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By Debra Cruz
We are helpless, afraid, alone...we are the foster children. For some of us, our lives began in turmoil, and for some, the turmoil started like a menacing fire and burst into a terrible flame. Our childhood is ripped from us. Then comes foster care.
We start out in foster care already broken. Why are the foster parents so amazed when we don't act like normal children? What are they thinking? We have been torn away from everything familiar and thrust towards people we don't know. It was the behavior of adults that caused us to be taken in the first place, and now we are given to another set of adults. What are we supposed to do? We don't trust anyone anymore, and we are given like property to strangers? The fear is unbearable. The loneliness a black void. The insecurity is a dark cloud that follows us from home to home, from adult to adult. We have no place to call our own, no real belongings, no hope, we are not loved, and we are so aware of that.
School is difficult. You become aware of how different you are and how hard it was to keep up, after going from school to school. Not only do you have new "parents", a new routine to get used to, new house rules, a new system of punishment, but now a new school. You already feel so insecure, but to have all those eyes stare at the "new kid" makes you want to disappear. Add to this how your education has suffered, and you are not just the "new kid", but the "stupid new kid". It gets worse with every new house you go to, and every new school.
There is no way to describe what it is really like to be a child and have no control of what is happening to you. It is a horror beyond words. You are not alive, you are merely existing. You feel nothing, you become numb, you trust no one, you completely withdraw from the world. Some children become enraged, some become severely timid, some become dependent on anything that provides any semblance of comfort, and some children are completely destroyed. The few who flourish are those who have had the wise and understanding foster parents who grow to love their foster children and do everything a parent should for their "child". These are the angels in the system, but they are few and far between. Imagine taking a broken child and placing them with foster parents who are abusive, how do they measure their self-worth?
If you are a foster parent, please be good to us. We need to be loved and understood. We need patience and kindness. We are already broken...do not shatter us.
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