The Great Healer and the small social worker

*I have been in court as an obese, toothless, 30-something mother weeped when a judge re-iterated that her child would not be coming back to live with her until she had a place to live.

I have cried with a young pregnant woman after she got the news that an STD she didn't know she had was putting her baby at risk and that she would carry the disease with her for the rest of her life.

I have sat with a frustrated and torn mother as she stated that she has hurt her children in frustration and as she stated 'on the record' that she couldn't handle them and wanted to give them a chance to have a different life with someone else.  I was with her as she kissed her youngest goodbye and told him she loved him.

I have watched a mother toss her toddler to the floor, oblivious to how her actions might hurt the child, out of anger.

I have spent anxious hours with a mom as she alternately panicked and cried out of frustration while trying to get ahold of one of her child's caretakers on the phone.  She could not locate her child and suspected that she was being abused, but there was little this mother could do about the situation.

I have come alongside a young mother that was terrified to crawl through a dark tunnel at a museum to the point of hysteria, yet was teaching her own child to bully others and to not show his fear of anything.

I have been in the ER with a desperate young mother as her child struggled to breathe and the asthma treatments weren't helping.

I have sat in a child's room as he, out of sheer inability to process his situation, was screaming and rolling from one end of his room to the other.

I have listened as a young woman told me what it was like to have to tell authorities that someone she knew had killed someone, and what it was like to be in a house that was being shot at as a result of telling, and what it was like to run through a neighborhood to escape the shooters, terrified that she would be killed.

I have talked on the phone with the grandfather of a very sick pregnant mother who told me flat out that he believed that she was trying to kill her unborn child by not caring for herself, in order to be free from the impending burden of having a child to care for.

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Snippets of these memories will come to me from time to time, and I will relive all the emotions and scenes of the moments.  I remember (and think) in what is like a video.  I will 'watch' and rewatch these scenes; I'll pause, rewind and go back over certain aspects.  I'll remember little things I saw, like how a young woman pulled her hair over her eyes and it got soaked with tears and sweat, what another 's hands looked like as she clutched her baby's arms to his side to help a doctor with a test.

I'll remember debating how to comfort these children- a side hug seems so cold in moments when they are so vulnerable and SO needing another human to reach out and hold them together.  But as a direct care worker there were lots of restrictions on how I could physically let them know that I cared and was grieving with them.  These restrictions are there for a good reason, but sometimes upholding them was the pits.  Kids in the 'system' often don't get touched, and it is a great travesty.

Each time a memory surfaces I reprocess it.  I review what I thought the child was thinking and feeling, and what I was thinking and feeling.  I try to figure out what I could have done differently that would have been more conducive to healing.  Almost always I wish I could talk to the child and see what their thoughts are now on the situation and what it was like to go through it.  I want to ask what they wish I could have understood about what they felt.

Today, I am giving these children to God...AGAIN.  My heart has been burdened, and the burden grows heavy when I forget to give them directly to God when their memory resurfaces.  I don't know why, but memories have been accumulating a lot lately- perhaps it's the great amount of change that has happened in our lives this summer.  In all the shifting and busyness, I have forgotten to give these children to God and to leave them at His feet.  I can never go back, and I will never know if I was helpful.  I don't know which of these children are still dealing with the pain that they were then, or which of them have healed and moved on.  I DO know that God can grant them healing, and that rehashing old memories in search of answers isn't going to get anyone anywhere, and it will just wear me out!  I would much rather have my whole heart and mind securely in the present, working with the children that God has placed in my life right now.  I will still think about the children I have worked with in the past, but I will strive to remind myself to hand them over to God when I do!

*some details have been altered for privacy sake.