This Couple Proves Why Military Families Are Made for Fostering Children
Editor's Note: This is part of a special series, For the Love of Family, which focuses on how as addiction to opioids and other drugs separates parents from children, foster families with unique qualifications (including empty nesters and nurses) have made room in their homes - and hearts.
Nicole Berry and her husband, Dwight, a lieutenant colonel in the Army, know a thing or two about coping with chaos. During their 23-year marriage, the couple have withstood five deployments and eight moves.
Still, in 2013, when they enrolled in foster parent training classes with an eye toward adoption, Nicole and Dwight assumed they wouldn't face relocation or deployment again any time soon.
Over the next couple of years, they took in 13 kids, many from families affected by the surge in meth addiction in Kansas, where they lived. But by June 2015, Dwight was headed to Iraq, and two months later, Nicole got the call that two brothers - Luke, then 8, and James, then 5 - needed a foster home. She gladly welcomed them.
The boys had been removed from their parents' home two days earlier, so Nicole followed her normal gentle routine for new foster kids, introducing first the family's affectionate beagle, Johnny, then her two biological kids - Meghan, then 16, and Jacob, then 15. She offered cereal, granola bars, and leftovers to show them they'd always have enough to eat.
Later, Nicole wrote August 17, 2015 on the whiteboard in her laundry room. She wanted to mark the day Luke and James had arrived - for foster kids, a day as life-altering as a birthday. And it turned out to be the day Nicole met her future sons. After two years of fostering, she says, "Who knew that my husband was going to be gone when we got the two kids we were finally going to adopt?”
Luckily, as a military spouse she's learned to handle curveballs - a skill that serves her well. According to Jeff Wiemann, executive director of Angels Foster Family Network in San Diego, military couples make great foster parents because they "understand what chaos, ambiguity, and uncertainty are."
Like most foster parents, Nicole rooted for the boys' reunification with their birth mother. But it became clear that that wasn't going to happen. Bittersweet as that was, to Nicole the boys were already family.
Now something else is written on Nicole's kitchen whiteboard: 735. It's the number of days it took to finalize James and Luke's adoption this past November. Dwight wasn't around for that either; he had been deployed to Korea again. But good news: He's gotten orders for a permanent change of station to Fort Hood in Texas starting this summer.
Just standard-issue craziness, the kind Nicole thrives on. Even after adopting James and Luke, she's never stopped taking in new foster kids - a total of 34 so far: "Some days are hard, and some days I feel like I'm losing my mind. But I wouldn’t change it," she says.
To find a foster care agency near you, go to childwelfare.gov.
This story originally appeared in the June 2018 issue of Woman's Day.
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