I’m asked, “What’s my secret?” or “How on earth do you do this?” in regards to simply getting up each day and facing the problems, the challenges, and the fun involved in a large family, but I touched a chord yesterday resulting in some long, tormented comments.

Y’all I get it, I know this hurts, and I know this is impossibly difficult, sometimes dangerous and head-poundingly frustrating. Please know that I rail against the injustice along with you, I know that having severely disturbed children in one’s home is an abject nightmare, and I have spent plenty of nights hiding our kitchen knives out of my own fear. The lack of community support, often even a ‘you got what’s coming’ mentality from others, only adds to the misery and desolation that adoptive parents feel.

And I don’t have a secret, often I don’t have a clue, usually I am muddling through, my hands on the wall as I feel I’m forcing a new way through a very thick fog of dissatisfaction with the system. Yet I’ve fortunately found a great deal of help from the system, truly the sad reality that I live with is the amount of damage once done to my children. However if I dwelled on that, I’d be sunk in a depression as well.

I have a laundry list of concerns at the moment, stuff I can’t write about yet as we’re deep in dealing with the aftermath. I’ve just done this for so very long that I can usually only relate how we got through previous incidents. The other events are still roiling around us. I fight feelings of dread and despondency but I need to model optimism and inner strength.

An area I feel so buffaloed by is the Reactive Attachment Disorder arena. One child out of 39 in my family displays the criteria and, at the moment, she’s in a therapeutic intervention, but it is only a short term answer for us. I’d advise any adoptive parent to read Nancy Spoolstra’s posts and website.

The area of severe emotional disturbances, bordering on mental illness, is also frightening to me. I have two children, older teens that I constantly grieve over. I have no answers, little help and few bright spots on the horizon right now. One was just transported from a psychiatric hospital to another psychiatric hospital for her own safety. The other is on the streets, bipolar and consorting with criminals.

There are no words to describe the damage he once wrought in our home. I now feel like a victim of PTSD, I’ve been unable to sleep or to gain weight, I’m jumpy and torn with all sorts of emotions, from glee that he is now gone to despair over his future prospects. Then I feel guilty over my own feelings. My phone ringing brings me waves of anxiety and my blood pressure spikes.

And what about my other children? How did I protect them? Good question. I’ll address it in the next post. I’m also struggling with the negativity that I’m pouring out here when in reality the majority of my children are wonderful and successful. I’m trying to find a balance in my posts.