What’s a chapter of your life you’d title “The Hard Years” — and what got you through it?

There were probably two sets of years that I would title the hard years and they both have to deal with the adoption, but in different ways.

The first two years were super hard because our kids had never lived in a home where anyone had any kind of positive expectation of them. They were grueling years, but slowly we made progress. We went from me calling the emergency help line while hiding under a desk to me feeling safe enough to be alone with the girls in the house. Those were hard years. Full of property destruction and so much misplaced anger directed at me. Adoption is not for the faint of heart.

Then for a brief month or so everything sort of shifted and the girls began to settle in and we were all finally in a routine of expectations and regulation. They knew what to expect from me and I knew what to expect from then.

Then March 2020, and our lives were completely destroyed. Our kids were so angry by all the restrictions and the loss of another life. We never fully bounced back from that. I would say 2022, we maybe were kind of back, but not like it was the first time. We went through so much during the shutdowns and without school and then online school, I never got a break. It was 24/7 trying to help regulate two kids who had briefly experienced regulation for the first time in their lives and had it snatched from them again. From the whole household.

I had COVID during the early days. I had it when the shutdown began. They did not know how to trace it, but I was basically drowning and unable to breathe for months. It took almost two years before I could breathe normally again. It was the worst time of my life. All the work I had done for the last two years was gone and I was not healthy enough to try and keep it together.

So we all suffered. I tried. My partner helped us get through the worst of it. He had COVID the same time I did and he was down, but for only a month with no lasting issues. He tried to step up and take care of everything that I once did, but he was not great at it. He did not have the practice I had or the trust of the girls that I earned. Instead they had to watch me struggle to breathe because they would not take me in at the hospital. It was a horrible time.

The girls never give him the credit he deserves for trying. Luckily, his work went virtual for the worst of my sickness. Once he was well, he was back to working nights online and trying to get the three of us through the day. Without him, I honestly do not know what would have happened. I was trying to field the biggest issues when I could not even sit up right.

COVID created a huge setback for us and I do not think we ever fully recovered as a family. It set us up for almost divorce. The girls left. Though one regrets it already and is in regular contact again. We were building something, but the disappointment and destruction brought upon us by outside forces fractured it through no fault of anyone in the family. Try telling that to two girls who had been let down by everyone in their lives. We had the ‘Hard Years’ and the ‘Harder Years’. And the only way my partner and I got through it was relying on each other.