The Grief They Don’t Warn You About

I haven’t heard from her in two weeks.

Two weeks since she moved into that foster home we all prayed for, worked for, fought for. Two weeks since I sent that text to her new foster mom. Warm. Professional. Just wanting to schedule our first visit. Two weeks of silence that sits heavier than I ever expected.

And I’m grieving.

Not the kind of grief people recognize. There was no funeral, no formal goodbye. She’s alive. She’s hopefully thriving. This is supposed to be the *good* outcome. This is what we worked toward for over a year. Getting her out of that residential program and into a family. So why does my chest feel this tight? Why do I keep checking my phone?

Here’s what they don’t tell you when you’re a former foster youth who grows up and decides to do this work. You will give these kids everything you didn’t have. You will pour from a cup you once had to fill all by yourself. And sometimes, *especially* when you do it right, you will have to let them go.

I can still see her face that first day. Arms crossed, eyes hard, walls up so high I couldn’t even see over them. She didn’t want a mentor. Especially not me. Especially not someone asking questions, trying to build trust, showing up when everyone else had a habit of disappearing.

But I kept showing up anyway.

Because I knew those walls. I’d built them myself once. I knew they weren’t keeping me out. They were keeping her safe. So I showed up. Week after week. Bringing nothing but consistency and the quiet promise that I wasn’t going anywhere.

And slowly, brick by brick, those walls came down.

We became something I can’t quite categorize. Mentor and mentee, sure. But also big sister and little sister. Sometimes mother and daughter. Sometimes just two people who understood what it meant to be in a system that wasn’t designed to hold you gently. We were everything we needed to be for each other in any given moment.

For a year, her team worked relentlessly. Her social worker. Her clinicians. Me, going on TV. Yes, actually on television. Talking about this beautiful, complicated, deserving young woman who just needed someone to say yes. Someone to choose her. Someone to see past the file and the behaviors and the trauma responses to the child underneath who was just desperate to belong.

And in the middle of all that work, there were so many moments where I had to be her hope when she’d run out of her own.

“Nobody’s gonna want me.”

“Yes, they will.”

“I’m gonna age out here, aren’t I?”

“No, baby girl. We’re not giving up.”

“Why doesn’t anyone choose me?”

And this one broke me every single time because I didn’t have a good answer. I just had my presence. My persistence. My refusal to let her believe the lie that she was unwantable.

I held hope for her when she couldn’t hold it herself. I believed in her future when she couldn’t see one. And finally, *finally*, a foster family said yes.

In those final weeks before placement, she asked me constantly. Different words, same fear.

“You’re still gonna be my mentor when I leave, right?”

“You’re not gonna forget about me?”

“We’re still gonna talk, right?”

Every time, I told her the same thing. “Absolutely. I’m not going anywhere. We’re gonna do life together.”

That’s our tagline at Unashamed Inc. “We want to do life with you.” I meant every word.

And then she moved. And I gave it a week to let her settle. Then I reached out to her foster mom. Warm. Professional. Excited. Just wanting to schedule a time to visit, to stay connected, to keep my promise.

Silence.

I wasn’t prepared for this feeling. I’ve been in this work long enough. I know the goal. The goal is reunification, permanency. The goal is stability. The goal is to get these kids into homes where they can heal and grow and finally just be children. The goal is to work ourselves out of a job in their lives, to become less necessary because they have what they need.

I know this intellectually.

But my heart? My heart is still with that little girl who didn’t want me at first, who learned to trust me anyway, who asked me not to leave.

And here’s what nobody talks about. When you’re a former foster youth doing this work, you’re not just mentoring or supporting or advocating. You’re healing your own younger self through every child you serve. You’re giving away what you never got. You’re creating the safety net you wish had existed for you.

So when those relationships shift or end, even for good reasons, even for the right reasons, it touches something deeper than professional boundaries. It touches the abandoned child you used to be. It touches every goodbye you didn’t get to choose, every relationship that ended without your consent, every time you were moved or placed or discharged without anyone asking how you felt about it.

We pour from our wounds into theirs. And sometimes when we have to let go, we bleed.

There are other kids waiting. I know this. My email has message after message from social workers asking if I can mentor their client, their teen, their young adult. The need is endless. The work continues.

But how do you move forward when your heart is still standing at her door?

This is the tension nobody prepares you for. Your job is to move on to the next child. Your heart is still with the last one. And somehow you have to hold both of these truths at the same time without breaking.

I think this is why there aren’t enough of us doing this work. Not just former foster youth, but anyone who gets close enough to truly love these kids. Because loving kids in care means practicing radical attachment knowing you might have to practice radical release. It means building deep, meaningful, transformative relationships knowing the system might separate you without warning or explanation.

It means choosing to be heartbroken over and over again because the alternative is worse. Not loving them fully.

But here’s something else we need to talk about. Something we don’t say out loud enough to each other. Sometimes we can’t save them. Sometimes no matter how much we pour in, no matter how hard we fight, no matter how deeply we love, we can’t be their rescue.

And we have to make peace with that.

I know what it’s like to want to be everything for these kids. To want to fix what was broken in them because we know what broken feels like. To want to give them the miracle we either got or desperately needed. But sometimes the thing they need most isn’t us. Sometimes what they’re reaching for, what they’re aching for, is something we can’t give them.

Remember what you wanted most when you were in their shoes? For most of us, it wasn’t a perfect mentor or a well-meaning program or even a safe foster home. It was our mama. Our daddy. Our family. The original thing. The thing that got broken or taken or lost.

These kids are no different. And sometimes they choose the broken thing over the safe thing because the broken thing is *theirs*. Sometimes they go back to situations we fought to get them out of. Sometimes they reject the stability we worked so hard to build. Sometimes they disappear into systems and cycles we can’t penetrate.

And it will wreck you if you let it. It will make you question everything you’re doing, everything you’ve built, everything you believe about this work.

But listen to me. You are not their savior. You were never meant to be. Your job was never to fix them or save them or keep them from every hard thing. Your job was to show up. To be consistent. To love them well in the time you had. To plant seeds of worth and hope and possibility that might not bloom until years after you’re gone.

You did that. Even when it doesn’t feel like enough, you did that.

We have to release ourselves from the weight of outcomes we can’t control. We have to trust that our presence mattered even when we can’t see the results. We have to believe that love is never wasted, even when it doesn’t look like we thought it would.

You can’t save them all. You can’t even save most of them. But you can love them. You can show up. You can be the one person who didn’t give up, didn’t walk away, didn’t stop believing in them even when they stopped believing in themselves.

And sometimes, that has to be enough. Not because it’s easy to accept, but because it’s true.

If you’re a foster parent reading this, or if you’re a birth parent who just experienced reunification, please hear me. The mentor who came before you? The youth care worker? The teacher who stayed after school? The counselor who showed up every week? We’re not trying to overstep. We’re not questioning your role or your importance. We’re just trying to keep our promises.

These kids have had enough broken promises. If we said we’d stay, we need you to let us stay. Even in a smaller capacity, even in a different role. Let us send the birthday card. Let us have the monthly check-in. Let us keep showing up in whatever way makes sense for your family structure.

Because here’s what happens when you honor those connections. You’re teaching that child that people can stay. That love doesn’t have to end when circumstances change. That relationships can evolve and adapt and continue. You’re helping them build a web of support instead of a single thread that might break.

And to the social workers and case managers, please remember this. When you’re making placement decisions and case plan changes, there are people who’ve been walking with these kids who are suddenly cut off. A heads up would help. A transition plan would be beautiful. An acknowledgment that these relationships matter. That would mean everything.

If you’re reading this and you’re a former foster youth who’s felt this grief, I see you. If you’re pouring into kids from the overflow of your own unmet needs, I understand. If you’re trying to be for them what no one was for you, I get it. And if you’re struggling with that terrible, beautiful tension of loving kids you might have to let go, you’re not alone in this.

This work will break your heart. Let it. That breaking open is what makes room for the next child, and the next, and the next. Your capacity to love isn’t diminished by grief. It’s deepened by it.

But please, also take care of yourself. Go to therapy. Build your own support system. Learn to recognize when you’re giving from your wound instead of your healing. Set boundaries even when it feels impossible. Remember that you can’t pour from an empty cup, and you don’t honor your younger self by destroying your current self. Remember that you can’t save them all, and you were never supposed to.

The kids need you whole, not shattered.

And to my girl, if you ever read this, I want you to know this. I’m still here. The silence doesn’t change my commitment. The distance doesn’t diminish my love. You are not forgotten. You are not replaceable. You are not just another case, another file, another kid I helped.

You changed me. You taught me things about resilience and hope and second chances that I couldn’t have learned any other way. You let me keep my promise to my younger self. That if I ever had the chance, I would be for someone else what I needed someone to be for me.

I don’t know if we’ll talk again soon. I don’t know what your new family needs or what boundaries they’re setting. But I know this. Everything we built together? That’s yours to keep. The worth you discovered. The voice you found. The belief that you deserve good things. That belongs to you now, whether I’m in the room or not.

And if you ever need me, I’m a phone call away. Always.

Maybe this is what it means to love kids in care when you’ve been one. You hold the grief and the gift in the same hand. The grief of letting go. The gift of having had the chance to love them at all.

I’m learning that both can be true. I can miss her and celebrate her new beginning. I can feel the loss and trust the process. I can grieve this chapter closing and have hope for her next one.

This is the work. Not just the mentoring and the advocating and the showing up. But this. The loving and the releasing. The holding on and the letting go. The choosing to stay soft enough to keep getting hurt because these kids deserve people in their lives who love big and stay present and refuse to become another person who disappeared.

So I’ll sit with this grief. I’ll let it teach me. I’ll let it make me more tender, not more hardened. And when I’m ready, when my heart has made enough room, I’ll say yes to the next child who needs someone to believe in them when they can’t believe in themselves.

Because that’s what we do. We who’ve been those kids. We love loud. We show up hard. We give everything we didn’t have.

And sometimes, when we’ve done it right, we have to learn to let go.

This is the grief they don’t warn you about.

But I’m learning it might also be the holiest work I’ll ever do.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​