Two Black Bags

Yesterday I spent the day packing. Packing two little lives into two black bags. The bags now sit next to my front door, staring me in the face. Sadness sweeps over me when I look at them. Two bags represent two lives. Two very young lives. Lives that have been shuffled from one home to another. No stability. No consistency.

Can you imagine fitting all your possessions in a bag? I look around my house and my view is changed. But this is reality for children in foster care. They move from place to place with a big black trash bag of their items. Their only possessions. This is their life. Their norm.

In their bag is clothing, toys, shoes, hair bows, socks, books, and blankets. They are 15 months old. They have moved four times--their birth mom's home, a previous foster home, my home, and now they are moving to their family member's home. Each time they take a big black bag. Strike that. When they came to my home they came with nothing. They only had the clothes on their backs. At least now they have something, right?

Just another pain in my heart that comes with fostering. When I go to work each day, I see the big bags sitting in our office hallway. I work for a foster care agency so I see kids move from place to place on a daily basis. I see the bags following kids. I see the kids without bags, longing for just one bag to call theirs. And I think of all the bags my house would fill. It's sickening.

While I continue to pack their things this weekend, it will be difficult. A little difficult because I have two little bodies crawling through the neatly folded piles of clothes. And climbing into my lap when I sit down to re-fold them. But more difficult because I have to put them into a bag. A bag that should not resemble the life these babies have lived. They're too young to remember me as they grow older. I just hope they're too young to remember these two big black bags.