After a couple of weeks so it’s time for more advice on Tuesday. This week’s advice comes from my lovely friend Erika. I met her in 2009 while I was on Erasmus in Sweden and we immediately became friends. Since I’ve been back to visit twice and they welcomed me in their home with such warmth and kindness that I figured she’d have some great advice in store for you all.

When Karen sent me this request I was lying on the couch with a high fever, watching The Little Mermaid and feeling pretty bad about myself. I had been stuck with this pain in the ass virus for over two weeks and it had more or less put my life on hold. Immediately I started thinking of what kind of advice I should write about. My feverish brain couldn’t go
further back than a few months and I remembered some advice that I got when my whole life suddenly
changed with a single phonecall.

To understand why this advice is so important to me, you need to know some things about me and my loving husband Andreas. We have been a couple since 2007 and married since 2009 (where Karen was one of only 3 guests – Ed. note: and what a party it was!) and we have been trying to get pregnant almost as long as we have been together. We don’t know what’s wrong, but we just can’t conceive. We kept going however and started to plan for adoption. The process is a time and money consuming process and we had actually decided not to save to buy a house but to adopt a child.

One evening, when Andreas was at work I was getting ready to go to bed, when an older cousin of mine wrote to me on facebook asking if we ever considered becoming fosterparents. I was stunned and asked why she suddenly brought it up. Then she just told me about a child that hasn’t been born yet and that I should call her immediatly. I first called Andreas to check that he was in on it, and he started talking about maternity leave and all the practical stuff. He didn’t even say yes, he started making plans on the spot!

Finally I called my cousin, and she explained the situation to me. There is this woman who is now pregnant for the third time and my cousin and her husband has one of the older children in her care. They are now in their fifties and feel that they are to old to care for newborn. My heart stopped beating. I held my breath. My cousin wanted us to voulenteer as fosterparents for this unborn baby.

Ever since that night my life has been all about calling social services and planning for the baby. Even though we are pretty sure to get this child, we have not started the investigation and all we can do is wait.

So on to the advice. It was something my cousin wrote to me when I asked her how she felt about that none of her children is biologically hers, and that she will never be pregnant. She answered very simply:

”It doesn’t matter if the child grows beneath your heart or in your heart, it will always be your child.”

This is something that I will cary with me through life. I have had so many comments about our descion to be foster parents, and not all are supportive. I am a strong beliver that everything has a meaning, but the road to find out what it is can be rocky and bumpy and you may loose track of your path some times. Most of the time however you will find your way. So I have started to relax and we know that perhaps we are not ment to be biological parents, but I think that there are children out there that need us, children who need a family that will care for them and love them.

I can only hope that this blogpost will inspire just one person out there to start thinking about being a foster parent, and to never take life for granted. There are children out there who need you.