Today is my little guy’s first day at daycare. He’s been with me almost 2 months now and we just celebrated his first birthday. “How are you feeling?” a friend asked shortly after I dropped him off. The words that immediately popped into my head where relieved, free, thankful. And then the “shoulds” started creeping in. What should a mom feel on the first day of daycare? Are my feelings normal? Can I say that out loud? 

Normalcy is something drilled into foster parents. It’s our responsibility to create the most normal life for our children as possible. It’s important to remember that these kids are in fact just normal kids. It feels like there is nothing normal about being a foster parent though. You have to record every bump and bruise and every single medication. You submit progress reports on all your outings each month and how they’ve impacted your child. The paperwork feels endless. You rearrange your schedule for bio family visits and extra appointments. You constantly have people in and out of your home – caseworkers, attorneys, planned and unplanned home inspections. You ask all your friends and family for background checks so they can spend time in your home. You battle for time off of work and benefits for your child like any other “normal” family would receive. And that’s just heavy logistics. The emotional component brings another level of normalcy challenges. I promise to love my kids as if they were my own. But do I? Is that possible? How do I care for someone as if I’d be completely devastated without them even though I know someday I will have to, in fact, live without them? Yeah, it’s complicated, right? And if you’re wondering what it might be like to convince the people in your life that this is a good choice for you, especially those who view a “traditional family” as normal, well that’s a topic for a whole other post. 

Another foster parent recently worded it so well as a group of us talked about the complexity of normalcy. “You can’t expect things to be normal, but you have to do normal things.” This is the perfect framing for the situation. You take them on family trips and enroll them in activities. You go through the motions of doing anything that any normal parent would. And the more you go through all those normal motions on top of the not-so-normal requirements, your life may not look normal to anyone else but if feels normal to you. And that’s really what matters, right? 

And the emotions? I can’t speak for other foster parents but I can say that for me I’ve learned that I can love a child like my own even though they won’t be with me forever. And I am devastated every day that they are not with me. The moments of devastation eb and flow. Sometimes it’s just a brief moment of remembering and longing. Somedays it feels impossible. But here’s the thing. It’s normal to be sad. It’s part of what makes us human. I feel fortunate that I get to do something that takes me to the depths of my humanness. I’ve written before about how I had never felt so connected to my purpose until I became a foster parent. And I continue to feel that way. I believe we’re all called to do things that are equally hard and fulfilling. Athletes, entrepreneurs, scholars, philanthropists – there are so many paths that lead to hard work and extreme payoff. In so many cases, risk and reward don’t just balance each other, they feed one another. They are not opposite outcomes or a means to an end, but instead equally foundational throughout the entire experience.  This duality is a very normal human experience. 

So this morning I did something normal. I dropped my kid off at daycare. It’s not a first for me or for him. My other kids have gone to daycare and he was in daycare before he came to me. But it’s a first for us. This is the first time we’ve been here together. We’ve spent spent the vast majority of our time together for the past 55 days. It is more time than I originally planned to stay home with him.  I’m grateful for the time I’ve had for us to get to know each other. I’m also ready to get back to work. To have both the time and mental space to think about other things, to use my brain in different ways. Those are normal feelings. Are they what every mom feels on the first day of daycare? Honestly, I don’t know. But this is the third “first day of daycare” for me with the three kids that have lived with me and called me mama for a while. And this is my normal.