Three years earlier, I’d buried both of my own children, following a car accident. For months afterward, I kept their bedroom doors firmly closed. Then I started leaving them open instead, because closed doors somehow felt considerably worse. My daughter, Sophia, had left a sweatshirt hanging over her desk chair. My son, Toby, had three library books stacked beside his bed. I genuinely couldn’t bring myself to move a single item.
People kept telling me my grief would eventually change, maybe even fade away entirely. They were technically right about that. It changed from something that crushed me fresh every single morning into something I simply learned to carry silently, without anyone else ever noticing.
Eventually, the silence in that house became genuinely unbearable. That’s precisely why, on one rainy Tuesday, I walked into a foster care agency and told a woman named Patrice I wanted to talk about becoming a parent again.
Patrice didn’t smile right away. “I’m going to ask you something difficult,” she said. “Are you trying to replace your children?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“I don’t think anyone actually could.”
She studied me carefully for a moment. “Good answer.”
The whole process took months altogether — training sessions, interviews, home visits, background checks, and conversations about trauma that sometimes sent me home crying inside my own car. Then one afternoon, Patrice invited me to an agency event, where prospective parents could meet some of the children directly.
Most of the younger kids were busy playing together. One teenage boy sat alone beside a window, a paperback open across his knees. A little girl nearby accidentally knocked over a box of crayons. The boy immediately set down his book and crouched to help her gather them, even crawling beneath a nearby table for the very last blue one. Then he simply returned quietly to his own chair.
“Who’s that?” I asked, nodding toward him.
Patrice followed my gaze. Her expression changed the instant she saw who I meant. “Callum.”
“Can I meet him?”
She hesitated. “You should probably know he’s had a lot of placements.”
“How many?”
“Ten.”
I stared at her. “Was he violent?”
“No.”
“Drugs?”
“No.”
“Did he hurt younger children?”
“No.”
“Then what actually happened?”
Years earlier, after my own husband died, Toby’s teachers had called him “complicated,” purely because he’d stopped talking in class. What they’d actually meant was that my grieving eleven-year-old no longer made their own jobs easy anymore. I genuinely hated that particular word.
