Dear Foster Mama,
You don’t know me, and I don’t know you, but both of us have been in love with the same boy for the last seven months.
The boy who you’ve raised since he was 4 months old.
The boy who tomorrow will become our son.
The reports we’ve received and the updates we’ve read just ooze with the details of how well you have cared for this boy who was abandoned at birth in a hospital garden.
About how you have loved on him and doted on him and nursed him to health through multiple doctors’ exams and surgeries.
About how you hold him and snuggle him and tell him frequently just how precious he is.
And although we are counting down the minutes until we can hold that sweet boy in our arms, today, sweet mama, we want to acknowledge YOU.
The woman who loved him first.
We can tell just by the photos and videos we have received that you have LOVED this boy with all your heart. That you have TREASURED HIM and CHERISHED HIM and given him something so special that he will take it with him forever.
True love.
Your love for him is so evident that one of the first things we did when we began the process to adopt him is ask how you felt about an American family adopting him … and if there was anything that was keeping you from adopting him yourself.
Your love for him was so great that our family had decided that if money or anything else we could change was the only thing standing between you and this boy you have cared for so well that, rather than adopt him, we would instead provide the means for you to do so.
And then we received your Bridge of Love response to our update request, where you chose not to answer our specific questions, but instead responded that you would be very happy for an American family to adopt him … and with the telling words “We just want him to have his own true family.”
And we understood.
Because we, too, have been in your shoes. Although we haven’t fostered long-term, we’ve had the privilege of short-term hosting two beautiful orphans in our home — children we loved passionately, but children we couldn’t make our own.
We couldn’t adopt either of our host children because they fell out of the birth order of our family, and our homestudy was only approved for an inside-birth-order adoption.
But we loved them madly. We advocated for them fiercely. And when it was time to let them go, we grieved over the huge holes they left in our hearts.
Saying goodbye to the children who lived inside our home for that short period of time was one of the most emotionally grueling experiences of our family’s lives. Our hearts ached for their laughter and their smiles and their antics and their JOY.
As we know your heart will ache for HIS.
These children — they are such blessings! They bring so much JOY! And they give FAR MORE TO US than we could ever in five lifetimes give back to THEM.
The only thing that comforted us as we released these two superheroes whose big love literally changed the course of our lives was the fact that we knew that they would soon move into the arms of two amazing mamas who would love on them and cherish them and treasure them and adore them … and that they would never spend another day in their lives without knowing the value of unconditional LOVE.
We’re not that amazing. We’re not that good. We are imperfect people and imperfect parents and we ask for our children’s forgiveness in the face of our parenting mistakes on nearly a daily basis.
But sweet foster mama, we can promise you that we will LOVE YOUR BOY MADLY. That we will protect him FIERCELY. That we will serve and sacrifice and give everything we have to ensure that this boy YOU love knows for the rest of his life that HE IS ABSOLUTELY, POSITIVELY, WITHOUT A SHADOW OF A DOUBT LOVED.
We’ll hold him.
We’ll speak LIFE over him.
We’ll PRAY over him.
We’ll invest our whole lives IN him.
We’ll love him with every fiber of our being, and when the days are hard and our love is imperfect and short, we will draw on the never-ending love of God to pour HIS perfect love all over your perfect boy until he feels so drenched in unconditional love that it oozes from every pore.
We know it won’t be easy.
We know it won’t be a rainbows-and-puppy-dog kind of trail.
Leaving you will be the hardest thing this boy we both love will probably ever do.
But we are HERE. We are committed. We are all up and all in and 5,000 percent dedicated to committing the rest of our lives to real and authentic and through thick-and-thin selfless love.
Thank you for showing us by example just how to do that.
With our greatest admiration, affection and thanks,
Wu Li Long’s Forever Family