I spend more and more time each day contemplating problems that seem to have no answers.

“Each month, about 20 percent of the children sleeping in CPS offices were newly discharged from psychiatric hospitals.”

This statement is from an article today in the San Antonio newspaper that bemoans the fact that over 300 foster children are sleeping in the offices due to no bed space within the foster care system. Caregivers refuse to accept children into their home with significant mental issues.

Well duh. I wouldn’t knowingly allow them as overnighters either for the protection of my family and myself. Foster and adoptive parents, for the most part, simply aren’t trained, equipped or capable of dealing with the accompanying issues.

Julia illustrated this also in her post regarding what foster parents often face.

Children are not discharged because they’ve been healed of their mental and emotional issues. They are usually given a two week evaluation, diagnosed and then moved on still with their issues thus freeing up bed space for a long, long waiting list.

These diagnoses usually are lifelong.

Maybe I’m so upset this morning because naïve adoptive parents like me then adopt some very troubled children and we spend the rest of our lives trying to find nonexistent help. Maybe there are no answers, no solutions, no place for the emotionally wounded to heal?

I know this isn’t just an ‘adoption’ issue. I’ve had plenty of birth families share their stories of emotional disabilities, thinking I’d understand their burdens, as I’ve obviously been struggling with ours.

The real problem seems to be a lack of facilities that keep people safe when they are incapable of doing so for themselves. It just looms large for me in the adoption world because that’s where I live. I do know that with age and maturity, some issues cease to be so dominant such as borderline personality disorder, and I also know that with age and maturity some disorders mushroom into chaos as the person is then a legal adult and can’t be placed in a safe situation without a judge’s order.

In my journey, in the adoption of sibling groups, there’s sometimes been a brother or a sister with very apparent emotional distress, bordering on mental illness. I’m still hung up on Nancy’s assertion that ‘keeping them safe’ might have been our only purpose in parenting some of our children.

I feel that this article so proves her right. At least I have kept those distressed children safe because I have fought so hard to try and find them help. I’ve adopted them, given them a family, a place to always call home and have kept them with their siblings rather than split up in foster care or worse yet, winnowed from the group of their brothers and sisters, sleeping on the floor of an office.