It has been a long time since I posted, and with good reason.

The boys are gone. We almost quit foster parenting.

Some types of trauma can not be healed in a family foster home, and that is hard to admit when you are the foster home in question.
Some types of trauma do not show up in a child’s behavior in public, but only in private, behind closed doors, when nobody but a sibling is there to witness it.
Some types of trauma leave no scars on anything but a child’s psyche, and a child’s psyche can not be presented as evidence in a court of law.
Sometimes it isn’t possible to track abuse to its source. We will likely never know the identity of the person who first hurt these boys.

We did our best. We taught them manners, how to ask for things politely and how to say “thank you”. We taught them it was safer to to hold an adult’s hand when crossing the street. We taught them what it was like to be tucked into a clean bed with warm blankets.

In our home, they learned that waiting for something wasn’t the end of the world. They learned that sometimes – sometimes – you can trust an adult to do the right thing. They learned that it was never, ever, ever, EVER acceptable to hit a dog or a cat. They learned how tightly to buckle their own carseat buckles, just in case the adult they were with didn’t know.

The older boy arrived not able to sing the ABC song, and left 4.5 months later able to sing the song, write the alphabet, and identify all its letters both capital and lowercase. He went from a preschool IEP in January to “no accomodations needed” in June. The younger boy’s vocabulary exploded with new nouns, verbs, and adjectives.

All this in spite of behaviors that were rapidly spinning out of control. Ultimately, we knew we were not going to be able to keep these boys safe. Their behind-closed-doors behaviors were just too extreme and dangerous – to each other – and to us.

Did you know it is possible for a preschool aged child to be so traumatized that he will require inpatient psychiatric care in order to heal? And, did you know that psychiatric inpatient programs at hospitals are not available to children that young? Nasty catch-22 there.

In short, the boys are now in homes that are better equipped for helping them heal. Yes, two separate homes. It was eventually determined that in order to heal, the boys must not be constantly triggered by each other’s presence. If they can heal, and learn that siblings should support each other and not hurt each other, they will be placed together again. But they have much healing to do before that can happen – an amount of healing that is more than many adults are able to accomplish.

May God speed you both to full recovery, boys. And may you each get the type of permanent home and family that will enable you to continue healing the rest of your lives. God bless you, Tiny Viking, who upon seeing the sea for the first time, hit it with a stick and demanded “Stop Moving!” and the wave withdrew. God bless you, Puzzle Prince, who upon being told “you’re smart!” for the first time in your life, responded by looking shocked and then slowly saying “yes, I am”.

If you are a parent, struggling with a child with Reactive Attachment Disorder or Oppositional Defiant Disorder, or you find yourself being a “Trauma Mama” to a child who has endured unspeakable trauma, feel free to contact me for verbal support via the comments on this blog. I hear you. And I KNOW it is not always the fault of the person doing the parenting right now. We didn’t cause it. We can’t cure it. And we need to stand with each other, no matter what we choose to do (or have to do) to further the healing of these children we love.