There's always a moment of hesitation when someone asks us to share our family's story. So let me start with a brief introduction—think of this as talking among friends. I know Fede e Luce through stories and people and *Ombre e Luci*..., but most of you don't know us. We're a family living in Piacenza, made up of nine or ten people "at the moment." We're not a group home or a community or anything formal—just an ordinary family with the rhythms and needs of any other family: two working parents, children in school, sports, parish life, and so on.
So why are we being asked to tell you about ourselves? Probably because of the eight children and teenagers we have at home—plus two older ones now living on their own—only five are our biological children. Only five in the traditional sense of the word. The other four teenagers and one little girl have lived or do live with us through foster care, at different times and in different ways. And so come the questions, all kinds of them: Why do it? What do your own children think? How do you manage to let them go? Is it hard to organize? Do social services help? What's the relationship like with their parents? Does faith come into it?
Let me take these one at a time. For both of us, this goes back a long way. First of all, we were both deeply loved children. How could we accept that someone else might be denied the experience of being loved "like a child"? How could we accept that some child or teenager might grow up in anything less than a family? Then came experiences beyond our own family: parish life, a passion for children, teaching catechism, volunteering. A desire, simply, to shape our lives after Jesus. Then we met each other and brought together all these experiences and plans. But more than anything, we asked ourselves: why should these things seem possible only when you're young?
So even during our engagement, we began imagining a family that would be a place of welcome. We thought this would be the right way to honor all our earlier experiences—to transform them into something we could live out as a family, not just as two individuals. We also wanted to put to use not only our time and abilities, but our material things too: our home and everything that God's providence and our parents' hard work had entrusted to us over time.
What happened in practice? We married about fifteen years ago. After a year, our first daughter and our first teenager—he was sixteen then—moved in with us. Other children and teenagers came after. Some moved toward independence; some went back to their families. Now our house holds our own children (ages four to thirteen), a nine-year-old girl with autism (with us since she was four), an eighteen-year-old young man, and at certain times a nineteen-year-old young woman who lived with us before and has come back.
If I had to sum this up, I'd say a few things:
First: for me, a foster family—or any welcoming family—doesn't stop being one once the formal placement ends. It stays one. It develops a more flexible way of relating to others. It becomes a family that activates small acts of solidarity all around it—neighbors, friends of the children—the kind of mutual support that should be everywhere and could often prevent the need for more serious interventions. Over these years, we've supported three mothers in crisis for very different reasons, each in her own way for her own time. I like to think we may have helped keep their children from needing to be placed in foster care. And having a child or teenager not biologically your own living in your house forces you to reconsider your relationships with your own children too. I'd say that the moment you take on a parenting role with a foster child, you learn to be less enmeshed—in the best sense of the word—with your own children. You train yourself to see your own children as entrusted to you, but not as possessions.
The children of a foster family learn solidarity. That sounds obvious, but for us it isn't. Children need to be respected in their hesitations and fears—even their small selfishness. But at the same time, they need to be challenged, pushed forward, encouraged toward values and ways of living that their friends and classmates admire rarely and share almost never. When we decided to welcome Lucia five years ago—a choice we all understood and agreed to, within the limits of what our ages allowed—we didn't know what lay ahead. As time passed and the family changed and both she and the other children grew, we hit periods of real difficulty. The last two years have been spent trying to find balance between her needs and everyone else's, trying to understand what our two oldest children's growing restlessness really meant.
Finally, foster care has brought us tremendous satisfaction in many ways. We love seeing our teenagers' futures take shape—their plans for school and work, the healing of relationships with their own parents. Our oldest is twenty-nine now and married, wanting to build a family that welcomes others too. What more could we ask for, knowing that we've never had to end a relationship with any of our young people? We've simply stepped back sometimes when their own families became able to reclaim their full role.
- Barbara Vaciago Colpani, 1999