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We took a year off from foster care when our daughter was a senior in high school, and always said we would do the same for our son. We want to be present for the senior year, attend all of the performances and go visit colleges, and just basically be here. Fully here.

We told the case worker back in the late Spring that was our intention, and she was on board. The court schedule delayed the transition a little while, since we didn’t want to move them before a long-term decision was made about their placement plan. But other than that delay of a few weeks, we have known all along that this transition was coming.

And yet …

Knowing that a foster placement is leaving is one thing; grieving the transition is quite another.

It is especially difficult this time, it seems. These two have worn us down. We are depleted. The energy it has consumed to care for these two boys for these nine months has left us very little with which to focus on anything else. At least, not very well.

The level of chaos and disruption that their past trauma has brought into our home is hard to describe. And their past trauma follows them everywhere, bringing the chaos and the disruption along the way. It’s a particularly nasty kind of frustrating; just when we start to think there are signs of progress, like they might be “figuring it out,” things shatter, and come crashing down.

Their subconscious sabotage of all things functional is maddening. Like we are living an alternate reality. And it’s exhausting.

We are depleted.

So this one doesn’t feel at all like a foster parent “win” for us. Twelve years and twenty kids, and we have enough experience to have seen pretty much everything, and there have most definitely been “wins.” But right now, not so much. Words like defeat, failure, surrender … these seem more fitting.

The boys’ behavior is so erratic, so chaotic, that it is impossible to predict what will happen now. There may be a “honeymoon” for the new foster family, during which things seem to be on track. And I hope and pray that it stays that way and they find a forever family there.

And it is just as likely that the one will disappear into the deep sorrow that defines his identity and the other will lash out from the uncontrollable rage that lurks in his heart, and it will all come crashing down. Again.

This morning I knelt down and looked into the three year old’s eyes. I said, “We are gonna have a good day today, right?”

His sweet and sincere “Yes Daddy” will linger in my memory.

Then we did three deep breaths, like we do every morning, and he went into the room to greet his teachers.

And now it’s not even that I don’t know what to feel, it’s more like I just … don’t. Like the emotions are so conflicted that they’re cancelling each other out. And we’re just left void. Blank.

Depleted.