Snapshot - An Expressive Art Piece
Foster care is a child removed from the only home, only family, they have ever known at midnight, at 3am, after school, on a weekend, on a holiday, on their birthday, on a snow day, the day before the big field trip, on a random Tuesday, on the day their sister is born and placed with strangers.
Foster care is sleeping in a strange bed in an unfamiliar house with people you are too scared of to ask where the bathroom is, where the kitchen is, if you can have a snack, a drink of water, a shower.
Foster care is counselors and judges, therapists and case managers, new schools, new teachers, new bus drivers, new doctors and churches and stores, new clothes and toys and foster families and it’s over and over and over again. It’s never knowing who is picking you up that day or where you will sleep that night. It’s people saying you are safe when everything they do screams you are not.
Foster care is visits once a week, twice a week, once a month, never, with your mom, dad, grandma, grandpa, aunt, uncle, cousin, sister, no one. It’s asking questions over and over and getting no answers in reply.
Foster care is having normal reactions to abnormal, traumatic, difficult situations and being punished, diagnosed, labeled, taunted, teased and moved. Again.
Foster care is bed wetting and nightmares, food hoarding and temper tantrums, insomnia and isolation, drinking and drug use, stealing and lying, sneaking out and running away, and feeling alone. It’s making bad grades or good grades or no grades and no one seems to care.
Foster care is being told to trust people who see you as a job, a paycheck, a case number, a name on the docket when at the end of the day they go home to lives that don’t include you. It’s trusting that the only constant is uncertainty and uneasiness and change. It’s trusting that the only stable thing in your life is everyone leaves.
Foster care is hoping to go home to an aunt, a grandmother, a friend, to be adopted, emancipated, reunified. It’s weeks and months and years of your life being decided by people who have never met you. It’s by the time the decision is made you are too fed up, frustrated, sad, tired to really care anymore.
Foster care is pockets of calm in a chaotic world, spots of happiness in spite of grief and trauma. It’s learning to love people despite their flaws. It’s hoping, and being disappointed and hoping again. It’s a label, a way of life, a circumstance, a situation.
Foster care cannot take your name, your identify, your sense of self. It cannot break you. It will not break you, because no matter what, you will survive it and one day you will be able to say:
Foster care was my past, but it isn’t my present or my future. Foster care is where I was, but it is not who I am.
