Editor’s Note: This article was contributed from the Laney College Chapter, Poor People’s Campaign.
Foster care and homelessness made me feel like I was surviving, not living! Foster care created so much trauma for me like abandonment, depression and anxiety.
In my teen years growing in care was not a great experience! I went home to home, to different high schools and not all my credits transferred at one point. In one placement, my every movement was being monitored and I wasn’t allowed to hang out with my high school peers. Once I went to my third placement, I eventually stopped making friends and started isolating myself from my mainstream schooling.
Once I turned 18, I was kicked out of foster care and had nowhere to go and started living in my car. To add, I was staying at random men’s houses giving up my body in order to have a place to stay! I would never wish that on anyone.
Foster care needs to be transformed so no foster kid becomes homeless and feels obligated to give up their body in order to have a roof over their head that night! Fortunately, I am still alive. I got my own apartment when I was 19, finally got off the streets and I got my own house at 23, and I am a single mother to an amazing little boy and I strive to be a better mother and not have him enter foster care either!
Switching gears, my biological mother tried reconnecting with me but it wasn’t because she actually wanted a daughter-mother relationship; she knew I was doing well and just wanted money from me, so I had to do what was right for me and my son and cut her completely out of my life, no matter how bad I finally wanted a mother!
