A note on privacy before anything else. The kids who have lived with us are not ours to write about. They have their own stories, their own families, and their own right to grow up without a stranger being able to find them on the Internet. So there are no names on this page, no photographs, no ages more specific than "little" or "teenager," and a few details have been blurred on purpose. What you'll find here is our side of it: what the process was like, what surprised us, what we got wrong, and what we would say to anyone thinking about it. Especially to any other gay couple thinking about it, because when we started looking in 1997 we could not find a single page like this one.

We are Paul (a high school Spanish teacher) and Steve (an accountant, and the one who reads all the forms). We've been together since 1991. We have a small house with a yard, a dog named Tortilla, and, since the spring of 1998, a foster care license.

We had talked about kids for years in the vague way you do. What made it real was a flyer at the library, of all things, about a foster parent orientation night. Paul went by himself the first time because Steve had a client deadline. He came home and said, "They said they need families. They said it twice." So we both went to the next one.

Here is roughly what the process looked like for us. Yours will vary by state and by agency, and we're not going to name ours, but the shape is similar most places:

1. Orientation. One evening. A social worker explains what foster care is and, mostly, what it isn't. It isn't adoption (though it can lead there). The goal is almost always to get the child back to their family once it's safe. You are a bridge, not a destination. We heard that phrase a lot. It's true.
2. Application. Long. Employment, finances, references, every address we'd lived at, medical exams, a fingerprint check for both of us. Steve enjoyed this part. Paul did not.
3. Training classes. About thirty hours over several weeks, in the evenings, in a room with a coffee maker and a dozen other hopeful people. Child development, discipline without hitting (that one was a requirement, and it should be), what trauma does to a kid's behavior, how visits with birth families work, how the court system works, how to write things down. We were the only same-sex couple in our class. Nobody said a word about it, which was somehow both a relief and a little disappointing to Paul, who had prepared a speech.
4. The home study. A social worker comes to your house, more than once, and looks at everything and asks about everything. Where the medicines are kept. Where the kids would sleep. How you argue. How you were raised. What you'd do if a child ran away. It is intrusive and exhausting and, honestly, fair. They are about to hand you someone's child. They should ask.
5. The house. We needed a smoke detector in every bedroom, a fire extinguisher, a locked cabinet for cleaning supplies, a fence check, and, this was the surprise, a first-aid kit that met a specific list. We made three trips to the hardware store. Every drawer with a knife in it now has a latch, which Steve still curses at while cooking.
6. The license. Arrived in the mail in April 1998 in a plain envelope. We stood in the kitchen and read it twice. And then nothing happened for six weeks, which nobody warns you about.

The call came on a Tuesday afternoon while Paul was grading finals. Two kids, a brother and sister, both little, needed a place that night. Could we take both? They try very hard not to split up siblings, and that is exactly the reason we'd asked for a license for two. We said yes and then we stood in the hallway and looked at each other and Steve said, "We don't have a car seat." We had a car seat by six o'clock. The lady at the store asked what we were expecting and Paul said "two, in about an hour" and she just stopped asking.

Things we did not know and learned in the first 48 hours:

• Kids arrive with almost nothing, and what they have is in a trash bag. Our agency has since started giving out duffel bags, which is a small thing that is not small. If you want to help foster kids and you can't foster, buy an agency some duffel bags.
• A four-year-old who has just been taken from everything she knows does not want a hug from a stranger. She wants to know where the bathroom is, whether she's allowed to have a snack, and whether her brother is going to sleep in the same room. (Yes, yes, and yes.)
• Nobody sleeps the first night. Not the kids, not you, not the dog.
• Dinosaur chicken nuggets are a food group.
• You will be asked, by a small person at bedtime, whether you are the daddies now, and there is no training class for that question. We said we were the people taking care of them for now, that their mom was working on some things, and that they were safe here. That was true, and it's what we still say.

They were with us for eleven months. They went to their preschool and then to kindergarten. There were visits with their mother every week, supervised at first and then not, and we drove them, and we learned to like her, because she was trying very hard and it was working. There were court dates. There was one truly terrible stomach flu that went through the house like a wave. There was a birthday party in our backyard with a rented bounce house that the neighbors still talk about. And in the spring they went home, which was the point, and which we'll get to below.

When the little ones went home we told our worker we needed a couple of months to breathe. She gave us five weeks and then called about a teenager who had been through three homes in a year and, in her words, "needs somebody who won't flinch." Paul teaches high school. Paul does not flinch.

Fostering a teenager is a different job entirely. You are not raising them; they are mostly raised. You are giving a nearly-grown person a stable place to finish growing, and the main thing they want to know is whether you're going to give up on them too. So the first month is a test, and you are going to fail parts of it, and the trick is to fail without leaving.

What has worked for us, so far, with the caveat that it's only been three months:

• Clear rules, few of them, written on the refrigerator. Curfew, school, no smoking in the house, tell us where you are. That's it. Everything else is negotiable.
• Food in the house, all the time, no permission needed. A kid who has gone hungry does not stop worrying about food just because you say the pantry is open. Show it. Keep showing it.
• Our teenager did not need two new dads and did not want them. What they wanted was a ride to a job interview, help with a geometry class, someone to sign a permission slip without making it into a Thing, and a door that locks from the inside. All of that we could do.
• Being a gay couple has, for this kid, been mostly a non-issue and occasionally a plus. We're not going to say more than that, except that some kids in the system have very good reasons to feel safer with us than with a house that looks like the one they came from, and that this is one of the arguments for letting families like ours foster. We know not every state does. We hope that changes.

Paul is a teacher, and he still was not prepared for how many school meetings a foster kid generates. Enrollment (you need the placement paperwork, the shot records, and patience). The counselor. The counselor again. Special-ed evaluation meetings, which come with their own acronyms. Parent-teacher conferences, where you sit in a small chair and explain, for the fourth time, that yes, you are the foster parents, both of you, and yes, you are both authorized, it's in the file.

Things we've learned about schools:

• Bring a folder with copies of everything. Every time. Assume the last copy got lost.
• Most teachers are wonderful about it once they understand the situation, and the situation is often that the kid has been in three schools in two years and has holes in what they've been taught that are nobody's fault. Say that out loud. It changes the conversation from "behavior" to "catching up."
• Ask for the kid's records to follow them. Push. Foster kids lose credits when files don't move, and losing credits is how a kid ends up a year behind and decides school isn't for them.
• Go to the school play, the game, the thing. Even if the kid says don't. Sit in the back. They see you.
• One school secretary, at our teenager's school, has been more help than any three officials combined. Find that person. Bring her cookies.

This is the part everyone asks about. "How can you let them go?" "I could never do it, I'd get too attached." We heard that so often before we started that we half believed it.

Here's the honest answer: it is awful, and you do it anyway, because it was never about you.

When the two little ones went home in the spring, we packed their things (in real suitcases; we bought them suitcases), we put the drawings from the refrigerator in a folder, we drove them to their mother's apartment, and we helped carry things up the stairs. The older one hugged Steve and then ran inside to show his mom his room. The little one held onto Paul's leg for a while and then let go. Their mother cried and thanked us and we cried and thanked her, which confused everybody. Then we drove home and sat in the driveway for twenty minutes without getting out of the car.

The house was very quiet for a while. Tortilla looked for them for a week.

We got a card in July with a drawing of the bounce house in it. That's all we're going to say about that.

The thing nobody tells you is that "too attached" is the whole job. A kid who has been yanked around needs an adult to get attached, needs to see what that looks like, needs to learn that it's possible. You are supposed to get attached. The goodbye is the cost of having done it right. We would pay it again. We are, in fact, paying it again, in a slower way, with a teenager who will age out in a couple of years and who we very much hope keeps our number.

We want to say something about this because it surprised us.

Paul's mother, who took about five years to come around to Steve, took about five minutes to come around to two small foster kids in her living room at Thanksgiving. She sent them home with a bag of pan dulce and a rosary each and asked, in Spanish, when we were getting more. Paul's sisters supplied hand-me-downs in quantities we are still sorting through. Steve's parents, who are quieter people, drove in from Sacramento to babysit for a weekend so we could sleep, and Steve's father built the bunk bed that is still in the back bedroom, and did not say much about it, and did not need to.

We have a friend who is also a foster parent and who calls it "the village showing up." That's what it felt like. You think you are doing this alone, as a couple, and then it turns out your whole extended family had been waiting for a reason to bring casseroles.

Not every gay couple has families like ours. We know that. We got lucky, and we got lucky partly because we'd spent a decade slowly, stubbornly letting them know us. If your family isn't there yet, find your village somewhere else: other foster parents, your agency's support group, friends who will watch a kid for two hours so you can go to the grocery store alone. You'll need them. Nobody does this without them.

1. Go to an orientation. Just go. It commits you to nothing and answers a hundred questions.
2. Be honest with yourself about what you can take. Ages, number of kids, special needs. Saying "we can do one child, under ten, no medical needs" is not a failure. Saying yes to a placement you can't handle is much worse for everyone, most of all the kid.
3. Your relationship needs to be solid. Not perfect. Solid. This will find every crack. Ours is stronger for it, but there were a couple of weeks in the first placement when we were two tired, snappish people passing a sick child back and forth and not much else.
4. Write everything down. Every visit, every phone call, every bruise from the playground, every doctor's appointment. Steve keeps a notebook per kid. It has saved us in court twice.
5. The birth family is not the enemy. This was the hardest thing for us to learn. Most of the parents we've met are people who have had a very hard time and are trying, with almost no help, to do better. Treat them with respect. The kids are watching how you treat their mom.
6. Ask for respite care and take it. The system has a way for you to get a weekend off. Use it before you need it, not after.
7. If you're gay, ask up front whether the agency licenses same-sex couples and whether they've done it before. If they hesitate, find another agency. There are ones that will be glad to have you. There are more kids than homes, everywhere, all the time. They need you.
8. You will not save anyone. You will give a kid a stretch of safety and normal, and it will matter more than you'll ever know, and you'll have to be okay with not knowing. We are learning to be okay with not knowing.

If you've read this far and you're thinking about it, write to us. We'll answer. We are not experts, we are two guys with a year and a half of doing this, but we remember exactly what it was like not to have anyone to ask.

With love from our house to yours,
Paul & Steve (and Tortilla)