Everyone in Foster Care has a story. Here are the stories from some of the many Young Leaders in foster care.
I screamed out my sister’s name, tears cascading down my face, reaching for her out-stretched arm. But my four-year-old hand slipped from her fingers. My drunken biological mother was pulling me back inside the house, while my dad yelled form my sister to get in the car. I kicked and hit, trying to run to the car pulling out of the driveway. I didn't understand.
I remember abruptly waking up to the sound of glass shattering and my baby sister screaming. I tried to look around in the darkness to figure out what was going on, but couldn’t tell. My mother grabbed me and tried to hide me behind a rocking chair in the room. All of a sudden the room got bright and my mother froze.
As a child growing up in a broken home, it was extremely hard for me to create and hold onto healthy relationships. Bouncing from parent to parent and town to town made it very difficult to stay in touch with any of the friends that I had in school or any of the families neighboring me. Until I entered foster when I was age 12 I had no idea what a healthy relationship was supposed to look like.
We all ran away to our grandparents’ house because they were the only stability we had. Ever since my grandparents and my aunt made that commitment to take four kids into their house at the ages of 72 and 62 and 26 it has been one struggle after another, most of which have been financial struggles.
I am 22 with an old soul. Every inch of me is a representation of my grandmother; the way that I cook, the jokes I make, the songs that I listen too, and the way I present myself as a woman.
Chris entered California’s foster care system at three months old, and remained in the system until he aged out at 18. “I jumped around a lot,” he recalls of his time in foster care, living in 8 different placements until he joined his last foster family at age 9. He remained with this family until he turned 18.
When I graduated from high school, all I could do was hope for a bright future. In my cap and gown, wearing a smile, I looked just like my classmates. My hopes and dreams for the future were identical to theirs.
As college students arrive at school and prepare to start the new academic year, I am reminded of the painful, bittersweet occasions that I – a young person who has aged out of foster care and who recently graduated from college – have experienced.
My foster care story is not a typical one, although I can’t say I have ever heard a ‘typical’ story about being in foster care. Unlike many children who suffer the loss of family members at a young age, fear rejection by their foster parents, and experience an overwhelming sense of abandonment, I was fortunate.
In the U.S. today, there are more than 500,000 children living in foster care. Georgia alone has more than 14,000 children and young people in the foster care system.
Schylar Canfield entered foster care in Montana at age six. He moved 14 times over the next 11 years, until he “aged out” of foster care at 18. Living on his own and working to support himself, Schylar graduated from high school and will graduate this spring from college.
I was raised as a Chinese American speaking Cantonese fluently and some Tosanese with my grandma. When I entered foster care at the age of 12, I was no longer my own person. I was told by others on how I should act and behave based on their cultural expectations. I had to fit a "mold" that wasn’t made for me to fit in. I lived with four different families and spent five years in foster care.
Each year, more than 650 Michigan youth “age out” of foster care, leaving the system with no permanent family or place to call home. When I aged out, I was in the middle of my senior year of high school. I had no safe place to live, no job, no family and no security.
I entered the foster care system when I was eight years old. My mother simply left the house one rainy evening. I didn’t know what to do, so I went to the neighbors. Soon a police car came and took me away. I was terrified.
I would like to read you two definitions of one word. The first is: to make strenuous or violent efforts in the face of difficulties or opposition, the next is: to proceed with difficulty or with great effort.
When I was eight years old, my sisters and I were removed from our home and placed in foster care in the Utah state system. Our home environment was unsafe and unstable. The idea was that we would spend temporary time in care until my mother could be named suitable. There were three of us. My time in care was a brief one, but I remember fully the impact it had on my life.
I pulled my blanket to my chin, warm already in my blue footed pajamas. My eyelids slowly began to find their other halves when again that thought shot through the warmth and sent cold tremors up the back of my neck and onto the top of my blonde head. I rolled onto my stomach and began to hum and bang my head against the tops of my hands.
I will never forget my twelfth birthday – on that day, my social worker appeared at my foster home with two trash bags and announced that I was moving. She handed me the bags and said, “You need to pack your things.”
