05/25/2026
If I were sitting across from you in real life right now, I would pour you a cup of coffee, pull up a chair, and tell you something I wish someone had told me years ago: This work changes you, too.
Not because you do not love these children enough. Not because you are weak. Not because you are failing. But because walking alongside children from hard places leaves an imprint on the people loving them, too.
When we first became foster parents, I was idealistic and full of hope. I knew foster care would be hard. I knew trauma existed. I knew children would enter our home carrying pain and loss.
What I did not fully understand was how deeply those stories, behaviors, crises, and heartbreaks would eventually settle into my own nervous system, too.
Over the years, we have held babies withdrawing from drugs while their tiny bodies trembled in our arms. We have sat in emergency rooms, courtrooms, therapy offices, psychiatric appointments, school meetings, and visitation centers.
We have listened to heartbreaking disclosures no child should ever have to make.
We have chased terrified children through neighborhoods. We have stood in our home during violent escalations trying to keep everyone safe. We have watched trauma impact not only children, but our home, our routines, our peace, our marriage, our other children, and our own sense of safety too.
Somewhere along the way, I stopped sleeping deeply. I became hypervigilant. Easily startled. Emotionally exhausted. Always waiting for the next phone call, the next crisis, the next escalation, the next thing to fall apart.
For a long time, I convinced myself this was simply what “good foster parents” did.
We carried impossible things quietly. We pushed through. We survived.
But eventually my body stopped cooperating with the story I was trying to tell myself. After years of living in chronic stress and survival mode, my doctor gently suggested I may be dealing with PTSD from prolonged trauma exposure. That conversation forced me to acknowledge something I think many foster and adoptive parents quietly experience but rarely talk about: Secondary trauma is real.
Loving children from hard places while continually living inside crisis, grief, chaos, and trauma exposure changes you.
It can make you more compassionate, empathetic, and aware. But it can also leave you depleted. Burned out. Hypervigilant. Emotionally numb. Overstimulated. Exhausted in ways sleep cannot fix. And yet somehow, many foster parents still wake up every morning and keep going. We pack lunches. Drive to therapy. Advocate at schools. Navigate behaviors. Do mountains of laundry. Love fiercely. Show up again and again. Not because we are superheroes. But because we love these children deeply.
I do not regret this life. Not even a little. Foster care shaped our family profoundly. It grew our compassion, stretched our faith, and helped shape the mission behind Compassion Connection and the work we continue to do today.
But I do think foster and adoptive parents need more honesty around the emotional cost of this work. We need more conversations about secondary trauma. More support. More respite. More therapy. More community. More grace.
And maybe most importantly, we need to stop acting like struggling means we are failing. Sometimes it simply means we have been carrying very heavy things for a very long time.
To every foster, adoptive, and kinship parent quietly carrying more than people realize: You are not alone.
