Dear Director,
I feel like a failure as an adoptive parent. I adopted Jules when he was 3. He is 15 now. For the past 4 years he has been in 3 different Residential Treatment Centers. Whenever he gets back home, all the old patterns of explosions, stealing, and utter chaos eventually continue. This time, his team is suggesting a different kind of placement where I remain his legal parent, yet he doesn’t live with me. I just keep remembering when the judge said to me in all seriousness all those years ago at his adoption: “Do you understand that this boy is now your child with all the commitment and responsibilities as if he was your child by birth?” Jules doesn’t want to live with me anymore and I recognize it just won’t work. So why do I feel so bad?
Signed, Weary and Sorrowful
Dear Weary and Sorrowful,
Some of my most important lessons in my over twenty-years here at JFS I have learned, not from books or trainings, but from our foster and adoptive families. Mrs. Z taught me this one the first year I was here, around the time she was working in our Post Perm program to find a Residential Treatment program in another state for her adopted daughter, who had sexually abused her adopted son. Having run out of placements here in PA, they were considering places in Florida, Maryland, and Utah, and I asked her if she needed to relinquish her rights as an adoptive parent. She told me that her daughter’s need for a parent had never been greater than when she could not be safely in their family home, and that she, Mrs. Z, would not relinquish her rights, because who else but a parent would advocate for her daughter wherever she lived or received treatment. She said to me, I am her mother, even if she can never live safely in my home again. Mrs. Z knew that parenting a child and having them safe at home, for many reasons, were two different things. And this I have repeated to many people working in and with our Post Perm program since. Just ask Kim.
When we give birth to a child, we pray that we can carefully guide them into being safe and healthy adults, that they will somehow escape all of childhood without broken bones, childhood cancer, learning disabilities, bullying by other children, exposure to illegal drugs, car accidents, and on and on. But we cannot do this and bring them up to be in the world, no matter how hard we try. Things happen. The best of parents know about kids sneaking off from school with the “cool kid” to smoke weed as a way to be accepted. We know about the older boy who asks our daughter to the fall dance then ghosts them, all on a dare. We cannot keep them from making mistakes, and yet, they are still our children when they wreck their fourth car and get arrested for possession of heroin and lose a leg playing chicken on the train tracks. They are ours to parent to the best of our ability. And ours to parent after they “grow up” and leave home.
That is all that we ask you to do for your adoptive children. You did not borrow them to see if it works out. You did not take them for a test drive for ten years to make sure they don’t grow up gay. You did not commit until they mess up and get that girl pregnant. They need us always and forever, even when they cannot be safe in our homes. Because who knows them better than you and who can fight harder and longer than you? Who will speak up for them if they cannot speak up for themselves? Who will advocate for one more round of NARCAN and rehab? Parenting is always about doing what is best for the child, even when it is not best for you. It is what we ask of all birth parents. And it is all we expect from you.
-The Director
