Archived Post 2011 - Broken

In late April I learned about some boys who needed a family. We applied, it looked positive, it looked like it might happen, it looked like we might be parents to 4 really soon. Then last Friday we got a phone call that let us know that the "team" had decided to place the children in a family without other children because although we had all the skills needed to parent these boys they felt as though we would be unable to do so given that we already had kids.

I was devastated. I had tried to guard my heart against caring about them, I had tried to say it would be okay if it did not happen. Then when it did not happen it hit me like a ton of bricks.
I knew that they might not choose us, I knew that the fact that we already have adopted kids was seen as a strike against us, I knew that they might not understand why we wanted to do adopt again. But, I was hopeful that they would believe that we knew what we could and our kids could handle and that our worker who was supporting us would not say yes to something that we could not do.
Regardless of what I thought, they said no.

I now understand why people walk away from adopting from foster care in this country and go abroad instead. There is no reason that the system needs to work like this. We are qualified, we have a completed homestudy and we have room in our home and our hearts and yet we are waiting because we can not find a worker who will place an attachment challenged child in a home that has kids who had attachment issues.

Yes I just wrote, had attachment issues, they had them, they raged and broke things and rejected me but they are healing, they are learning to love and I am pretty hopeful that we can help other kids heal as well. I know that people do not understand why we would want to do this again, why we would mess with a good thing. Well, we will mess with a good thing because there are kids who need families, there are kids who need to heal and learn that the world is not just an unpredictable and scary place. There are kids who deserve better than they are getting now.

There are kids available, there are kids who have serious attachment issues and need therapeutic parents, parents with experience raising kids like them and yet they will not place those kids in families with other children. It seems to me that it would pretty hard to find parents who were experienced in raising kids with serious attachment issues if it was not something they had already done which would usually mean that there were kids in the home.  It's like desperately looking for an Macintosh apple but only looking Granny Smith trees, it is pretty much an impossible task.
When we began parenting our kids we had no idea how to be therapeutic parents, we had no idea how to make this work. I made a lot of mistakes, I still make mistakes, I am human but I have learned a lot and I am continuing to learn.

As hard as it I will continue to put my heart out there and fall in love with kids that might one day be ours so that eventually one will.