Clean Break

She told me, as casually as mentioning the weather, that someone always took the labels off the plastic water bottles in their house. "I picked one up 'cause I was thirsty, and it was nasty."

The usual drink of choice in that house was vodka.

She was eight.

We heard other stories all the time, just as casually, as if it were nothing. And to the kids, it pretty much was.

The more we learned, the more it explained a lot of the behavior we experienced during our custody battle with her mother.

Ultimately, and with a lot of misgivings, we agreed to let her go back. The child leapt into her mother's new boyfriend's car, and headed back to Kentucky without so much as a 'see ya'.

Everyone keeps saying, "You must be so relieved."

Oh, most definitely. Every morning, I woke up preparing for war.

I know that sounds a touch dramatic, but that's what it’s like to raise a child who, according to the professionals, doesn’t know what love is.

It was the root of so much.

People love to romanticize raising a traumatized child, and I get it, I really do. It sounds noble, cinematic even.

You picture some sort of tearful breakthrough with fierce hugs and happy tears, but life ain't no movie, is it?

We knew (and were warned) this would be like nothing we'd ever taken on before. We expected a rough adjustment period and eventually a life of relative normalcy.

We prepared for the worst and hoped for the best, convinced love, structure, and the support of professionals could fix everything.

But we had no idea how deep the dysfunction ran, and it nearly cost us everything.

We had multiple doctors and specialists diagnosing years of untreated trauma.