On the TV show Major Crimes (Season 1: Episode 4, aired 9/3/2012), a foster child, dealing with always having to leave and start over someplace new, that is, with always being a stranger, and, also, dealing with always expecting to be repeatedly sent away to a new place, requests, from his latest foster mother, thirty days notice before he is sent away again. She reassures him: “Whatever happens here, you will one day go off and be the new kid again. But no matter where you go, no matter when, you’ll never be a stranger to me. I will always know you.”
That brief interchange resonated with me as a psychotherapist because for a short while we ‘foster’ the growth and development of our patients, temporarily providing safety and succor, while growing ourselves. The world is a better place for both of us. But despite this fostering of a most emotionally intimate of relationships, our patients, like our children grown, must leave us; and we are left to mourn. We take solace in the recognition that they will never be strangers, joy in that we have known and, in some ways, will always know them. We send them off and into the world with great pride, matched with loss.
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