Hi Tilderinos!

First, apologies for the ramble. I'm based in the US. I got a letter from our state's child services department telling me that one of my relatives who is a minor has been removed from the custody of their parents. The letter asked me to complete a form to indicate the level of involvement I'm interested in having with said child's placement and/or support.

We don't know what the child's situation is. I'm the furthest-degree relative they search for - hopefully someone closer will step forward, but unfortunately, based on what I know of our part of the family, other relatives may not be in the best situation to take on a child. I'm hoping that this would be a temporary situation and that the ultimate goal is for the child to be reunited with their parent(s), but we have no information at all right now other than "child was removed and we're looking for support from relatives."

I'm going to call the contact info on the letter tomorrow, as we received it after business hours today. We've discussed our comfort levels with caring for a child and what type of situation we could say yes to and what we would have to say no to. We are very fortunate to be in a stable situation (in control of our own housing, dual incomes, qualified for leave programs, etc.). Our point of view currently is that this child is a child in need of support, and we are willing to provide what we can as long as it's not overtly detrimental to us or to them. I already filled out the form the best I could in a manner that corresponds with our comfort level, which is approximately that placement with us would be a possibility but not right this instant, and otherwise we're happy to correspond or communicate in whatever way benefits the child. (We suspect that the child is currently 1-3 hours from us, so frequent physical assistance on our part would be less doable unless the child were placed with us.)

Is this something you've been through before? What experiences have you had with child placement? (I'm actually not even really sure what questions to ask beyond this, but if you have been down this road and are comfortable sharing, please do!) We've discussed adopting or fostering before, but only in hypotheticals, as it's something we weren't planning to look into for 5-10 years (we're in our early 30's and are not having bio kids). Something externally-initiated like this was never on our radar. Any guidance, tips for questions to ask, or experiences you would like to share would be welcome!

I’ve been mulling over this for the past few weeks.

Even though I haven’t drastically changed lives over the course of my lifetime, I still feel like I’ve had eras:

• As a young adult in the UK and around the world, figuring things out
• As a student in Canada
• As an employee in another province
• And now as an independent consultant in Switzerland and France

Although I still live a comfortable western lifestyle, I do feel these different eras are akin to different lives. 18 year old me wouldn’t guess what 30 or 40 year old me became. Not only professionally but also emotionally and day to day.

To delineate my eras, I consider career/professional matters but also outlook on life, lessons learnt, relationships, country/city of résidence (or lack thereof).

Do you have a similar feeling? Why or why not? And what do you consider you life or lives to have been so far?