Ruminations of an Old Goat

It wasn't supposed to end like this.

Five years ago, we took legal custody of a nine year old boy. He was a year older than our son and the two of them seemed to get along quite well. The boy's mother was not in a stable situation. While she had a child to worry about, we seriously doubted she ever would reach stability. By taking in her son, we could help both him and her. It seemed like a perfect solution.

Things seemed to go well for a while. There were some issues that caught us by surprise -- such as the day our foster son told his school teacher his mother had died the day before -- but we were able to deal with those issues as they arose. It was the issues we simply could not deal with that caused the problems.

Any parent who takes a child to grocery story knows the child will beg to push the cart. If you have more than one child with you, they'll argue over who gets to push the cart. That happened to me a couple of weeks after our foster son moved in with us. My son offered a compromise, "We can flip a coin to see who pushes the cart this time and then take turns." But my foster son wasn't interested in flipping coins or taking turns. He insisted that he be allowed to push the cart, period. Tired of the argument, I stepped in, announcing that if they couldn't work out an agreement, then neither of them would ever get to push the cart. Rather than agree to the compromise, allowing him to get his way half the time, my foster son agreed that neither one of them would push the cart.

That was our first example of our foster son's scorched earth, my-way-or-no-way form of "negotiating" with our son. His world view was so warped that he was happy with the result as long as my son didn't even partially get his way. Usually, that meant our foster son didn't get his way, either, but he preferred that to any compromise. If that had been the only problem, we could have handled the situation. It wasn't.

Our foster son was initially quite polite, particularly when he knew my wife or I were around. When we weren't there, he waged relentless psychological warfare on our son. The situation was even worse at school, where our foster son worked diligently to undermine my son's relationship with his friends and classmates. It didn't help that our son turned out to be on the autism spectrum (they used to call it Asperger's Syndrome), leaving him rather awkward in social situations. At this point, we started taking both boys to therapists; our foster son to figure out what was driving his behavior and our son to help him figure out how to deal with the foster brother he neither asked for nor deserved.

It here that we first heard of Reactive Attachment Disorder. Children with RAD are described as having grossly disturbed internal working models of relationships. The description sounds bad enough. The reality is worse. No parent can be prepared for the anger that lives inside children with RAD. Nothing can prepare you to literally have to fight the child to get them to trust you, much less accept you as family. Nothing can prepare a woman to be so thoroughly rejected, as children with RAD will almost always reject the mother. Merely being treated with indifference is the father's usual lot. But as hard as a child with RAD can be on parents, that's nothing compared to what the effect can be on other children in the family.

Three years into relationship with our foster son, my wife and I sat in the office with our son's therapist. She was the therapist who originally diagnosed our foster son with RAD. She looked across her desk and told us our son was "barely hanging on" and in real danger of suffering a psychological break down -- at the age of 11 -- all because of the stress of dealing with our foster son. Unless you've been in such a situation, you simply cannot conceive of the guilt I felt after hearing such a pronouncement. How could such good intentions go so thoroughly awry? How could I have done something like this to my son?

That afternoon, I made arrangements for our foster son to be placed in a therapeutic group home. Our foster son spent eight months in the group home, watched over and helped by a truly amazing and caring staff. Of the various boys who came and left during that time, our foster son was the star pupil. His visits home during that time were much less dramatic and we were honestly pleased to have him return home at the end of eight months. We did take the precaution of enrolling him in a different school, so he and our son would have plenty of time apart from each other, and made sure to continue our foster son's therapy, but things really seemed to be looking up. And our lives were generally quiet for several months.

What we didn't know during those months was that our foster son was getting involved in drugs, including helping to sell them to his fellow middle school students. Then, just a few months ago, he took a pretty wicked knife to school and got caught. His lack of concern for the possible ramifications of his actions led to a counselor at Juvenile Justice to send him to court. The hope was to put the fear of God into him. It didn't work. Just two days after his court appearance, he violently assaulted a younger boy, pounding on the boy mercilessly. This led to more suspensions, another court appearance, and our realization that our foster son wasn't improving, he was just getting better at hiding his issues from us.

It was shortly after the assault that I received the phone call from our foster son's mother. She had heard about the assault from others she knew who lived in our area. She told me her life was stable, she was engaged, and she felt she was in a position to take care of her son again.

Plans were made to modify the court order that had granted us legal custody of our foster son, returning all responsibility for him to his mother. Further plans were made to take our foster son to Philadelphia, where his mother now lives, once school was out for the summer.

School let out last Thursday. On Friday, three of us -- my son, my foster son, and I -- loaded into the minivan and drove to Philadelphia. We didn't spend much time in Philadelphia, wanting to allow our foster son to begin getting to know his mother again. My son and I had only been on the road home for five minutes when the guilt hit me. I couldn't stop myself from thinking that I had abandoned my foster son. I couldn't stop myself from thinking of him, lost and alone in a strange place. I couldn't stop myself from thinking this way, even though I had left him with his own mother. It sounds paradoxical, but emotions aren't known to pay much attention to logic.

Three of us made the trip to Philadelphia. Two of us made the return trip to Raleigh. Only when I was safely home, physically exhausted and emotionally wrung out, did the tears finally fall. Tears of rage and grief. Tears of pain and relief.

Tears for the boy I tried to help but could not.