Living in care really is random and unique based on so many factors. Where you live, the amount of time you stay with families, types of families/couples you stay with are all things that can impact how kids in care live their lives. It’s tough to say if they’re mostly bad or good because so many factors affect it. Out of the many homes I had been sent to, I really only had one good experience. The rest were uncomfortable, scary and traumatic. The timeline in my head for these moves isn’t clear to me. I believe it was a few years before the story I mentioned in my bio. No one called on us this time. My mom ended up having a second stroke and we were taken. This was quite scary because again, we weren’t told anything. This time we lived in a small town so it was much harder to find a place for my sister and I. We were moved sometimes every day. I remember going to a random school I had never seen before. School would end and I would see a guy in a suit ready to pick me up. They would take me to an older family's house. They seemed very sweet and I was excited to get to know them. I was there for a couple of hours, then the same guy in a suit came and took me away. This happened several times to me, which after a certain point, became pattern-like. The homes all began to blur together for me. The next place I remember is this single mom with 3 kids. All the kids were younger than me, but there was one kid who was close to my age. He HATED me, he would always go out of his way to tell on me if I was trying to play on my GameBoy.
If I veered from the strict schedule that I had to follow, I would get my GameBoy taken away This was a huge part of my escape. The mother really made me feel safe and I respected her a lot because she actually just seemed to care. She always respected boundaries and asked how I felt about them. This was the first time I felt myself lowering my guard in foster care. I also stayed here for a few weeks, and I was a very picky eater, so this family helped me start to like vegetables (by dousing my broccoli in cheese whiz). Overall, I view my time with this family as one of the better ones; even though her oldest child treated me poorly. The mom noticed that he and I started spending less and less time together, and I remember us arguing over what tv show we could watch before bed. A year or so after when I was back with my mom and sister, we saw them at a carnival/outdoor event, and at that moment when we had all met, my mom was able to thank her. It was a really cool experience that I am grateful for. The next foster home I went to I believe was the last one. This was a cabin-like house that was owned by an older couple. There was this cool log they had in the house that had a bullet in it (they explained when they were getting the logs it must have come from someone hunting and they missed). The couple had a large dog. The first couple of days of me living there I was attacked by their dog. It was the day the man told the log story to me to try and cheer me up. It was just me, the man and the dog, and he went to prepare my bath for me. I guess the dog was jealous for attention or something because when I went to put my hand out for him to sniff so I could pet him, he bit my face and tried biting my neck as well, but the man heard my scream and the dog’s noises, so he was able to stop him in time.
Thankfully I don’t have any permanent marks from it. The same man with the suit picked me up that night and took me home to my mom because CFS finally started being transparent with us. That was when I noticed, they only started to let us know what was going on when they were about to leave.