Hannah’s Story of Kinship
My husband + I began our parenting journey in late 2020. It was a journey that came quickly and at the same time, one we expected could come at any moment for years. My husband's little sister moved in with us. At the time, I was a foster care social worker and he was a graduate student at Duke University. She had my heart from the day I met her years previous. This little girl was fire, spunk, joy, always glued to my hip, a cuddle bug, determined child. She was in her late teens, we were in our early 20’s, the age gap to all 3 of us meant nothing. We were a family just as we were, our unit, unbreakable. She was the first baby of 9 to fill space in my heart in indescribable ways.
Our situation is what we call informal kinship care. We took her in, parented her, cared for her, etc. without DSS taking custody of her. Pro’s + Con’s absolutely exist for keeping the situation informal, but it worked for us and for her and that’s all that mattered to us.
In our time caring for her, I was hit with the reality of just how important kinship care is. She knew us, loved us deeply and had incredibly strong bonds with us prior to moving in with us. This was something she had thought over for a while. We were not strangers, she was not picked up by a social worker, instead she was picked up by us, her safety net.
Both as a social worker and a foster parent, I have witnessed numerous times the fear in a child’s eyes as they are removed and placed with strangers. I have watched teenagers not know how to move through a house comfortably, anxious about their every move. I have watched babies search rooms for their family, never finding them. I have watched littles lie awake in bed at night sobbing, filled with questions that I never have solid answers to.
The gift of kinship care is the removal of so much fear, anxiety, and wondering for so many children. It doesn’t mean these characteristics just go away, but it does mean they are often decreased significantly. It’s the shift from the anxious teen walking through an unknown house to an at peace teen rummaging through the fridge on move in day, because she’s been in the fridge so many times before. It’s a loss of fear of an unknown future, shifted to a peace of whatever the future will be “I’m with my people” and I love my life. There is so much brokenness in kinship care, as there is in every category of foster care, and I will not speak for the masses that this is everyone’s story, but this is our story and we would do it all over and over and over again.
For us, for our first baby girl who stole our hearts in a way we had never experienced before, this is our story and we would not change a thing unless it was a change that made her story whole. She’s since been with us multiple times and is now an adult herself. I once was afraid I could never love another like I did her, my love for her is so indescribable. I was quickly shown just how a mothers heart shifts to continuously love each child so deeply, however she will always hold that special honor of our first baby in my heart. She’s the one who had grace for us when we were learning to parent in our young 20’s. This is the slightest glimpse into the beauty and brokenness of kinship care.
