There were times when Nicky saw the boy she and her husband had raised for eight years as she walked the halls of the school where she substitutes in Rehoboth. And she couldn’t do the natural thing. She couldn’t reach out to him, provide a reassuring hand on the shoulder or a quick hug.

She is caught in a strange place, shut out of the life of a boy she raised and loved and treated as a son. She and her husband know now, as they look back, that they should have tried to adopt him.

“I just thought him going back to his mother was never an option,” she said.

But it was. Last month, with three days’ notice, she was told to pack up his things. After eight years, the boy’s birth mother was determined competent to be his mother again by Rhode Island DCYF. At the age of 10, with all his childhood memories wrapped up in the house and the family in Rehoboth, he headed back to Pawtucket to get reacquainted with the woman who had given him birth.

On that last day, Nicky said she sat with her biological son and her foster son and they cried.

For someone outside the system, it is very very difficult to understand how a 10-year-old can be asked to leave the only life he’s known and return to someone who was once judged unfit to raise him. It is even more difficult to understand why a caring foster mother should be completely shut out of a boy’s life after she raised him through the years of youthful awareness and provided a wonderful home.

Nicky said she has written to the boy’s mother, asking to visit and offering to baby-sit. She has also asked that her son and her foster son be allowed to see each other since they grew up as brothers.

She has received no response.

“The birth family is not happy with some of the things she did,” a DCYF spokesperson said when asked why visits have not been approved. He offered no specifics.

So she worries. She worries if he is getting good meals and whether he will again receive the counseling that seemed so good for him. She worries because she has no way of talking to this kid whose smiling picture sits in the middle of the dining room table in Rehoboth.

It is the high cost of foster care — the incredibly strong, loving connection that often develops and is abruptly broken: the hard realization that years of caring for a young life give a foster parent no guarantee of a place in a child’s future.

Nicky remembers when her foster son arrived, after he and his siblings were removed from squalid living conditions by DCYF.

“He was skinny, very quiet,” she said. “He just stuffed food in his mouth.”

She and her family lived in South County then. When they moved to Rehoboth they had to work out an interstate agreement with DCYF to continue caring for the boy.

So he grew up in leafy Rehoboth with a big yard stretching to woods out back. Every two weeks, he had a one-hour meeting with his mother.

But then, last year, Nicky started hearing that there was a possibility of the boy’s mother attempting to regain custody. There were court hearings. The mother was judged competent to be a mother.

Nicky put together a photo album filled with eight years of pictures to give her foster son. On May 11, the day he left, boxes of his things were lined up in front of the house. She hugged him and told him she loved him.

Then began the strangest time of all. Since it was close to the end of the school year, the boy was allowed to finish the year at his school in Rehoboth, the one where Nicky works as a substitute. He was driven back and forth from Pawtucket every day by a social worker. That meant Nicky could spend some time with him — until she was told she couldn’t.

She tried to send a note home with the boy to his parents. She told him to show it only to his parents.

The note was given to the social worker. She in turn wrote to Nicky saying that attempting to send a note in such a way caused great stress in the boy’s life and no further contact would be allowed.

Seems a bit controlling.

Now, she has no idea what, if any, role she will play.

“I want to be a part of his life,” she said.

To be denied that, after all she has done, seems unfair to her and the kid who spent most of his life with her.

bkerr@projo.com