Tips for Sustainability in Foster Care and Adoption

We reflect on the move from drowning in caregiver burnout to building a sustainable life in foster care and adoption. We share three pillars—community, recognizing the load you're carrying, and setting the right pace for your family (prioritize rest!) —and a bonus practice for managing our emotional field.

• naming unsustainable patterns at home and work
• defining sustainability independent of perfect conditions
• using awareness and meditation as a starting tool
• my three anchors: intentional fun, beauty, and white space
• finding an honest community to end isolation
• laying down burdens that are not ours to carry
• pacing like an ultra marathon, not a sprint
• practical rest: micro-rests, structural rests, and sleep guardrails
• managing our emotional field with personal reset routines
• reviewing pillars and committing to small, repeatable steps

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Transcript

Honest Check-In And Today’s Focus

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey guys, thanks so much for joining me today on Behind the Curtain. I'm your host, Rebecca Harvin, and this is where we have honest conversations about foster care and adoption. I am very behind on editing interviews right now. So I'm coming to you this week with another unedited podcast. And I have to tell you right now, I was at the dentist this morning and half of my face is numb. So I hope that I don't sound numb on the podcast. But I want to talk to you today about sustainability. And I don't think that I would be exaggerating if I told you that I think about this word in a variety of different ways every single day. We exist to create sustainability in foster care and adoption. I think about it in terms of our team here, like how do we create sustainability for the work that we're doing? I think about it, I think about it all of the time. But I also think about it at home with my family. And the number of times that I have looked at my family and the way that we were operating and said, this is not sustainable, or at our schedule and said, this is not sustainable. I mean, if I if I had a nickel for every time, I would be one rich lady. Um I wasn't always concerned about sustainability. In fact, um it took a little bit of time, it took about a year and a half of fostering before I even started thinking about this concept. And I remember the first time that it showed up in my conversations. I was standing at um my kitchen door, the side door in my kitchen. And it was New Year's Eve 2018. I had spent the month of December experiencing deep caregiver burnout. It's the season that I talk about when I talk about starting Haven. This season of Caregiver Burnout is um is like the impetus for that, right? And this question is actually one of the questions that that started Haven months before Haven was even um a thought in my head. But I'm standing there, I'm watching the kids play, and I thought about what I wanted for the new year, and I had this thought that what if we've been asking the wrong question? We've been trying to figure out how to survive. Brad and I had been drowning, and and we'd been asking, like, how do we survive this? How do we survive our yes? Um, but what if the question we're supposed to be asking is how do we thrive here? So admittedly, that question is a giant leap from drowning, but that's kind of how my brain works. I go from one extreme to the other, and then I work my way back to the middle. And the middle here is sustainability. So let's start just with even defining sustainable. Um, and this is gonna be a horrible confession for somebody who says that they think about sustainability all the time. I've never actually looked up the word in the dictionary because off the cuff, I would just say that it's the ability to keep going. It's the ability to continue down the path that you're going. Um, but that ability to keep going, it can't be dependent on your circumstances. If your circumstances never change, what do you need in order to make this sustainable? Because let's be really honest, in foster care and adoption, there aren't a lot of seasons where all of the circumstances create an environment that feels very sustainable. In fact, most seasons in that I have known feel very chaotic. And if I'm not um careful, can very much feel like I'm drowning. And then some seasons, even if I am careful, still feel like I'm drowning. It takes effort on our part um to create sustainability, but I think more than that, um, or I guess even before we could put in the effort, it takes awareness. When I think about awareness, I think about it like a muscle that I've worked to develop over the years. I started years ago um with meditation. And I know that meditation is not for everybody, some people, your brain just goes and goes, and meditation feels like the most boring thing in the entire world. But for me, it was very helpful to notice the thoughts and to center back on my breath. Um, and to as I did that, as I did that more and more, I was able to bring awareness to other things in my life. Um if you've never tried it, I highly, um, I highly recommend it. So when I was standing there in my kitchen asking this question for the first time, I I was really bringing awareness to the fact that it felt like we were drowning, right? And um, and I had a couple immediate answers for what this would look like for me. Um it looked like for me, it looked like uh adding intentional fun, putting myself in the way of beauty, and creating white space in almost every area of my life. Those were my three immediate and basic building blocks that I know I need in in order to um not just thrive, but but a sustainable life for me will have those three elements in it, right? And they could be the same for you or they could be different, but there are some things that we all need for sustainability. And so I want to talk about three of them. And actually, there's like a fourth little bonus, and it's just a fun little bonus from what I am currently kind of fixated on today. But um, the first thing that we need to make this work that we're doing sustainable is community. I don't care if it is one good friend that you can be honest with or a group of fellow foster adoptive moms that you get coffee with once a month and have a constant tech stream with. I don't care. I don't care the number, I care that you find somebody and that that somebody is somebody that you can be brutally honest with about your experience in this work. That it is somebody who does not judge you, and that you can tell all of the hard things too, and all of the joys too. Isolation is the quickest way to drown. It's devastating. Isolation in this work is devastating. The second thing that we need, and this kind of circles back to awareness, is that we have to recognize when we are carrying burdens that aren't ours to carry. It is not sustainable to live underneath a load that is too heavy for you to carry and to take that load up a mountain. Like you can't, you can't do it. Our job is to show up and be faithful to the work that is in front of us, but it is not to carry the brunt of the load for the people around us. And we have to know the difference. We have to know what it looks like for us to be faithful to the work, to be faithful to the work of parenting, to come alongside our kids and parent them without taking on the burden of being the one that's responsible for their healing, or being the one that's responsible for their behaviors, or being the one that is responsible for the outcome, whatever it might be. That will lead to burnout, and it will lead to burnout every single time. We've got to know what is ours to do, and we have to leave it at that. The third thing that we need to talk about is pace. And I am flying through this, I will I'll do a quick little review at the end, but we have to talk about pace because we're not the energizer bunny. We can't sprint our way through an ultra marathon, and we are running an ultra marathon here. We have to be obsessively aware of our pace and we have to prioritize rest. True, deep, soul-level rest. Now that is not like, I mean, great if that's like a week-long vacation, right? But I'm talking about a life that incorporates rest. And I know, I know without even seeing your face as you listen to this, that you immediately thought of how that's not actually possible. This is the one that that is the hardest. It's one of our core values at Haven is to lead from a place of rest. And when I tell you that of our core values, this is the hardest one for us to do, I mean it. I experience it in my own life. I I know that some of you guys listening, you think that you have to be hyper-vigilant at all times because if you're not, one of your kids will do something disastrous or even potentially dangerous. Or, I mean, worse yet, one of your kids might harm another kid in your home. I know. I know, I know that feeling. My heart, it breaks for you. And for the kid in your home whose heart is hurting so badly that their behaviors are so out of control. My heart breaks for you because you need rest more than most of us. And you feel like you can't get it. Maybe that's you, maybe it's maybe it's not. Maybe you just have like the the the average load of chaos in your home, which is far more than than the neighbor next to you in a in a normal social environment, right? And you still feel like you can't get rest. And I want I want to invite you guys to try to look at your life with fresh eyes and to look at the circumstances around you with fresh eyes. And this is actually true for all of these categories. All of these categories, we're gonna need to look at our lives with fresh eyes and to go, okay, if I'm gonna, if I'm gonna add this, if I'm gonna incorporate this into my life, do I have community yet? Am I carrying burdens that are not mine to carry? Am I over-identifying with with the chaos or the issues in my house, right? Um and so with rest here, let's look at our lives with fresh eyes and say, like, if nothing changes, how can I get rest here? I promise you that there is an answer. And I don't know what it is for you, but I promise you that there is a way. You might have to try a couple different things, but don't stop trying until you find something that works. It could be a deliberate day without scheduling something on the calendar. It could be that in addition to being up to your eyeballs with kids, your phone is also ringing off the hook. That is true of me. My phone rings all day long. Rest for me means turning my phone on, do not disturb. And knowing that for the next two hours, if there's a family emergency, they'll call my husband's phone. There are so many ways to find rest in the middle of chaos. You just have to find one. But when you find it, you have to name it. You have to be like, this is what I am doing for my soul to take a breath of air, right? Another aspect of pacing ourselves is that not every season is for everything. You have to have the ability to say, this isn't a good season for our family to X, Y, or Z. And then you fill in the blank. Obviously, we are always going to take care of needs. I know a ton of us have children with extreme medical needs. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about um how many yeses we're saying and to what. I'm talking about that if you have never have a single evening together as a family because this kid is going to this sporting event, and another kid is going to a different sporting event, and two kids have therapies in one part of town, and one has a different therapy in a different part of town, and and this kid needs to be picked up over here at this time, and this one. I say this with every ounce of love in my heart as a person who has lived this schedule, the exact one that I'm just said. It's not sustainable. You're the pace setter in your home, not the chaos. And you have to have wisdom here. It was hard for me in the fall um to cut out some things that I thought were were necessary. It was really hard. But do you know what I found is that when I added room in our schedule, when I added downtime for my kids at home, we began to thrive as a family. And then this is just, you know, a bonus because I was listening to this Andy Stanley podcast um today where uh they talked about managing our emotional fields. Um, and I had never really actually heard that um sentence before, but they um they talked about managing emotional fields and how our job as a leader, I was saying it's a leadership podcast, and our job as a leader is to manage our emotional fields in order to um create space for for our employees to manage their emotional fields and so on and so forth. And I um, you know, this actually brings us a step past sustainability and a step into true health. Um we are the leaders in our home. And as the leaders in our home, it is our job to manage our emotional fields. So knowing what brings us anxiety, what it looks like when we're experiencing it, we've got to know what happens to us if we don't get enough sleep. Or, or um, if running is something that helps with your mental health, you've got to be aware of what happens to your mood when you miss one run versus three runs. And then you have to set guardrails in your life to protect that, right? So, like I have to have eight hours of sleep. I can get by on seven hours of sleep. At six hours of sleep, I'm gonna feel it the next day. If I get only six hours of sleep for two or three days in a row, everybody around me is paying the price of me not paying attention and managing my sleep well. My family as a whole unit is gonna pay that price. And that's not their, that's not their job. That's not right. It's it's on me to make sure that I get sleep. Um I have this like mantra in my head, and and it's kind of just like, how do you reset yourself? In in my life, it looks like this this mantra that is vigorous exercise hot shower. If I'm having a day where I am spinning out of control, or a day when my heart is my my head is spinning out of control, this mantra gets me right back into my body. And I will, I will drop every I will be like, I have to go to the gym, or I have to go. And it's not a walk for me. It's like I have to go get on the elliptical and I run until I don't have thoughts in my head anymore. And and that works, or I have to lift heavier weights than I normally do that day and and push myself farther than I normally would. And it it works for my body. It's a quick reset. So, okay, let's review. Uh, we started with this thought that that maybe maybe I was asking this the wrong question. I had been asking how to survive the chaos in my home and instead felt like maybe we should be asking how to thrive here. And we will talk about thriving because I genuinely think that thriving is possible. Um, but it's a huge leap between drowning and thriving, and and in between is really just sustainability. What does it look like to live at peace here in this in this world of foster care and adoption? And we need a couple things for our lives to feel sustainable. We have to have community, minimally one person that we can be brutally honest with about our experience. We have to be aware of taking on burdens that are not ours to carry, and we have to be boundried about not only just putting them down, but knowing when we're tempted to pick them up again and saying no to ourselves about picking them up. And we need to be very aware of our pace, prioritizing rest. And just remember that we're running an ultra marathon. And if you need to, guys, go to social media and find accounts of ultra marathoners and and what they do in the in the physical realm apply to the emotional realm of your of your world, right? How they talk about intake and nutrition and rest and and when to push miles and when to not push miles, apply that to your world, apply that to your reality. Even if you never run a mile in your entire lifetime, the concepts there are good. Okay, that's it for today. I am gonna catch up on editing, and we are gonna be back next week with some great conversations that I have waiting in the pipeline and that I am very excited to share with you. Talk to you soon.