When people ask me how many children I have, I fumble the question almost every time. I have six. I know I have six. But only five of my children live with me. And in the next year or so, one of my children will no longer legally be mine.

One of our children came to us by birth, and the other five by adoption. We had three daughters at the time that I first saw pictures of my son and his siblings, and I was drawn to him right from the start. His online profile talked about him being angry that other kids picked on him and called him names, and I felt that “mother hen” reaction, wanting to rush to his defense. How could they pick on “my” boy? Within a year of seeing those pictures, we flew to meet him, along with his big sister and little brother. He was four; mischievous, and a little wild. Why wouldn’t he be? He had already lived in an overcrowded orphanage for a year, and clearly the kids did what they wanted much of the time. Yet on our visit, he listened when we spoke, looked to us for approval, accepted correction.. and when we had to bring him back to the orphanage, he crumpled to the ground, wailing in agony that we were leaving him there. As heartbroken as we were by this, we took it as a good sign. We loved him fiercely, even from afar. I often cried with missing him and our other kids. I prayed every day that they would be home soon.

My husband made a return visit to spend additional time with the kids. Finally, eight months after our visit, and a year after starting their adoption, I flew to their orphanage, picked up our children, and brought them home. About a month after coming home, our son, now 5, attempted to assault one of our girls (during play), and she, horrified, immediately came to tell us about it. When we questioned him about the incident, he disclosed extensive sexual abuse from another child, although we suspected that somewhere along the way, an adult had also been involved. We sought post-adoptive services and followed the advice that we were given, but despite our best efforts, we discovered, a little more than a year later, that he had been perpetrating sexual abuse against one of our daughters over a period of months, and molesting another (and clearly “grooming” her for more.)
After a frightening weekend during which we had to report our son to Child Protective Services, our life drastically changed. We moved his bedroom to another floor of the house, alarmed his door, put him (and the girls) in therapy, kept him in sight at all times. He was angry at these changes, and at being denied the sexual outlet, and started acting out. He would rage violently for 2-4 hours per day, actively work to antagonize me, verbally taunt and mock me, threaten to kill me and the other kids, tell me he hated me and wanted me to leave, intentionally and deliberately destroy his belongings, work to set my husband and I against each other and then laugh as we fought. We knew that he was suffering. We knew that he needed help, and desperately. And yet every therapist, counselor, psychologist and psychiatrist that we took him to in our community had a different opinion on what was “wrong” with him, and their suggestions on how to help him were ridiculous. There was no sticker chart that was going to help my boy, and putting him in “time-out”? Please.

In the course of a year, our son had been to an art therapist, a psychologist, and 2 private psychiatrists, had been in an inpatient psychiatric hospital for 2 weeks, done an outpatient psychiatric program for 3 weeks, seen a family therapist, gone to a neuropsychologist, had MRIs, full blood panels, EKGs, EEGs, and been in a school program for kids with emotional disturbances. There were three attachment therapists about 90 minutes from our home (none of whom took insurance). One wanted to swaddle my husband and I in blankets and “hold” us to show us what our child would go through in treatment.. this is not even legitimate attachment therapy. We left that office and never went back. The other two had waiting lists so long that one would not add to the list, and the other projected they could call us in about 11 months. We didn’t have that long.

We were living in day-to-day crisis mode. It was hard to make plans, because we never knew what our son would be like that day. Our other kids were sometimes late to school, because their brother would be raging. On occasion, I called ahead to his teacher and brought him in his pajamas, because he refused to get dressed. To do something as simple as go to the bathroom, I had to escort him to his room and set the alarm first, every time.

He continued to make sexual gestures and comments to our daughter. I could not even send him to the closet to get his coat at the same time as the other kids, because he could not control his words or behavior, and she was afraid. But it also grew increasingly difficult for him to control those behaviors outside of our home too, as he propositioned a therapist, his teacher, and another child at school. We were moving as fast as we could to get him into a specialized residential treatment program; I only prayed that we could get it in place before he hurt someone again.
And finally, he went to residential, my 7 year old baby. It was the best program we could find, the one program that we believed could really help him. We had had to pull strings to get him there, to “work the system” a little bit because it was an out-of-state facility. We glued together a mishmash of private insurance, a grant from an employer, and then Medicaid to fund his care. We participate in his treatment through phone therapy and SKYPE, and we take turns flying to see him every 6-8 weeks or so. He has been in residential for almost a year now.

We see some changes in him. An increased ability to take responsibility for his actions. More cause-and-effect thinking. His aggressiveness and his oppositional behavior still are wildly variable. We don’t know if the hypersexuality is being kept in check by him or merely by the ultra-restrictive environment, but our feeling is that it is probably the latter (just because there has not been enough emphasis on this in therapy, in our opinions).

The biggest change in our son being gone was in us. In me. Once the chaos was removed, I was able to see for the first time the effect he was having on our other kids, and it was not okay. I owe them safety. They deserve, at a bare minimum, to feel safe in their home. I told my husband that our son could not come home, and that I was willing to face whatever consequences of that decision I needed to, even if it meant the end of our marriage. We fought for months. We both felt that “adoption is forever”, and yet I knew that I could not continue to keep our daughters safe, and that the effort to do so was killing me.

We could have tried to keep bouncing our son from one long term residential facility to another until he turned 18, but there was no aspect of this that was appealing. For starters, we felt strongly that he deserved to live in a family. He was as much a victim in this entire scenario as our daughters. To sentence him to 10 more years of institutional living.. on top of the 3 years he had already spent in institutions, seemed inhuman. Not only that, we feared it would only prepare him for living in institutions… like jail. Further, our experiences thus far made us think it would be highly unlikely we could keep him in residential care for the long term. While funding may once have supported this type of care, it certainly does not, now. There were no good options. We loved our son, but did not feel he could live with us. We did not want to sentence him to long term institutionalization in order to maintain custody of him. We decided to dissolve, or legally void, our adoption, and find our son a new family.

Knowing that our son had more challenges than the average child, we took our search to the internet, posting our story on our blog, asking friends and other adoptive families to link to our story, to Facebook, Twitter, and email the link to anyone and everyone they knew. We received emails from all kinds of families who had similar stories; families who had suffered through their dissolutions in silence and isolation and shame, when, in truth, they had done nothing more than give everything they had to kids with very traumatic histories.

Sometimes, that’s just not enough. We also received some unbelievably cruel and sadistic email, from people who had no goal but to wound. Some of it succeeded, although truthfully, there was little that people could say to us that we hadn’t said to ourselves or to each other over the previous two years. I accepted it, telling myself that if it ended with a family for our son, it would all be worth it. Finally, it did, and they were everything that we could have wanted for him.
We are moving forward, slowly. Our son is still “ours”, for the time being. He will finish his treatment; his new family will wait for him. They have agreed to let us continue to have contact with him. They understand that our boy needs as many people in his life that love him as possible.
We are slowly coming to terms with the fact that he will not come home to us, and while this is “for the best”, I find myself struck down by grief unexpectedly. No family ever imagines this outcome. No mother ever dreams of her child leaving like this. This is not how it’s supposed to be. But for now, it is what it is.

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