When Love Isn’t Enough: Parenting Through the Gaps of the System

There’s nothing harder to watch than a mother trying to rebuild her life — doing everything asked of her — and still feeling like the rules change every week. At Promises, we see that heartbreak up close.

We used to think recovery was the hard part. Turns out, it’s parenting in recovery that breaks you open. Especially when you’re trying to do it inside a system that doesn’t play by its own rules.

No two caseworkers follow the same plan. One tells a mom she’s ready for overnights; another says she’s not “stable enough.” One wants her in therapy, another wants her working full-time, and another wants proof of parenting classes — all while she’s still learning to breathe again.

We walk our women through the impossible — and we do it with grace, grit, and sometimes a dark joke or two just to keep from crying.

When the kids are here, the house changes. It’s louder, messier, but it’s alive. There’s laughter in the halls, cereal on the floor, and mothers getting to tuck their kids in sober for the first time in years. It’s holy chaos.

And then — sometimes — they leave again.
Not because anyone did something wrong, but because paperwork lagged or a visit got reclassified. You hear the crying through closed doors — the kind that only happens when a piece of your heart drives away in the backseat of a caseworker’s car.

That’s the part no one talks about. The grief inside reunification. The way we as staff have to stay strong in front of them but cry later, too.

But here’s what gives me hope: we keep showing up. Every woman who walks through these doors is trying to rewrite what love looks like in her family — and even when the system bends her, she doesn’t break.

Maybe someday the “system” will catch up to what we already know — that mothers in recovery don’t need perfection. They need consistency, compassion, and a fair chance to raise the children they fought so hard to come home to.

Until then, we’ll keep doing what we do best: holding space, speaking truth, and loving these families through the red tape. Because at Promises, we don’t just build recovery — we rebuild homes.