My boyfriend and I are struggling. We went through a horrible situation with his children and his ex-wife, and in the end he made the painful decision to give away his rights to his children so that they hopefully wouldn't have to live under the stress that their mother was causing, just in an effort to win full custody. She made it literally impossible to do anything else. It was years of court and false accusations and was bankrupting us. It's been almost 2 years since the kids lived with us and yet our hearts are still breaking. We hope to be able to reconnect with them in the future, but obviously we don't know what they will and will not remember about us and if they will even want to speak to us after growing up with their mom. They absolutely loved their dad when we did have custody of them but I worry that they will forget us. They were almost 5 and 6 years old when they saw us last.

I haven't had a good night's sleep since we lost them and my boyfriend isn't doing any better. We both wake up in the middle of the night and cry, we used to be best friends and now we just fight about everything. Not only did we loose the kids, I had a really rough divorce myself and I lost my house when I found out that my (now ex) husband was cheating and not paying the mortgage payments for 8 months. Both of us went from having intact families, living in houses that we owned, to being divorced and broken. Will this ever get better?