Abby emphasizes the need for realistic expectations and the importance of finding joy in small victories while navigating the foster care system. She shares personal experiences and insights on fostering, emphasizing the importance of balancing personal life with parenting, the role of play in family dynamics, coping with grief and emotions associated with fostering, navigating the foster care system, and the key messages from her book ‘Simply Available’. She highlights the need for foster children to feel loved and supported, and the importance of self-care for foster parents.
Learn more about Fostering Faithfully and checkout their resources.
Checkout Abby’s guest blog for AKB on trauma and parenting.
TRANSCRIPT:
Courtney (00:01.314)
Hello and welcome to the Foster Friendly Podcast. I’m your host Courtney Williams, joined with my co-host Travis. And I’m excited for this conversation today because I don’t know Abby too well, but the little I’ve gotten to know her, our lives are very, very similar, like very parallel in a lot of different ways. So Abby is our guest today and she’s a veteran foster parent, a public school teacher, and the founder and executive director of Fostering Faithfully. She and her husband Jonas have been raising children, two biological.
Travis (00:08.686)
I don’t know Abby too well, but the little I’ve gotten to know her, our lives are very similar. So Abby is our guest today. She’s a veteran foster care, public school teacher, and the founder and executive director of Fostering Beacon. She has been raising children, two biological, two adopted foster care, and four seven four season.
Courtney (00:30.286)
two adopted from foster care and 47 for a season for the past 18 years on a cattle farm in South Carolina. Thanks for joining us, Abby.
Abby Crooks (00:41.236)
Thank you. Yes, I’ve enjoyed getting to know you guys and I’m just excited to share a little bit about our journey today.
Travis (00:47.918)
Cool.
Courtney (00:48.55)
And I’ve got to know about this kettle farm because my husband and I, we had a dream forever of owning a farm. So we bought this farm, we had all the animals, we had it for about 18 months and then we got called to a different location. And so we were really bummed and we didn’t pick it back up when we moved. So I just want to hear about that for you guys. Was that a lifelong dream or how did that come about?
Travis (00:51.438)
Yes.
and we’ll have a coffee.
Travis (01:06.84)
you guys.
Abby Crooks (01:09.93)
Oh, absolutely. So my husband and I grew up here in this community. And when I went off to the University of Missouri to come alongside some foster and adoptive families there, he went to Clinton University, then to basic training. And that was his dream to come home and buy this property. And he did. And funny story, my junior year, I came home and it’s near my parents’ home. So my parents live up the hill from this farm. And my dad had just gotten his first Harley and I got
road down here, Jonas was on his horse on this property. So I got off the back of my dad’s Harley, I got onto Jonas’s horse. He took me for a ride on this property and I guess the rest is history. moved away for a while, we came back and we’ve raised our kids here. The farm is an amazing place to foster parents. It’s been good for my kids. It’s been good for our foster children. So many of them have no idea where chicken nuggets come from, how hamburgers happen.
Travis (01:48.398)
Ha ha. Ha ha. Ha ha.
Travis (02:05.056)
No. All right.
Abby Crooks (02:07.37)
And so we’ve broken that news to them.
Courtney (02:11.042)
Yeah. Do you name your animals?
Travis (02:13.179)
They know now!
Abby Crooks (02:14.692)
I don’t know. We do have animals. We have a horse. we name them. Yes, we even name the beef we eat. Isn’t that terrible?
Courtney (02:18.274)
Do you name them? okay. Yeah, I would do too. We’ll be sitting on a, like, over eating Linus tonight, or.
Travis (02:23.842)
Nice.
man, gallows humor there.
Courtney (02:31.342)
I love it.
Travis (02:34.126)
There’s a great line that says farming looks nice from a car window and having grown up on a farm too, it smells better from a car window too, but we can all say that. Yep.
Abby Crooks (02:41.874)
Yes, you’re right. But they’re so much fun here. mean, aren’t even our newest foster daughter, I mean, she’s had blast riding the horse, jumping on all the hay bales we had stacked up for winter. So there’s just nothing like that.
Travis (02:49.613)
Yeah.
It’s magical, yep, for sure, cool. Well, Abby, tell us more about your entry point and journey into foster care.
Courtney (02:53.898)
It is very special.
Abby Crooks (03:03.338)
The journey started again when I was 17, which not many people I know can say. I just really felt like I was called to this at a young age, watching those people at my church in Columbia, Missouri, foster and adopt children. And so my husband, now my husband, came out to the University of Missouri at this like 17 hour drive. And I said, listen, if you’re not up for foster and adoption, like quit wasting your time because I’m not your girl. And so it’s funny that I only talked about adopting.
Travis (03:29.39)
haha
Abby Crooks (03:32.84)
I guess you can’t paint the full picture of what you’re signing up for, maybe. So we ended up, as soon as we got married, we had our two biological boys. And then when our son Caleb was 15 months old, we went to training to become first foster to adopt parents. And so we did that and we got our daughter. had, of course, like most people, we wanted a younger child.
But they called us with a two and a half year old after waiting for two years. So I definitely want people to hear that part of the story. I felt so called to this and then waited for two years for a call. And so we adopted her and we did the foster to adopt plan. And so we were close with her foster family. And so after about a year and a half, we said, you know, we can do that for another family. could foster. And so we became foster parents. our first placement, one of our first placements was
who would become our daughter Carly came and she was four pounds and I was teaching at an online school so I was able to take a really young baby. It was supposed to be for six weeks and twelve. And so we ended up giving her to relatives at the nine month mark and I felt the grief of that may kill me because we got her ten days old and gave her to family in North Carolina and through a turn of crazy events
They called us back and said, she’s coming back into foster care. You know, do you want her to come home? And I was like, my gosh, yes, we’re dying down here. So she came back to live with us forever. And we did get to know her mother and have a relationship with her mother for a while there and grandmother. And then finally, we have a son who we never adopted named DeAndre. He aged out of our group home here. He’s like a son to us. And I have to tell you, he wants to be a teacher.
Courtney (05:03.15)
you
Abby Crooks (05:24.338)
And all four of us that co-parent DeAndre are in education, so we couldn’t be prouder of him. He’s working on his education degree, and we just can’t imagine our lives without all these children in it.
Travis (05:24.45)
No.
Travis (05:29.72)
I don’t know.
Courtney (05:36.334)
you
Travis (05:37.452)
Wow, that’s incredible. We’ll record it.
Courtney (05:40.78)
And you’re so fostering today, right? Yeah.
Abby Crooks (05:42.826)
Yes, we took a new placement about two weeks ago now. So she’s gonna have her first family visit today and will be dropped off about the time I’m done with this. I’ll take a few deep breaths and we’ll see. Visit days are hard. So we’ll see how this afternoon and evening goes for her.
Travis (06:01.294)
Well, I was laughing because also when you’re telling that because Courtney does have like she is like a mirror image of you in some ways of her own story with the line that Santa were fostering right on first date or
Courtney (06:13.804)
Yes, first day.
Abby Crooks (06:16.554)
Hey, ladies, no!
Courtney (06:18.496)
Yeah, I agree. I told my husband I was going to have 27 kids and I was totally just joking, but I was just curious to see like what his reaction would be and he passed the test.
Travis (06:18.922)
They need to know.
Abby Crooks (06:28.69)
That’s awesome.
Travis (06:29.678)
60 kids later, right? So, so great. So yeah, thanks for sharing a little of your entry point and your family’s journey into foster care. We’re gonna kind of pivot now into your actually organization, fostering faithfully. This is an organization you started and the mission is to build a healthy ecosystem of support in your community for foster families and the children they love. It sounds very similar to our mission in America’s Kids Belong.
Courtney (06:32.341)
Yes.
Travis (06:57.432)
wherever we aren’t on the ground, so to speak, know, kind of resources and supporting, doing the actual support and training, but we connect people with organizations like yours who are, so that folks can foster longer and stronger as we like to say. And for us, that’s primarily the Foster Friendly app. And then we’ve also have resources like this podcast as well to help, but tell us a little bit, Abby, about fostering faithfully and kind of more about that.
Abby Crooks (07:24.138)
So it really began when I moved back here to South Carolina and we signed up as foster parents. We showed up at our first foster parent association meeting and I was pretty shocked. There were about three to four couples there, which we’re here in the Bible Belt and I thought, man, I thought it would be packed out, you know? And so I was back in a very religious community, so I thought it would be packed out. And there were foster parents there trying to earn mandated training hours.
wrangled children, those kinds of things. And so I really just couldn’t sleep at night. And I’m thinking, I know there’s gotta be more than these four couples in this community who care about foster children. And I was so right. Our community is amazing. And once we showed them tangible ways, like here’s what we need help with, they jumped in. And so we started with this crazy lady, this crazy foster care lady, I guess they thought when I started calling them, like we started with, can you help us?
provide childcare or foster parents training. And everybody was like, we can do that. And here we are close to Clemson. So we had college students coming to help us. And then some community churches came alongside us. And then I was like, well, could we also feed them dinners? We started feeding foster parents dinner. I started doing a lot of speaking, cold calling churches and saying, hey, would you let me come share about foster care? And thankfully they did, even though nobody really knew who I was. And then in 2015, a lot of them
original people I had gathered up, we decided to have this huge event at a local high school called Fostering Hope. And basically a miracle happened. We had so many new foster parents. was unbelievable the number of foster homes we suddenly had in our community. And so at first it was all these three or four, five core people, which by the way are still on our board today. Yes. And they were all calling us and it was crazy.
Travis (09:13.12)
cool.
Abby Crooks (09:17.906)
And we realized, my gosh, we can’t do all this ourselves. Like we’ve got to build a better team around these people. We’ve recruited them and now we need to be there for them in super tangible ways. And so we started facilitating a support group for foster families at my church. And we just started growing that support group. And I’ll tell you, as we recruited foster parent families, they recruited their friends and their churches. And the movement grew.
And we’re just still a super close, very united group. When someone gets on our private page or someone struggling at support group, man, support and help is there for them. And it’s just been such a beautiful thing for me to see the realization of this dream. started in our small town and now Fall Streams basically serves three counties. Oconee, Pickens, and Anderson County we added on in the past couple of years. Jason Johnson, and I know you guys believe this.
you know, not everyone can foster, but everyone can do something. And that’s just one of our core beliefs too. And so in 2017, we became an official nonprofit so that we could not be crazy people saying, hey, can you help us buy car seats? Could you help us buy cribs? We need three new mattresses. And so as we became a legitimized nonprofit, doors just opened for us.
You know, we support kinship caregivers and that’s been a good adventure as our state’s moved to really encouraging kinship caregivers to step up. I’m really glad we could be there for them because that’s really hard when you didn’t sign up to foster. So we have two resource centers, fully stocked diaper swipes, clothes. We do shoes a couple of times a year, new shoes for kids in care. know, recreation scholarships to let them play sports, go to camp, have school field trips.
And then y’all are gonna laugh, but we’ve spent over $20,000, $24,000 just feeding foster families for about a years. I had events, catering in their homes, people with placements, everybody’s gotta eat. So we can feed them and they’re thankful. We get the most feedback on that. They’re very thankful for food being delivered to their homes.
Courtney (11:16.75)
I believe it.
Travis (11:18.466)
Hmm
Travis (11:35.032)
Wow.
Courtney (11:35.886)
Yeah, a lot. That’s awesome. It just feels like a all encompassing organization to really support these families and the kids that they serve. You know, it’s beautiful. And you mentioned there’s a lot of different facets of it. Great initiatives, support groups, meals, shoes, covering tutoring costs. The list goes on and on. When you kind of think about your organization as a whole, what’s like the one thing that you’re like, I am most proud of this and why?
Travis (11:45.902)
Hmm.
Abby Crooks (12:02.11)
Well, for me, it’s definitely birthday sponsorships. As a foster parent, I can remember. So we’ve had a foster child arrive here on his birthday, like the day of his birthday. What? I mean, that’s really sad. And the days that I wake up, foster children on their birthdays or tuck them in at night on their birthdays are the most sobering days for me as a foster parent. Like, this shouldn’t be like this. Like, this shouldn’t be.
Travis (12:15.862)
Yeah.
Abby Crooks (12:28.862)
what’s happening in your life. So for me, it’s very important that we do a great job honoring foster children on their birthday, showing them that they’re valued and special to us. And so we provide all our families birthday scholarships. So many of these children, they’ve never seen a cake with their name on it, made just for them. Or we have teens who wanna go to big air with all their friends or.
go to a fancy nice restaurant with their birthday scholarship. So just giving kids opportunities to have memorable parties and invite their friends to them. And many of our foster families adopt, I mean, they invite biological families, guardians, and other homes. And that’s not cheap to take everybody polling. So I love that we can help them.
Travis (12:59.63)
Hmm.
Travis (13:15.15)
That was so cool. Yeah.
Courtney (13:16.312)
That is awesome. Yeah.
Abby Crooks (13:18.41)
Lots of people do Christmas stuff, so was really important that we do the birthday well.
Travis (13:24.558)
Hmm. Yeah. I mean, could there be a bigger way to honor the life of anyone, you know, and to give dignity and, just to just say how much you matter than a birthday like that.
Courtney (13:35.118)
Yeah.
Abby Crooks (13:35.272)
Absolutely.
Travis (13:37.592)
Very, very cool.
Abby Crooks (13:38.738)
And it’s another chance many times for them to see their siblings. So I love that.
Travis (13:42.124)
Yeah. Yeah, because you said also like biological families are invited and parents when that can happen to.
Abby Crooks (13:48.006)
If the foster family wants to, they’re safe people, know, some grandparents, yes, many of them invite them and we want them to be able to feed everybody and, you know, have those happy memories surrounding that child that day.
Travis (14:03.21)
That’s such a cool just picture too of the overall thing when foster care system, as much as it gets flack for all the difficulties and some problematic areas, but when it does kind of have that picture of all involved and all there at the table and all kind of with the end goal of when it’s possible to have the child go home, that’s a picture of that.
Abby Crooks (14:28.124)
It’s a great chance. It’s a great day to say to bond with the child too, especially the place in the city. Like look how important you are to us. Look how much we value your life. Even though we just met six months ago or for me a few days ago, a couple of times that happened at my house.
Travis (14:38.498)
Yeah.
Travis (14:46.36)
Well, you personally, as a journey of a foster mom, we know attrition is huge. We’ve done an episode recently on that, just the things around foster parents quitting. As a foster parent yourself, how have you kept going when it’s emotionally draining, physically draining, spiritually draining, all of the above? What are some tips or things that you’ve learned?
Abby Crooks (15:09.744)
It is pretty heavy, kind of difficult work, very rewarding, the best time. But I just tell foster parents, know, we’ve got to be looking for the miracles and they’re out there because where there’s great love, you’re going to get to experience miracles. And I tell foster parents, they get a front row seat to those. We’ve been able to see kids that you didn’t think could ever be verbal talk. And once their medical needs are cared for,
just come alive again, that flat, sad affect looks alive again and you get to see them thriving. you know, those are miracles. We’ve seen families come from other places in America, giving up so much of their life to come and take custody of children they’ve never even met before. And to be able to shepherd them through that transition as a foster parent, show them, show grandparents, here’s how you put a car seat in, here’s your grandchild you’ve never met.
And so to meet them at parks and watch them fall in love with these kids and become a family, to see siblings put that together, see families put that together and help them again is a miracle. And over the past few years, my husband and I used to talk a lot about physical space, physical space. You know, do we have a bed for this child? But as we’ve gotten older, part of the conversation has had to be, do we have emotional space?
you know, five kids that we’ve committed to. So there’s times that there’s cases we have to say no to and there’s seasons we take off and to get our heads right again, to patch our family back up. But I think the number one thing that my husband has to preach to me all the time and very often to stay in this work is that we have to simplify to serve our life, our family life. It just can’t run like everyone else’s.
Courtney (16:38.089)
important.
Abby Crooks (17:05.716)
You know, the crush it culture tells you your kids have to be in every activity that should be sports superstars. You have to do this and do that. And the truth is we just can’t. We can’t go with the flow in this culture. We have to say no, even to a lot of good things to be able to have emotional space for fostering our children can’t stay out. They need more structure. A lot of stability. They need, you know, more sleep than children who haven’t experienced trauma. And so
We have to really, really make sure that we stay laser focused on a family so that we have space in our lives. We’re not overly reactive. We can kind of go at a slower pace. So we have room for emotional meltdowns. And so I guess the other big thing as I think about how we’ve been able to do this, because I did have to sit there to write my book, and think about that is,
Travis (17:53.006)
Mm-hmm.
Travis (18:00.514)
You
Abby Crooks (18:02.62)
We just have had to change our expectations and we’ve had to look for even small glimmers of positive and hope and reframe the difficulty sometimes as you know, today it only took 30 minutes for me to get her in the bathtub because we’ve had some kids who do not want to bathe. And so, you know, looking for little things of progress today, we’ve had a heartfelt chat today. It wasn’t screaming at bedtime.
She seemed peaceful. Today we made a seed and I’m a teacher and it’s been hard sometimes to be like to celebrate that seed and so I think there’s a lot of unmet expectations that can take people out of this work and I think we have to have realistic expectations for ourselves, for the kids we’re serving. I haven’t always been the saint that I wanted to be and so to lean in and say
I’ve got to learn. I’ve got to get more tools. Like I’ve got to figure this out. It’s been part of my journey. And again, just looking for small glimmers of hope and healing and also just measuring progress with a different stick. Like looking at winds differently, you know?
Courtney (19:21.379)
I love that. That’s like my biggest advice. Whenever somebody asks me how we’ve stuck in it for so long, it’s always expectations. Your expectations need to be realistic. Now that we don’t have expectations, but they need to be realistic. And then I kind of go onto my spiel like you just did and it’s spot on exactly what I would say. So kind of related to that, Abby, right before we started recording this, my 20 year old was over for lunch.
Travis (19:35.758)
Yeah, spot on.
Travis (19:41.742)
related to that.
Courtney (19:46.574)
And he was just telling me a story how yesterday on campus, somebody was asking about his family and he’s got a large family. And they’re like, well, what do your parents do? And he said, I don’t know what to tell people what you do, mama. I could think of it as like, just foster care, everything, foster care. And I was like, I wonder what my kids think of me, like as who I am. And I don’t want foster care to be my only identity, right? And I think we can easily get into this role as foster parents and especially after many years and just kind of becomes who we are, which it is part of who we are.
Travis (19:51.456)
the
Courtney (20:16.118)
On flip side, how do you and your husband really find time for yourselves and for your marriage so it doesn’t become your only identity and just parenting and often parenting kids that have hard backgrounds that you need some extra time and energy to pour into?
Abby Crooks (20:29.538)
Absolutely. And I’m probably not the best person at this question too, because I sometimes stay up too late at night, like going through foster care woes, telling my husband’s stories, trying to figure out how to solve this emotional behavioral conundrum of a child. What are we going to do about this? And so I do feel like as I carry other people in foster care, as I carry their stories as well, I sometimes seem to ruminate on foster care a whole lot. But
Travis (20:47.47)
Hmm.
Abby Crooks (20:57.704)
I’d say the biggest thing I think we do is play the important play. mean, my husband and I, thankfully we live near our family. And so we love to be in the great outdoors. They help us with our kids go on vacations and travel some without kids. love adventure. If I don’t have adventure in my life, I feel like I might starve. So I always have to have a great hike plan somewhere that keeps us saying we love to be with the kids too at the river.
you know, at the lake, in the pools. And then, you know, my husband and I have separate lives. He’s an introvert. He likes to be in the woods by himself, at a shop by himself. And I still play tennis with some ladies that I played tennis with in high school. Some of them now volunteer for fostering faithfully, but in general, they are not involved in foster care. They don’t really ask me a lot of foster care questions. If I want to talk about it, they listen. But in general, we just get out there and snipe the tennis ball around and it just helps.
Travis (21:30.936)
Mm-hmm.
Travis (21:54.392)
Hm-hm.
Abby Crooks (21:54.666)
with life. It reminds me of my old self. And I think if our kids never see us having fun together, know, why would they want to grow up to adult? Like if it just never looked fun to them. So I absolutely think that play is part of our story and our family story. I love to play with my kids, teach them how to snow ski or water ski. My dad always
was very involved in throwing the ball with me. And so I don’t have to have my kids in every organized sport. My husband and I can kick the ball, throw the, you know, throw the baseball, play soccer. I’ve been hit with many soccer balls. So in general, we just love play. And I think that that’s been good for us as foster parents and just as, you know, a couple, we love to take our kids down to the creek here we have. mean, at the creek kids can’t mess anything up.
Courtney (22:35.384)
He
Abby Crooks (22:51.594)
You know, there’s no rules they have to follow. So I’m just a big believer in free play. And I think that’s keeps the same.
Travis (23:00.312)
Hmm.
Courtney (23:02.094)
It sounds fun.
Abby Crooks (23:03.44)
I’ve been fine, yeah.
Travis (23:05.782)
Yeah. Well, I love it too. I play such a good word for this. I think that, and that cuts across so many different things, just like, even if you’re not fostering, mean, play is important as adults. We need to have those outlets and a different identity than what our work is or those types of things. And I imagine too, in your experience, you’ve seen a lot of times where play has been disarming for some of the kids that have come in and just seen sort of like, Hey, these guys are fun. They’re fun as a value.
And maybe a guard comes down, you’ve kind of seen through the years where that’s happened where through play or watching you guys play.
Abby Crooks (23:41.87)
Absolutely. Yes, and especially I find a lot of them have had playful mothers, but to have a dad joke with you, at first some of our female young falter, you know, children might have been afraid of my sons, my older sons and my husband, but then to see them get those dad jokes and you know, all that physicality of play that dads bring to the picture has been really good and healthy.
Travis (23:49.24)
Hmm.
Travis (24:08.12)
That’s cool.
Abby Crooks (24:09.392)
Even our foster daughter has been there two weeks. She was brought out with my 20 year old son last night. I’m like, well, she fits in. She was the one.
Courtney (24:17.271)
Yes.
Travis (24:21.57)
I love it. Well, you know that the dad’s doing well when we know he’s getting eye rolls from the teenage girls of the dad jokes that you know, okay, there that’s a good job. what would you say to them or some, you know, just kind of practical tips that you guys have implemented around the house when, you know, you’re maybe you’re losing your cool at times or one of you is and you got to kind of share that or just how do you kind of cope with kind of hard moments?
Courtney (24:27.022)
Yeah.
Abby Crooks (24:49.822)
Well, that’s been kind of a long-term strategy for us. And I have to go back to that simplifying idea. We had a lot of clutter in our house. And as we added kids over the years, we were like, this is really stressful. So especially managing some of our kids clutter. And we just had to simplify a lot of things. The meals we eat, how much stuff we allow to be in our home, the cups they can drag out, the stuff in their drawers.
Because if they’ve got a, you know, some of them don’t have the executive functioning skills to pick it up, organize it, put it away. And so instead of getting mad at all our stuff that we were stealing was everywhere, we had to get rid of it. You know, we had to simplify everything. Sometimes we had to simplify being at our house more because there’s been times and Courtney, maybe you can speak to this too, but there’s six kids in the house. Well, they all want to eat, they all have laundry, they all have places to be. So like we had to be really focused on
doing absolutely nothing at times, just staying here and saying, I’m gonna catch up the laundry. I’m gonna have quiet time myself because if I don’t, I won’t have the wisdom and the creativity I need to look at this with fresh healthy eyes, to sort this out emotionally. I’m gonna come unglued if I don’t just take some time to be at my house, getting the laundry right. For me, nutrition plays an important part in…
you know, amount of stress that you’re under. I feel like nutrition plays a part in your ability to handle that. So in order to feed myself and my family healthy foods, I have to be here to cook it. I have to order it, prepare it, you know. So I’m always just, you know, I don’t have a ton of like tips, but I will tell you this. I’m always in the kitchen browning something, baking something, cutting something up.
Travis (26:41.827)
hehe
Abby Crooks (26:44.648)
I’m just planning my next move. cook three to five things at a time here. And so I feel like if we eat too much junk, we just won’t be able to take junk off the kids and we’re going to have to. And so just our rhythms here can’t be hair on fire or I’m really reactive instead of taking time to respond in ways that I want to be able to respond to my children.
Courtney (27:12.556)
Yeah, it is very practical and real. And I know sometimes I’ll be just sitting in my office or something and I’ll be working on my computer or just writing or whatever I’m doing. my husband or somebody will come in there and like, why there’s no music going, the lights are shut off. Why are you sitting like in the dark? And for me, sometimes it’s just like that quietness. Like sometimes I just need like even the lights to be dim and the music to be off. I love music, but sometimes I just need that quiet like to be.
in a little place of silence for a little while to gain my sanity and to feel refreshed. I thought I could go out and turn on the music and start cooking.
Abby Crooks (27:45.802)
Yes, and I love to read. Yeah, yeah, and reading is really relaxing and helps me cope. love to read. that also, I have barricaded myself in rooms with, you know, children with books, you know, so I don’t lose them, but I need my 15 minutes of just…
Courtney (28:01.646)
Yeah. Or the bathroom. I’m sure you play the bathroom trick as well. Like, mom’s in the bathroom.
Abby Crooks (28:08.958)
Yeah.
Travis (28:11.79)
That is such a funny rally between dads and moms of where it’s sister comment like dads don’t have that yeah, like generally it’s always mom’s got to hide and there yep, so
Courtney (28:21.198)
Yeah.
Abby Crooks (28:23.146)
I don’t know, my husband goes to those woods. I don’t know. He’s not gonna feed the animals.
Travis (28:26.976)
Yeah, you wonder why is he actually going? Yeah, yeah, we know we know what’s really going on
Courtney (28:28.812)
What?
Courtney (28:36.014)
yeah. Thanks for sharing, Abby. again, just talking about foster parents quitting or even not starting. I’m sure you hear this all the time, but what I always hear is, I could never do that because I’d get too attached or having them leave. And I know you kind of touched on at the beginning of when the kiddo left your house for time and how you were like, I don’t know if I can go on. And it’s the reality, right? These kids come in and we don’t know the ambiguity of it. We don’t know how long they’re going to be with us, if they’re going to be here.
You know, people always ask, so you guys done adopting? It’s like, well, we think we are, but we don’t know. You know, it’s just, that’s the reality of this life that we live. But how do you cope with those emotions that come and the grief that come with fostering?
Abby Crooks (29:17.354)
The grief is definitely real. know you and I had some email conversations. It is heavy. There have been times kids have left here and we, you know, we have felt like, oh my gosh, there’s their sock. I’m busting out into tears. They left their special thing, you know? And so that grief is real and it does exist. And I think foster parents, you know, we expected when we signed up in some ways that we’d be getting into a sad business.
Travis (29:34.158)
Hmm.
Abby Crooks (29:47.37)
And it is their stories of the you know, their stories are really sad. There’s grief in that not even a child leaving just holding their stories is really really sad. And so the grief is real but I’ll say one to be honest with viewers and since I work with a lot of foster parents I’d love to talk about if you guys will let me a couple other emotions. One of them is that you don’t always grieve sometimes you feel relieved.
And you know, not every placement we just click with and it’s easy. are just tough. And it doesn’t mean that we can’t love the child well and serve them well while they’re here. But our placement before last, she couldn’t understand foster care at six years old and she really never could embrace and accept love from us. And so when she went to her mother and family, we were overjoyed for.
them and for us because it was a really difficult placement. And so again, it’s not always sad. We have had good friends of ours adopt our foster children. That wasn’t a sad, was sad tragic ending every adoption is in some ways, but it was easy to hand her to friends who already loved her, already knew her. We’ve had, like I said earlier, families come and get children that are, you know, extended families of theirs and
Travis (30:46.862)
Mm-hmm.
Abby Crooks (31:12.466)
They were thrilled to embrace this new family member or half brother. And so those always haven’t been sad endings for us when they’re going to some relative of theirs and many of our foster children we’ve been able to keep in touch with to this day. So we know how they’re doing. So you don’t always have to carry such a lot of the sadness of the abrupt ending. It’s not always that way.
But the other big emotions that I see take foster parents out that make me really sad, one of them is working with DSS. It is, that’s the piece you never see coming, I think, as foster parents. Many of our foster parents quit because of the system that maybe doesn’t go the way they thought it should, and they feel so invested in children’s lives as everyday caregiver, but they have so little say in the outcomes.
Travis (32:02.851)
Mm-hmm.
Abby Crooks (32:04.283)
And that is tough. And so I like to just tell parents, and I wrote about some of this in my book, that you just can’t pay attention to all the chatter in the case. They’re going to do this. They’re going to do that. Because that’s an emotional wave that will take you out. Until they tell me they’re going to move a child, I try to stay calm. If I’m mad or I have questions or I’m like, this makes no sense to me, I pick up the phone and I call.
Travis (32:05.996)
Mm-hmm.
Travis (32:17.848)
Mm-hmm.
Courtney (32:18.253)
and
Abby Crooks (32:29.962)
my caseworker and if she doesn’t return my calls and what I think is the timeless fashion instead of getting bitter or angry about it, I’ll call a supervisor. I’ll email again. I’ll be timely. I sent you an email on such dates. And so I try to give them the benefit of the doubt. And I’ve had amazing caseworkers. I’ve very rarely had to use that. I mean, there’s foster parent liaisons in our state for a reason. I’ve called senators.
in my state and House of Representatives people and they have helped us and so before I get bitter and let it knock me out, I always try to tell foster parents, you know, we cannot really loudly phone doors for kids without kicking them in and ruining all our relationships with DSS. So when in doubt, pick up the phone, call someone, ask questions, maybe you don’t know the whole story and we don’t do that all the time.
Travis (33:25.358)
Mm.
Abby Crooks (33:27.05)
And you know, it’s okay to advocate for kids. It is. Whether they listen or not, I don’t know, but it at least will let you have, it’s a little therapeutic to get your feelings out there about the case. You know, thankfully we’ve had some really great guardians too, so I want to give a plug for becoming a guardian of Lydon because that is a great person for a foster parent to chat with, you know.
Travis (33:38.958)
Mm-hmm.
Abby Crooks (33:55.772)
And then finally, I just think one of the huge emotions for me too has been handling difficult behaviors in children. Sadly, like all the love in the world just can’t fix it sometimes and that can be overwhelming. So for me, mantras, scripts have been huge to handle some of those big emotions like, quit taking it personally, Abby, quit taking it personally. This is a trauma behavior. This is, it’s not about you.
They’re dealing with what they need to deal with. And so I have to keep repeating some of these mantras to myself. This is a trauma behavior. And one that I go to often, because I’ve got a pretty combative child in my family is, you I love you too much to argue with you. And Love and Loss gave me that one. So plug for them. But TBRi has some great scripts. I love you too much to argue with you. Asked and answered. Asked and answered.
Courtney (34:40.194)
Hmm.
Courtney (34:50.094)
You
Abby Crooks (34:51.418)
then I move out of room because I don’t want to fight with kids. That’s just such an emotional downhill ride. So those are things that have helped me, I guess, cope with it all.
Travis (34:51.872)
Mmm.
Travis (35:05.838)
Hmm. Wow. Well, I mean, gosh, we could have a whole nother episode just on what you’ve said in the last five minutes. thing I wanted to respond to that I felt like was a good kind of summary of something that really hit me, I think is really important for new foster parents or potential foster parents to hear. And I think that’s your reminder that, yeah, just.
If you get caught up in all the chatter, the minutia of the details, where the court case is going, mean, certainly you care about that stuff and certainly your heart’s invested. But the over, I guess, pull into that to where it just feels like you’re undone with the next update or the next, I mean, you’re right. I mean, that is going to knock you out of the game. It seems like in my experience in the savvy veteran foster parents that are around, it’s the same exact advice you’ve said of it’s to
because the recognition is it’s not that I don’t have a voice and you also on the other end did a great job to balance that out to encourage people to don’t just hit the roadblock and also feel like you can be empowered to share and you can, yeah, right? Cause that’s important as well. I think just even be heard. But at the end of the day, I think Foster Prince to be reminded is, that your role isn’t to help determine the outcome of the case, though we want to feel that.
Your role is to be a place of stability, a place of healing. And sometimes those seem to be in conflict because, maybe it’s not going the direction you want, but you giving the love and attention in that time to that kid in your house, no matter what’s going to happen next is how their healing is happening. And you may never see the eventual outcome of where this went. And it may have take, may take some twists and turns and went backwards and forwards and whatever, but I just love what you shared in that advice.
Abby Crooks (36:59.794)
And foster parents mostly are going to find that caseworkers are extremely loving, extremely sacrificial, extremely great listeners. They’re not judgmental when they come into your home. I made no beds for her visit tonight. When she brings her little one back, like they’re very loving people who are easy to work with, but then there’s the very few cases where they’re not. I’ve had to call a child family team meeting and say, Hey, can we all sort this out together? And it’s
Still ended up okay.
Travis (37:32.29)
Yeah. Yeah. Thanks. Thanks again for that point. So as you kind of get to the closing kind of phase of this interview with you, which has been great, you did write a book. You’ve already mentioned that simply here, the title simply available on filtered truths on the generous hospitality of a foster care lifestyle. Love that. The generous hospitality. What is your, you know,
in a short way or whatever here, what is kind of the elevator pitch or what is the snapshot of that message in that book?
Abby Crooks (38:03.39)
Well, it’s funny you like the subtitle because the book publisher loved it. The editor hated it. And so me and my husband were like, so we met with it. And so we titled the book Simply Available because I truly believe that’s all we’ve ever done is, you know, there’s nothing remarkable about our family in any way. We were just willing to work and willing to make it work. And so I just write about how we’ve made it work over the years and how things have changed over the years.
Courtney (38:08.6)
Yeah.
Abby Crooks (38:31.306)
I got really sick in 2023, had to take a year off of fostering. And I said, you know, if I’m going out of here, I want to write down everything I think I’ve learned the hard way. I certainly learned tons of stuff, every case from every child, from every caseworker, they all go differently. But I wanted to write down things that I’ve learned the hard way, things I felt like it’s made it work for us. I wanted to write down, you know, some of the fears of foster care, just have it come true.
Other things have happened. I never saw coming that have been hard. I wanted to talk about some of the positive outcomes that I feel like fostering has been in our family and how it’s changed our lives for the better. I wanted to strategize about, you know, here, how are ways that we can keep showing up for kids even when it’s difficult and just really pragmatic things I’ve learned along the way about court, different things like that are in the book.
And so I hope I was pretty honest about how hard it is. never want to be one of those recruiters who’s all, everything’s just wonderful in foster care. But I did want to make it really evident to people the joys that foster care has been in our life and with the children we’ve served. And I just wanted to share a belief that even though it’s really difficult, that showing up for kids and families when they’re, you know, caring more than they can bear is completely worth upending your life, being really intentional with your time.
and your family’s love and energy and space. And that these kids are absolutely worth it. And I hope that that was crystal clear in my book.
Courtney (40:10.06)
Wow, that’s my husband and I call it the interruptible life. We want to live a beautiful, interruptible life. And that’s kind what you just explained, that opening your home, opening your doors, having that generous hospitality is all about being willing to be interruptible or interrupted.
Abby Crooks (40:16.152)
So.
Travis (40:24.632)
be interruptible or interrupted.
Abby Crooks (40:25.66)
Right, it’s scary. I don’t know about you, but I mean, I’ve done this lots of times, had strangers come and sleep in my home, and it’s still scary. It requires a certain amount of bravery. Like, I don’t know what this is gonna be like, even though I’ve done fostering, I’ve never fostered this stranger. So that’s why the generous hospitality piece for me is like, you don’t know, you’re just swinging that door open. not just to the child, but sometimes to their family.
Travis (40:38.446)
you
Travis (40:50.67)
Hmm, yeah.
Abby Crooks (40:54.698)
You know, so we swung it open again. We’ll see how it goes.
Courtney (41:02.616)
Well, Abby, thank you so much for joining us in this conversation today. Loved hearing your insights as we kind of talk about foster parent attrition and why we’re quitting, why we see that happening and how we can stop it from happening as much as we can when we can offer some advice and support to those families. But we like to answer this question at the end of a lot of our podcasts. So Abby, can you tell us how would you finish the sentence? What kids in foster care really need is?
Travis (41:20.494)
If you like to answer this question about…
Abby Crooks (41:33.089)
Kids in foster care need a chance to go to a family for a season where they can be a kid again, have fun, know, have experiences and opportunities, be celebrated, honored and loved, have full bellies. You know, my foster daughter loves and so many of my foster children have loved to be tucked in at night like a hot dog. I tuck them in, put ketchup on them and you know, all the things and she’ll say, you didn’t put onions on me tonight. And I’m like, oh,
And so I put onions or chili over it and think all kids deserve that. All kids deserve a chance to have a parent that makes them feel loved and gives them safety and stability. And every child really needs that, but foster children especially deserve
Travis (42:21.532)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. I love that. never heard that. I putting onions on. That’s great though.
Courtney (42:30.091)
It is beautiful.
Travis (42:33.482)
Well, you want to close it out?
Courtney (42:36.984)
Sure, yeah. Again, talking about foster parent attrition and why they’re quitting and what we can do about that. Abby, you shared, it’s funny just listening to your answers today, because it’s very in line with a previous episode we did. In episode 31, we talk about the three hosts. We talked about foster parent attrition and the reality of foster parents quitting and what we can do about it. So again, I just love your conversation because it lines up perfectly with what we shared and very much aligned and seeing the bigger picture and what we can do to…
to support foster families, to love them, to also encourage them, to tell them it’s okay to take a break. You said that very clearly. I said that, you know, in my answer to that question, like, it’s okay to take a break. It’s okay to breathe. But how can we continue this generous hospitality and how can we get foster families to keep on going? So thank you so much for joining us and sharing those things with us today.
Travis (43:18.894)
Hmm.
Abby Crooks (43:28.5)
Well, thank you guys for creating such a positive and yet realistic narrative of what being in foster care ministry is like. It’s important hard work.
Travis (43:37.614)
Yeah, yeah well said what’s great having you on and thanks for all your wisdom and insights
Abby Crooks (43:46.954)
Great, thank you.
Travis (43:50.274)
All right.
