I had held them a little less tightly so it would hurt less later. I have never wished I had skipped the extra bedtime story, the long rocking-chair cuddles, the silly dances in the kitchen, or the whispered prayers over a sleeping child. I have never regretted showing up for the moments that now make their absence ache so deeply.
Love is never the part we regret.
If anything, we are left wondering whether they truly knew how deeply they were loved and wishing we had somehow found even more of it to give.
Children who enter foster care have already experienced enough loss. Many of them already know what it feels like for adults to disappear, promises to be broken, and the world beneath them to change without warning. They do not need adults who protect themselves from heartbreak. They need adults who are willing to risk having their own hearts broken so that a child can experience, even for a little while, what it feels like to be loved without conditions, caution, or an expiration date.
That love may last a lifetime, or it may last only a season, but I do not believe its value is measured by its length. A short season of safe love is not meaningless simply because it ended. Sometimes it becomes the first evidence a child has ever received that gentleness exists, that adults can be trusted, and that they were always worthy of being protected.
Maybe years from now they will not remember every detail of our home. Maybe they will not remember what we cooked for dinner, the pajamas they wore, or what toys were waiting beneath the Christmas tree. They may not remember the exact words of the prayers we whispered over them at night.
But perhaps their heart will remember.
Perhaps somewhere deep inside, their body will remember what it felt like to be comforted instead of ignored, to be celebrated simply because they existed, to hear “I love you,” and to fall asleep knowing someone would still be there in the morning.
Perhaps that is what love leaves behind.
Not memories alone, but a quiet truth planted within them: I mattered. I was worth showing up for. I deserved to be loved all along.
So yes, our hearts break. Sometimes in ways we never fully recover from. There are children we will carry with us for the rest of our lives, children whose names still catch in our throats and whose absence remains in rooms they no longer occupy.
But if I had to choose between protecting my heart or giving a child one more safe place to land, I would choose the broken heart every single time.
Because the pain of losing them will never convince me that loving them was a mistake.
And I cannot imagine standing before God one day and wishing I had loved His children less.
