I N T H E L O O P / E S S AY
Forever Mom KSAT digital journalist Erica Hernandez shares the joys and sometimes-tough realities on the road from fostering to adopting her 3-year-old daughter AS TOLD TO KATHLEEN PETTY
e always knew we wanted to foster to adopt. My husband was adopted by his stepfather, so it was something he had always wanted to do to give back. Working in the news, I had heard these stories and cases and just knew there were so many kids out there who needed a home and someone to love them. Our plan when we got married three years ago was to have one child and adopt one. I was about to be 33 at the time and, since we knew we wanted to have a family, we started trying right away. After two years, we were diagnosed with unexplained infertility. We struggled with whether to pursue fertility treatments because, technically, they hadn’t found anything “wrong” with us. We decided to go to an intro class for foster care and as soon as we finished, we knew that’s what we wanted to do. There are several classes you have to take to become certified. Plus, there’s a health inspection and an inspection by the fire marshal. There are so many people in
W
18
SANANTONIOMAG.COM
10-21_ITL_May21.indd 18
MAY 2021
and out of your house—and that doesn’t stop when you have a child. Then, you have the caseworker from CPS and someone from the agency coming by, and sometimes there’s a CASA volunteer. If you don’t like people in your home or you’re not willing to give up some of your privacy, this is not for you. We were licensed to become a foster home in October 2019, and our daughter was placed with us in December. We got a call about her the day before. Our agency said that Child Protective Services had a 3-year-old girl they were looking to place. That was exactly in the age range we were looking for, so we said OK and CPS dropped her off the next afternoon. We were told her case had been pretty publicized when she was first removed from home in 2018. She was one of four sisters (there are two more now) and it was a starvation case, but we did not know the full story right away. It took months for us to understand the whole scope of her case. She’d been in foster care for about a year already before PHOTO BY VINCENT GONZALEZ
4/1/21 12:20 PM
