The boys were put into a foster home where they proved to be unmanageable — defecating throughout the house, destroying furniture and scratching the ivory off the piano keys…”

Please go read the entire article of a severely troubled child. These are the children we parent. I know from your comments and emails, from other blogs and stories that when we adopt older children, especially from the foster care system but also increasingly from foreign countries as FAS and FAE are rampantly coursing through our children, that we are inviting a word of challenges into our once peaceful homes that we only wanted to share with others in need.

I read this article, recognizing the disturbed behavior and levels of anger that I too have seen in our family. Yet I’m the committed one, like many of y’all. We are still standing, still loving children who seemingly hate us, blame us, lie to us and about us, and whose anger and severe emotional issues preclude them from ever living a normal middle class existence.

Are our attempts in vain? Is adoption a waste of our time? Does it just ruin our health and our own emotions?

We do certainly take a beating, but it is not in futility. I look at my older kids who’ve finally pulled through and I am glad I hung in there. I’m right now as frightened for a few of my kids as I once was years ago for a few others. They pulled through though.

This boy in this family never got a family, just multiple moves. I don’t know if this boy could have ever lived in a family, I don’t have all the facts. I’ve been told that one of my sons was the most severely disturbed that a wilderness program had ever encountered. They told me this as they kicked him out of the program. Years of therapy, residential mental facilities, in and out of our family due to police involvement and my silly need to keep our family safe, now he is in jail once again.

His birth mom was an inhalant abuser, a druggie and an alcoholic during all five pregnancies; she’s been HIV positive for ten years. Four of her children were adopted by me, the fifth by his birth father who was not the birth father of the others. That fifth child now has a child in the system.

My best friend’s son was kicked out of the OTP placement as well and is, right now, in his third psychiatric evaluation hospitalization in the last several months. I know few adoptive parents who have not needed therapeutic interventions. Never mind, I don’t know any that have not at least sought counseling.

We adoptive parents are given no support to speak of; we are merely regarded as imbeciles for trying to help children who seem not to care about us. I’ve been teetering between my own anger at the system and my despair over the lack of mental health help available. Maybe it is just frustration but one would logically think that when one has willingly agreed to love and stand by children who are so damaged, that one would receive help from somewhere if only to keep the child in the family.

Maybe someday society will look back on this period in time, in the early 2000s when adoptive parents were fruitlessly beating their heads against walls, dodging unwarranted blame, and suffering under tremendous amounts of emotional abuse by the system. The same system we tried to help.