Time to Buy Some Muck Boots

This is Chris, and this is my first time posting on our “Pepper-Yowell Adventures” blog. Mostly this has been an avenue for Mandy to post crafty things, food stuff, and misc. updates in our lives. I miss writing (blog posts specifically) and I thought this would be a great medium to talk about stuff. The good stuff. The bad stuff. The ugly stuff. Per most of what I write and share in my life, my goal is to be transparent, open, and honest, keeping in mind the need discretion on certain topics. So #herewego.

I titled this post “Time to Buy Some Muck Boots.” If you aren’t sure what those are, I’m not sure if we can continue being friends. Growing up, muck boots were the definition of hard, messy work. The question was not, “am I going to get dirty?” The question was instead, “how dirty am I going to allow myself to get in order to get the job done?” Would I be willing to get knee deep in mud to help out an animal, or reset a fence post, or fix a barb line?

Muck boots. They’re simple rubber boots that go over your legs to help you get less dirty. It is time for the Pepper-Yowell’s to buy some “muck boots.”

When Mandy and I first got together, like many couples, we had the discussion of how many kids we were going to have. That discussion also included the aspects of adoption. We were both on the same page going into our marriage of having one of our own and adopting the rest. Fast forward almost five years and the season of “starting a family” has become very prevalent. We can’t throw one of our cats right now without hitting a pregnant friend, or recently pregnant friend, or with babies under the age of two. They’re everywhere. Seriously. Everywhere.

I feel that every couple goes through that phase when they are first married, even at the wedding, when distant relatives, friends of the family, and some people that you don’t even know asking when you are going to start popping them out. It is as if there is this unspoken rule that in order to be “officially” married you have to get to work and start bringing in little replicas of you into the world. Who wants that?

Just kidding. I do. But that wasn’t something that we wanted when we first got married. We had enough of a time being married without children that we did not need to introduce a third wheel that would be 100% dependent on us. We were taking two single people, with single people problems, and putting them together under the same house, sharing the same bed, the same dishes, etc. After a while, many people continue to have those “single people” problems and to “fix” that they get the idea that having kids will solve their problems. For the wife, often times that fills their need for love (both giving and receiving) and for men…well…having kids means having sex. I’ll be frank. Many men think that sex is like a wrench for a relationship. The more you work it, the better things are.

Mandy and I were not one of those couples. We made the decision to be married, and be just the two of us, for a while. That probably sounds very selfish to a lot of people. Let me clarify by saying that I have nothing against anyone that had kids within the first few years (or months) of their marriage. I’m just being honest that it was not in our game plan. That brings us to the current day.

Mandy is finally out of school, we’ve gotten a little bit older, and have grown to be a little more mature (except when fry bread is involved, in which case I am basically a five year old). Now seems like a great time to start a family. We expected that. We had discussed for a long time of starting to have kids once Mandy became Dr. Pepper. What we did not expect was for the Heart Gallery to show up at our church and tear open our hearts.

Heart Gallery, if you aren’t familiar, is a bunch of pictures of adoptable kids currently in the foster system. Their story is generally attached to a headshot, and the pictures are set up to show people who these kids are and that there is a need to be filled. These kids need homes. These kids need families. Seeing their photos and videos for a month at church wrecked me, so Mandy and I finally decided that it was time to start getting some more information.

We went to an informational meeting, which was a panel of representatives from the different foster and adoption agencies around Lubbock and the South Plains. They started out talking about the different costs, what is needed in order to foster, the difference between fostering and adopting, all of which was information that I thought I knew but ended up not really knowing anything. Local and state fostering is nothing like the international stories that I had heard before. How naïve I truly was.

The meeting then got…gritty. I learned very quickly that it is not, as Rocky Balboa says, “all sunshine and rainbows.” Many people walk into fostering and adoption with this idea that everything is going to be awesome. There will obviously be a few hiccups here and there, but once they get their kid, everything is going to be perfect. The kid will be happy to finally be in a loving home. They will get everything that they truly need. You may work through a few issues, but nothing you can’t handle.

That’s not really reality. Not saying that it doesn’t happen or that it is not possible, but I learned that fostering and adoption is messy ministry. It is not all sunshine and rainbows.

I was naïve in thinking about the kids that are currently in the foster system. Everyone that I had ever talked about this subject had adopted a child that was either a newborn or less than one year of age. Sometimes it was from another country, such as China or Africa. I heard about the crazy adoption costs that they had to spend in order to get their child, but once they got them, everything seemed to work out like any other parents. Taking on children from other countries seemed so much nobler than kids in our own city. My thought was, “at least the kids in our cities have grown up with freedom.” How naïve I was.

1000. One thousand. That is the number of kids in the Panhandle region of Texas that are currently in need of foster homes. 700 of those are from Lubbock and Amarillo alone. That does not include the kids that are in foster homes, but have not been released for adoption because their cases are still in progress. There are 6000 across the rest of Texas. 6000 kids that are waiting to no longer have to sleep in an emergency shelter. 6000 kids that need a foster home JUST so that the chaos that has become their life can begin to become more “normal.” That is staggering to me. I heard these statistics in our foster babysitting training class this morning. What really amazed me that there were just over a half dozen people in the class. There were maybe two dozen at the church informational meeting a few months ago. I think there were more representatives from the agencies than people looking to get information.

How is this possible?

It’s messy ministry. Why would people want to open up their homes, their lives, and subject their family (especially their biological children) to messed up and broken kids? To some, it seems irresponsible to bring a drug addicted baby into their home. It seems irresponsible to bring a sexually abused boy into a place with other kids. They will abuse other kids and those kids will abuse more kids, and the cycle will never end. That’s what we’ve all been told. It’s messy. If it wasn’t, there wouldn’t be a need to take these kids out of their homes, up-turn their lives, and try to re-locate them into something better.

In the state of Texas there is a category known as “special needs.” This is not simply the traditional mental or physical needs that most of us think of. Special needs in Texas are in reference to the “undesirable” kids. These are the kids that no one really wants. In fact, the state of Texas has an incentive program just to get people to take care of these kids. You may think to yourself, “wow, how messed up are these kids?” Here are the qualifications to meet for special needs:

Minority over the age of two.

Any sibling group.

Any child with physical or mental disabilities requiring additional care.

Caucasian over the age of six.

That is a lot of kids, about 50% of the ones in the foster system. People don’t want these kids. That rips my heart wide open.

So…where am I going with this whole post? Where am I going with contributing to this blog in general? My goal is to provide Mandy and myself with an outlet to the world of what this process really looks like. Right now, we plan to adopt in the next few years, most likely a sibling group. But through starting this process, we’ve been hearing the same things over and over and over again. Foster parents need support. This is hard, difficult, exhausting, and often frustrating work.

Our avenue to start this adventure is with foster babysitting. This will probably be another post all in itself, but not just anyone can watch your kids when they are in foster care. They have to be trained, in babysitting, CPR and first aid. They have to pass background checks and get fingerprinted, and a few other things which cost money. You can’t just hire the teenage girl down the street. You can’t even ask your parents if they aren’t certified. That creates a lot of isolation and loneliness for foster parents.

Right now, that is one of the greatest needs. That is where we are going to start.

That’s it for now (I can go on for ages, but it’s time to click the publish button). I look forward to creating a dialogue with everyone that reads this blog and walking this journey with Mandy.

It’s time to buy some muck boots.