Nobody Told Me This Road Was Lonely

In the foster care world, you do not make friends.

I know that sounds extreme. But it is true in a way that most people on the outside do not understand. What happens in your home stays in your home. The children you care for have privacy rights. The cases are confidential. The heartbreak is not something you can talk about at a dinner party or post about on social media. And the other foster parents, the ones who might actually understand, are either too guarded, too exhausted, or too different in their approach for the friendship to take hold in any real way.

So you carry it alone. For months. For years. For as long as you say yes.

I did this for ten years. Ten years of loving children through some of the hardest seasons of their lives and mine, without a single friend who truly understood what I was living inside of. My husband was there. But he was also inside of it, which meant he was not exactly a neutral place to put things down either. And the rest of the world? The rest of the world thought fostering was beautiful and noble and something they could never do. Which made it even harder to say: this is breaking me.

"The anger built up little by little, year by year. I just thought it was the kids, my husband getting on my nerves. But it was me. I had lost myself in this big world of foster care. And I was furious about it."

I woke up angry. I went to bed angry. The kind of angry where your throat hurts. The kind of angry that has nowhere to go because you are not allowed to talk about where it came from.

I went to the doctor. They wanted to put me on antidepressants. I refused at first. I was convinced something else was wrong, that someone just needed to look closer, listen longer. Eventually I gave in. I was on them for about a year. Coming off of them was one of the hardest things I have ever done physically. I was also going through menopause at the same time, which nobody had prepared me for either. Hormone replacement on top of everything else. My body was unraveling in ways I did not have language for, and the medical system kept handing me prescriptions instead of answers.

At some point I hated everyone. Including myself. I did not recognize the woman I had become. I did not like her.

Here Is What the Research Doesn't Say

There is a lot of data on what foster care does to children. And that data is important, it should alarm every one of us. But there is almost nothing on what it does to the adults who show up for those children every single day. And that absence is its own kind of answer.

What the research does tell us

25%

One in four foster care alumni experience PTSD, twice the rate of Iraq war veterans, according to a landmark study by Harvard Medical School, the University of Michigan, and Casey Family Programs.

Source: Casey Family Programs / Harvard Medical School Northwest Foster Care Alumni Study

More than 50%

More than half of adolescents in the child welfare system have been diagnosed with at least one mental health disorder, compared with just one-fifth of adolescents in the general population.

Source: National Foster Youth Institute

Now here is the statistic nobody has:

What percentage of foster parents are on antidepressants? What is the PTSD rate among the adults absorbing the trauma of these children day in and day out, often without support, often without community, often without anyone asking how they are doing?

Nobody is tracking that. Nobody is studying it. And that absence is not accidental, it reflects a system that has always been better at recruiting families than sustaining them.

If children who spend time in foster care develop PTSD at twice the rate of war veterans, what do we think is happening to the parents who are living alongside that trauma every single day, for years, without a roadmap and without a community?

I can tell you what happened to me. I became someone I didn't recognize. And I was one of the ones who stayed.

The Loneliness Nobody Talks About

Foster care is one of the only callings I know of where the people living it are actively discouraged from talking about it. Not because of cruelty, because of confidentiality, because of liability, because of the legitimate need to protect the children in your home. But the result is a community of caregivers who are carrying enormous weight in total silence.

You cannot post about the placement that broke your heart. You cannot tell your family what is happening in your home. You cannot vent to your friends because most of them do not understand and some of them will say things that make it worse. And the other foster parents the ones who are the closest to understanding, are often strangers who show up at the same training and then disappear back into their own separate silences.

I went to therapy for years before I actually started telling the truth about what I was living. Years of going just to have somewhere to put it down. It felt like talking to a friend, because in the foster care world, I didn't have any. That was the only place I had.

"Nobody is counting what this does to the parents. Nobody is tracking the antidepressants, the autoimmune diagnoses, the marriages that quietly came apart. The system measures placements. It does not measure the cost."

What I Know Now

The anger I carried for all those years was not a character flaw. It was not depression. It was not something that needed to be medicated away, though at the time, medication was the only tool anyone handed me. It was the accumulated weight of giving without being replenished. Of loving without being seen. Of carrying children through their hardest seasons while quietly losing myself in the process.

I was not broken. I was depleted. And those are not the same thing.

If you are a foster or adoptive parent reading this and you recognize yourself in any of these words, the anger, the isolation, the doctor appointments that go nowhere, the exhaustion that sleep doesn't fix…I want you to hear something clearly:

You are not failing.

You are not weak.

You are not the problem.

You are someone who has been carrying an enormous amount for a very long time, in a system that was never designed to carry it with you. And you deserve support that actually meets the weight of what you are living.

I see you. And I know how heavy it is

This essay is an ongoing series called The Unquiet Pages, where I write the things that needed to be said about foster care, adoption, healing, and the long walk back to yourself. If it resonated, share it with someone who needs to feel less alone. And if you are in the thick of it right now reach out. You do not have to carry this in silence.

-Saraphina Mare-