Beautiful Foster Parents ❤️

Hello beautiful people, 

When I was five years old I started kindergarten at Bondi Public School. I made a few good friends straight away and one of them was a boy who lived close to the school with his mum and dad. They were beautiful people kind, caring, compassionate, larger than life types of people. My mum was a single parent at the time and worked long hours so she would often need some help looking after me. My mates parents stepped up and were more than happy to let me go to their house after school or stay over on weekends. I loved going there. They were like foster parents to me. They treated me like their daughter and I always felt safe, loved and welcome there. When I started high school, another friend of mine was experiencing family breakdown and my mate and I asked his parents if they could foster our other friend too. Our friend really needed a family to take her in otherwise she was looking at going in to a refuge or foster care with strangers. These beautiful people stepped up and underwent the training and assessment required to become official foster parents and took in our friend as their own. I slowly started spending less and less time with them in my mid to late teens as I began to try and navigate the world around me a little more by myself but they stayed in my life and heart always.  I had formed such a bond with them as a small child that in my mind and heart they represented to me what an example of a loving married couple and good parents should look like. I was told that my mates dad, this beautiful big hearted man who I had known as one of the very few positive male role models in my life was terminally ill when I was in my late teens. I was completely heartbroken. I hadn’t really ever lost anyone I had loved so much before. I was scared and so sad at the same time to say goodbye to him but I did. I’m glad I did and I’m glad he got to meet my daughter before he left us. In my foster mum’s grief she experienced terrible anxiety and depression. She never remarried and talked of her loneliness and love for her departed husband always. These two beautiful people believed they were soul mates. Together they had loved and looked after so many people. My foster mother tried to continue to look after people but she struggled a lot on her own. We lost touch for a while in my twenties but when we reconnected it was like we had never been apart and our bond only grew as we let each other more and more in to our current lives and shared more of our pasts. This woman and her beautiful late husband inspired me to be the caring, compassionate, unconditionally loving parent I am today. They taught me that family is what you make it. They taught me to love unconditionally. They taught me to love myself. They weren’t perfect, they had their flaws but they loved each other and their families, warts and all. This beautiful woman, my foster mum, lived for over twenty years without her soul mate. Until this year, when she too got diagnosed with a terminal illness. It’s been three months nearly to the day that she passed away……. My life was so truly blessed to have her in it and my heart is still broken and now that she’s gone I don’t know if my life will ever be the same. I made sure I told her every second I could of every minute of her last days with us of how much of a positive influence she had on my life. How lucky are children like me and my friends that beautiful parents like these existed 😔❤️

http://www.fosteringnsw.com.au/