Young Adult, Formerly in Foster Care - This is my family, where i call home

♪ ♪ I went into the system with my two older brothers and then one of my younger sisters who's only a year younger than me. So, growing up in that system, you understand the negatives, the positives. And then aging out of that system, you want to make a difference for those that are younger than you. I also had a foster family that really believed in me, and I lived there for 14 years. And that's very unheard of in the foster care system as well, to have that ability to say hey, this is my family and this is where I call home and I know that I'm going to be sleeping here tonight and I know that I'm going to sleep here in six months from now and three years from now, and I know that when I graduate from high school, I'm going to have a graduation party and I don't have to worry about somebody putting my clothing in a garbage bag and saying hey, you're 18 now, you got to figure out where you're going. A forever family to me is a family that you can call at any time and they pick up the phone in the middle of the night and they're there for you. Normalcy for me was not having to tell my story. When I was in high school, I remember being petrified of telling people that I was in care because I had grown up in that same home for so long that people, they just thought that I lived there, and that's how my life was. And I remember being so afraid of having to tell them, you know, that I was in care, because there's that stigma that if you're in care, you know, you're a juvenile justice kid. You're a kid that got in trouble, and that's why you're there, even though I had been there my whole life. As a former special needs adoption social worker, you really start to understand the importance of relationships for youth. Even if they're tiny, tiny relationships and let's say that the youth has only been in that home for a month, but there's someone in that home that they really built that connection with, you want to try to sustain that throughout their entire time in care because that relationship, once they leave, could really be something powerful. So normalcy to me is having those relationships, not having to put myself out there as a foster child until I am comfortable with my story and decide to share that part of my story. Having a place to call home and people to go home to for holidays, Christmas, Thanksgiving, people to move me into a dorm, people to call in the middle of the night when I have a question about something and I have no clue what I'm doing. So, I think to facilitate normalcy within relationships, within the child welfare system we really need to do a better job of training our foster parents. A lot of times foster parents that come in expecting to work with an older population don't understand all of the challenges and ways to treat that population normally. You know, so if you have other youth that are in your home, let's say they're 10 years old and then you have a 16-year-old, what's normal for that 10-year-old might not be normal for that 16-year-old. When you go in as a foster parent saying you're going to work with older youth and you have that in-depth training, you know what you're in for. You know the struggles. You're willing to build that stronger relationship too.