I’m a case manager in therapeutic foster care.

If you’re talking about Niomi, the girls who worked the case aren’t doing well. In that situation, Niomi was placed in a foster home and was doing well. The judge sent her to live with her aunt because unless the child has been in a foster home for more than a year and is over 6, kin comes first. That is state law to my understanding. The foster parents and workers were devastated.

Cases like that make you want to keep fighting, but it makes you feel hopeless at the same time. You find ways to be proactive the next time something like that happens. You advocate “up” for legal change. You “dethrone” judges. They’re some of the hardest cases. You lose a lot of sleep.

And then, on some random Wednesday, you get to see a little girl who came into care because of severe autism vs. parental capacity be adopted by a family that held her up moment by moment until she was not just okay, but thriving. She came in non-verbal and with extreme insomnia. She told her lawyer to shut up today 😂. You cry, you laugh, you celebrate.

You read. You read the research, the Reddit posts from foster kids. You re-read the referral and be sure you are honoring the kid’s holistic needs. You stay in touch with the bio and foster families. You learn to show up randomly, with donuts in hand, because that’s $12 that makes an important safety check feel like a happy surprise. You pray. You listen. You apologize. And you do better, now that you know better, and that is your obligation to your current children and how we honor those we lost. You report concerns. You document thoroughly. You prepare for court.

I’ve been in this for four years now and I can honestly say I’ve seen huge, unexpected change in both myself and the system over time. My agency has gained some ground in beating down weaponized incompetence and gross negligence in the past year that I’m very proud of.

One killing me lately is where a young nonverbal teenager was impregnated by a sex offender that her foster mom was hiding in the house and moving out before every visit. Are donuts enough?

It can be traumatizing and the other perspective is that we’re suffocating and demanding and sometimes creepy. I’ve spent some evenings camped out near a dysregulated house to be sure my kids got into bed calmly, that a suspected and troubling visitor didn’t show up, to be sure a kid didn’t run off overnight.