A friend took me out to lunch today. She wanted to tell me about how she'd found her foster-son from years ago on Facebook. He's 16 now. He still has the toy box she and her husband gave him when he was a boy.
He's eager to chat with her, and when she invited me to lunch she was ecstatic to have found him.
But by the time we got around to actually meeting for lunch, two weeks later, she'd actually talked with him.
"He's so...violent," she said in despair. "I tried, I told him, that's not how we raised you."
But he's living with his father, and the lessons of home are hard to break even if the child doesn't go back.
We talked, for the first time, about Jacob and about - let's call him D.
D. got kicked out of so many schools, she told me. So many. She can't remember how often she had to leave work to rush off and get him because he was out of control, hitting teachers and other kids.
It sounded a lot like Jacob, but worse. She had D. longer. For years. She tried all that time to fight for him to get help, and no one would let her get him anything - not counseling, not medicine, nothing.
By the time he was returned to his family, she said, a part of her hoped he would go.
"I didn't want him to go back to THEM," she said. "But I was just being terrorized. So there was some relief."
I told her a little bit about Jacob, and she told me she wouldn't blame us for "anything you decided to do."
Especially not with the baby coming. How could we keep the baby safe, she asked.
But I could not bring myself to say the words, "We sent him away."
It is still just too awful.
As I listened to her despair about trying to help D. now, whom she still loves, trying to guide him through Facebook conversations, I had to confess I hoped Jacob would contact me some day.
I hope he will forgive me.
