We have adopted 5 children with varying degrees of trauma backgrounds. The first sibling set of 3 came to us in 2014. They lived with relatives, friends, endured food insecurity, hunger, malnourishment, and neglect. The youngest was 3, still in diapers, still drinking from a bottle, still sucking a pacifier. The 4 year old couldn't sit still, kept asking the same questions over and over ( What's your name? What color is the sky? Is that the sky?) The 8 year old tantrummed regularly for three days at a time, stopping to eat and refusing to sleep.
All three started in the same bed, with clothes with holes or that didn't fit. Garbage bags of broken toys and strange clothing showed up periodically after parental visits. Nothing was really usable. We bought clothing for the kids and fitted thin appropriate underwear and undershirts, socks, sneakers, shorts for summer, and pajamas. The kids would leave my house in matching new outfits with sneakers for running and come back two hours later in other clothes and flip flops. What happened to their other clothes? It's one of life's great mysteries.
The kids would talk to their parents on the phone every night. The parents would promise that they would be back home soon. Ten days after arriving at our house, their parents were to go to family court to determine custody. (We were told nothing beyond this information.) The parents assured the kids that everything was fine and that they would be able to pack their stuff and come home the next day.
When they left court the next day, we received a call from the caseworkers stating that everything had been postponed until August 25 and asking if we would keep the kids for the summer. They had some profound deficits but surely we could handle things for a few months. Right?
