Full Circle

On teaching, motherhood, and the places that shape us.

Before I was a mother, I was a young teacher who thought love and commitment could fix almost anything.

After college in Nebraska, I moved back to Denver to be close to family. I had an elementary education degree, an early childhood license, and something else I can’t quite remember anymore—it feels like 127 years ago. I wanted to work with kids. I wanted to teach.

Somehow, I stumbled into a job as an overnight youth treatment counselor at a place that had been around for more than a hundred years—once an orphanage, now a residential treatment facility.

Tennyson Center for Children.

I was young. Naive. I knew nothing about the foster care system. Nothing about trauma, failed placements, or emotional disabilities. But I fell hard. I loved those kids fiercely. I believed in them completely. And somewhere in the middle of the hardest days I’d ever worked, I found my people.

We had days that broke us open—and then we laughed harder than I ever remember laughing before. I didn’t know it at the time, but I had stumbled into a home I didn’t know I needed.

While serving students with emotional disabilities, I went back to graduate school to add special education to my licenses. Tennyson didn’t just shape my career—it shaped how I saw the world.

It was there that I first learned about the foster care system. It was there that adoption stopped feeling abstract and started feeling inevitable. Chris and I couldn’t conceive, and it felt natural—almost obvious—to open our home. I was already loving children who needed stability. Why couldn’t one of them become ours?

We made rules.
Ages zero to four.
Any race.
Any sex.
Any special needs.

We were licensed for three days when the call came.

Infant boy.
African American.
Cocaine exposure.
Still at the hospital.
Adoption likely.

All in.

How do you prepare for bringing home a child ages 0-4? You don’t-there’s no way to know what you’ll need. We borrowed a car seat from the caseworker. I walked out and immediately took seven weeks off work. Called everyone we knew. Family and friends showed up with bottles, clothes, blankets—everything we didn’t know we needed. My sister made spaghetti that first night because I couldn’t even think that many steps ahead and food was not on my radar.

That day is still crystal clear. One of the clearest days of my life.

I left Tennyson years later and built a career as a Director of Special Education. Carter grew. We worked hard to create safety. Stability. A life.

When he started middle school, I was hopeful. I wanted him to thrive. To find peace. To experience the ordinary messiness of adolescence. I believed—desperately—that love, structure, and time would be enough.

It didn’t take long to know otherwise.

With tears, therapy, and the support of people who loved us, we made a decision that terrified me: a separate school. Day treatment. Facility school. Call it whatever you want.

Here’s the thing about knowing too much—it doesn’t always make things easier.

I knew what these places were. I loved them. They gave me my family. But I also knew what it meant to need them.

The placement call came.

Tennyson Center.
ASPEN Program.

I was stunned.

Carter’s first separate school would be in the very building where I once taught. In the same room. In the same program I created years ago.

The place that shaped me would now hold my son.

And the people who would hold him?
They were my friends.

Colleagues I had worked alongside nearly twenty years earlier—people who had once sat next to me on hard nights, who had loved kids when loving them was exhausting, who understood the weight and the privilege of this work. There is something profoundly humbling about handing your child to people who already know how to show up when things are hard—and choosing to trust them anyway.

We were coming home.

And still—this is not the ending I imagined.

Years later, Carter now lives in a residential treatment facility in South Carolina—1,500 miles from home. A reality I never believed would be ours. A line I never thought we’d cross. A grief I am still learning how to carry.

This is the full circle no one prepares you for—
the one where love doesn’t fix everything, where expertise doesn’t protect you, where the story you thought you were writing turns out to be something else entirely.

And yet.

I know these places. I know the people who show up every day—to separate schools, to treatment facilities, to classrooms most people will never see. I know the skill, patience, humor, and fierce compassion it takes to keep choosing children who push back against every boundary.

This work is sacred, even when it is invisible.

Hope doesn’t live in pretending this is okay.

It lives in telling the truth.
In trusting the people who hold your child when you can’t.
In continuing to love—fiercely, imperfectly, anyway.

Full circle moments aren’t always neat. Sometimes they don’t bring closure—only recognition. A quiet understanding that the places that shaped you once may shape you again, differently this time.

This is not where we thought we’d be.
But it is still our story.

And I am still holding hope.