A totally tough element in the equation of the adoption of older children is how tough it is to get them through school. Long range plans seem to not compute, deferred gratification is an elusive concept when they simply do not want to go to school.

School is very hard for one thing. My children’s track record for school attendance was horrible during foster care and even worse when they were still living in the difficult circumstances into which they were born.

They were moved from foster home to foster home and through various shelters; never staying long enough to comprehend that school should be a daily affair. They find my insistence on non-truancy to be stodgily old-fashioned; a quirk from my own square Leave It to Beaver childhood.

Homework is a battle, assignments are lost, discarded or deliberately destroyed and several have simply quit school, a few have been put out of school, but fortunately the majority has graduated.

Without even a high school diploma there are simply no happy prospects for financial prosperity. Several of my children who were incapable of an education due to severe diagnoses are in even more dire straits.

I don’t have any solutions either. Some bombed out of public school so hard that they imploded, some catapulted out of family life as they posed such a danger to themselves and others, and some just didn’t have the IQ, minus behavioral problems, to even come up through the special education program.

So a couple are in jail. Unable to function at all in society, no more than they were able to sit at our kitchen table for dinner without incident, they are now lashing out at society in general.

I’m greatly saddened, knowing I gave them so much, put up with so much, lowered my expectations hugely and found them so much help… and it appears all for nothing.

I don’t know what will become of them. At the very least they had a family they could choose to reject. We never rejected them.

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