All these years later, Brittany Flowers doesn’t remember the boy’s name.
She knows that he was 2, and that he stayed with her, her mom and her sister in Raleigh, N.C., for just a couple of days.
And, in retrospect, she recognizes that weekend — referred to in foster care as a “respite” — changed her life.
“I remember we took him to my mom’s best friend’s wedding,” Flowers said. “And I cried and cried and cried when he left because I just knew I had a little brother.”
Over the balance of Flowers’ childhood and adolescence, there would be more tearful goodbyes, but also bonds that persist through the decades.
She stays in touch with most of her 40-plus foster siblings, and, as family systems coordinator for the nonprofit UMFS Fredericksburg, she’s chosen to devote her professional life to helping other families navigate their own journeys as foster parents.
“I think just hearing all my foster siblings’ stories, like, you know, there are horror stories and there are also like really great stories,” she said of how her experience as a bio foster sibling helped shape her vocation. “And my mom thankfully is a part of a lot of great stories.”
Press the Issue
May is Foster Care Awareness Month, a time to call attention to the needs of 5,500 children currently in Virginia’s foster care system. For information on becoming a foster parent, visit the UMFS wesbite.
Flowers remembers her mother, Mary Flowers-Graves, as the “fun mom,” the sort of parent whose house was always stocked with snacks and whose presence served as a maternal magnet for neighborhood kids.
“She’s always been that parent,” Flowers said. “So she’s always loved kids.”
Flowers-Graves frames her initial motivation for fostering slightly differently.
“Because my kids were rotten to the core and they needed to give somebody else something,” Flowers-Graves said with a laugh.
Flowers and her biological sister Breeana shared everything with a changing cast of foster siblings, from personal belongings to legroom in the back rows of her mother’s Chevy Suburban, the vehicle of choice for outings to Chuck E. Cheese or the beach.
“We got eight seats, so it worked,” Flowers-Graves said.
Now married and living in Virginia, Flowers-Graves is still a foster parent. And she, too, stays in touch with her former wards — from the boy who ended up attending college with Brittany Flowers at Old Dominion University to another male who struggled after turning 18 and wound up incarcerated.
“I’m glad I was able to be there for them,” she said. “And I’m glad I’m still able to be there for them.”
As family systems coordinator with UMFS, Flowers approves or disapproves prospective foster families. She holds marketing events and information sessions, and conducts home visits, ascertaining everything from parents’ thoughts on discipline to the location of a working fire extinguisher.
“If we’re going to put a child in your home — I need to know — I need to know where they’re going,” she said.
UMFS, Flowers explained, is unique in its approach to fostering because it trains host families to not only acknowledge a child’s past traumas but to meet them “head on” in an attempt to start the healing process. That model is sometimes referred to as therapeutic fostering.
The organization offers three types of placements for fostering. There’s short-term (a few months to a year), long-term (no goal of returning to biological family members) and kinship, which often leads to adoption. That was the case for brothers Nazeer and Antonio, who Flowers-Graves chose to adopt back in North Carolina.
As she sobbed that day following the departure of that very first foster sibling, Flowers recalled how her mother sat her down and explained that they were just a stop on a child’s journey, their home a safe waypoint.
“You could just see like how foster care or how our home healed them,” she said. “Like they didn’t leave the same way that they came.”
And neither did she.
