A New Story

By: Anonymous

I was left an orphan when I was two, and entered the care of my uncle and my "Nanny" (his house keeper), where I had five years to learn what a real childhood was, before it was lost forever.

When I was seven years old a social worker came to my home and took me from Nanny, screaming and crying. She was holding me and crying, but she let them take me. I was told that my uncle was dead, and that I was going to be put in a foster home where they could take care of me. [Later I learned that there was a history of mental illness in my family-which I was not told about until after I turned 18-and that my uncle had committed suicide].

The first foster home I was in did it for the money, and told me that to my face. Compared to what I would go through later it was a good home...despite the fact that we were expected to do chores instead of playing, and that we were fed hotdogs or oatmeal in the kitchen while the "real" members of the family ate in the dining room.

For some strange reason I began exhibiting "behavior" problems (bed wetting, night mares, screaming fits, etc)...well apparently they couldn't find a foster home for me with these problems, because my next stop was a state-funded group home. The lady running the group home was nice enough, but she was an older woman and soon after my arrival (and days after my eighth birthday) she had a heart attack. I was the one that found her, and got one of the night time staff to call an ambulance, and she was taken away...we weren't told anything, and assumed that she had died [Later we learned that she had survived, but was not allowed to return to her job or contact any of us, though she had wanted to let us know she was okay].

She was replaced by a man, and within months the entire staff had changed, rules had changed, our lives had changed. I spent nearly three years in the care of this monster...he was a pedophile (I escaped his grasps because at the age of eight I was too old for his liking), an alcoholic, and an all-around bad guy. Though I escaped the sexual abuse (though I was witness to it time and time again) I, like all the other children in that home, was a victim of severe physical abuse and neglect. One child was thrown down the stairs so hard that he was permanently paralyzed...this act was blamed on another child who was locked away in a psych ward because of it. Most of the violence was blamed on us kids...after all we were emotionally unstable by that point (no joke). Sometimes I would hide in the dog's kennel when I knew I was going to get a beating, it was warm and safe in there...but the dog disliked this man (animals have an amazing way of judging people's true personalities) and so the man had the dog put down.

My behavior issues escalated into defiance (ODD), and attachment problems (RAD), and running away. I lost count of how many times I ran away. I used to "sneak" onto the bus and ride it all the way around the route, back to the group home...where I would receive a beating for running away. Never occurred to me to take the bus anywhere else...there was nowhere else to go.

Eventually they got sick of my running away and placed me in a home with a couple that wanted to adopt me. This couple wanted a perfect child, to dress in frilly dresses, and learn to play the piano, and never EVER misbehave. You got the wrong kid folks. I won't say the sole responsibility for this situation turning abusive is on their hands, the system has to take some responsibility for sticking an emotionally damaged child into a home that wants a perfect child and expecting them to handle it with no support network whatsoever...I have to take some responsibility for being an emotionally disturbed eleven-year-old with no understanding of love and the recognition that the only person who could take care of me was myself. This couple eventually decided they could "beat the demons" out of me...by that time I was so used to beatings that the demons just got worse. They finally returned me to the system after I tried to burn their house down.

My story has a somewhat happy ending, as happy endings go in the foster care system. My final family, though completely unprepared to deal with an emotionally unstable child, was at least willing to stick it through and did not believe in beating children...they went through a lot in the seven years before I turned eighteen, but they didn't give up.

Oh yeah...when I was fifteen I was raped and became pregnant, ended up placing my twins for adoption after my second nervous breakdown...sexual assault and early pregnancy seems to be a common theme of many of the stories told by survivors of the system...

I am also still struggling to open my records (having been denied twice). I've been able to track down my birth family and some of the history there, and have found some of the answers I was seeking in prosecuting the man that abused us in the group home (he served a total of three years, and then had his own children returned so he could continue to abuse them...but that's another story), but my state records are still in a file somewhere labeled "confidential"...apparently it is not enough to take away our rights when we are a child, they have to continue to keep our history a secret, even from ourselves. Ironic, isn't it?

I've been in therapy, of my free will, for two years now, including family sessions where I am, for the first time, starting to develop some form of attachment with my parents (love is still a four letter word in my vocabulary).

I actually have days where I am glad to be alive, which is something I never used to have. There is still a long way to go, but there is at least some hope...but not because of anything that the system ever did for me. The hope comes from having a family that stuck in there, and a will to survive and overcome this. All the system did was allow me to be abused, abandoned, and hurt time and time again. There is NO excuse for this.

If children are our future, and this is how we treat our children, the future is destined to get worse.