Im in the same boat irishsj. My child has been in and out of residential treatment and therapeutic foster care now for at least 4 years due to his mental and behavior problems.

The best thing I can tell you is as much as you hate to find something that is going to take alot of your time and focus on that. If it wasn't for writing my three books I would probably be 6 feet under a cement block with my name on it.

Even now I spend as much of my time putting together those books. I also keep a running journal for my child because when he does come home in 5 more years he's going to have alot of questions about things that went on and those things are things that DHS has forbidden me to tell him like three of his relatives have died, a good friend to both him and I was in a fatal car accident, along with stuff that has to do with the caseworker that got fired that involved him and so on. I keep documentation of every meeting and court date I have about him and so on.

latch on to everything you possibly can that will pass the time for you. It doesn't fill the whole but time goes faster that way. As long as DHS has nothing to prove you are crashing or going down hill they have nothing to take away parental rights. Which means when her therapist, lawyer, and caseworker say she is stable you will have visitation. Even if you have to ACT like you have it together its better then letting DHS see you go down

Hang in there and soon she will like my child will be coming home. and she will. I have talked to many parents here that had children in care and those children now adults and they all said the first thing they did the day they turned 18 and graduated high school was make a bee line for the biological parents, and most chose to live the next few years at home instead of going away to college and so on because they were kept away from the parents.