My Life Changing Experience: My Involuntary Foster Care Story

From the ages of 8- 14, I lived in a very volatile home. Coming home from school, I never knew if it was going to be a quiet day in my house or if the entire house would be engulfed in screaming. I dreaded the weekends, that meant that everyone was going to be home. Everyone home meant that things could easily go up to flames in just a millisecond. I tried my best to never be home, I would spend the days with my friends. I knew that when I got home there was a 90% chance of everyone fighting. One day in the summer of 2012, things got too heated, and my mom finally decided to move. We packed up everything in a few hours while my stepfather was at work. We moved into my best friend’s home for a few days until we found an apartment within the school district to move into.

Life normally doesn’t go the way you plan when you’re young. When I was little, I figured that when I was at the age of graduation I would be totally prepared to go off my own. As I sit and think about the topic of how my life is going, several thoughts pour into my mind. First, I think of how lucky I am. The past two years could’ve changed my life because of bad health. Through weeks and months of hospitals stays and hours spent in the doctor’s office and in the emergency room, I’ve come out lucky and I have almost returned to good health. Second, I think of those friends who I thought would be there for my whole life that are no longer a part of my life. I also look to the people who I never thought would be there by my side and realize

I remember being taken away from my mother at age seven. My brother was only a year old when we were separated. We were ripped away from her arms and placed in foster care. I can recall that day clear as a crystal. My throat felt constricted as I yelled out for my mother, my eyes were red and puffy from all the crying, my knees bruised because I refused to be taken away. From then out my life tumbled down. I could no longer protect my brother, I could not be there to wipe my mother’s tears away. I was alone and frightened. Now that I look back at my experiences in foster care it made me stronger. As of today I am more grounded, and able to go through life with a new lense. I got to experience foster care and am able to empathize with those who have gone through it as well.

Social work introduced itself to me at a very young, and tender age. Growing up in foster care, not being able to see my parents, watching as family members died before I could say goodbye, and constantly being called orphan in school, taught me a great deal about the scars I would carry for the rest of my life. While I tried to play the role of a normal kid, hanging with friends, telling stories of happy childhood memories, it was simply a mask to hide that I knew my scars were burning inside me, that happiness wasn’t a luxury I could enjoy. Going from foster home to foster home was a reminder of that unaffordable luxury, and soon I grew to be so insecure that I could not function without having someone tell me what to do, or reassure me that

After a long ride, we saw our new home for the first time. It wasn’t luxurious, but to a couple of young children like us it was cool to live on the beach. The changes that lied ahead of us were great. There are many ways in which this new start changed my life. First, no longer did we live in fear. This enabled me to move on. I enrolled in eight grade that year. I felt like had a fresh start. No one knew my business. I could make myself whatever I wanted. My whole personality changed. That year I started at quarterback for junior high and from there everything started to look up. If I was to go into details of all the success I had it would be bragging, so I am just going to say I went from a casualty of a broken home to a respected and important part of High Island High School. In the five years I was there, I had more fun and a more productive life than all the other years put together.

When I was in 7th grade, one of my counselors told me she has this friend named Lilly when she was my age. She was in the foster care system and was staying with a great woman in a small yellow house. Before she was put with this family, she was with a man that abused her mentally and physically. Therefore, she was what some would call “crazy.” Bright lights would terrify her and it was hard for her to communicate with people. Lilly only trusted my counselor and couldn’t even trust her foster mom. She was unable to stay with her foster mom because Lilly was too much to handle because of the abuse in her past. She left just a little after a month and went with another foster family. It saddens me that a sweet little girl like Lilly has gone through so much pain and terror at just 11 years

It is past midnight when loud banging sounds wake you. Something is wrong. All of a sudden, you hear the door being kicked down as the wood splinters and the glass shatters. Before you know it, the police have rushed into your home like a swarm of bees and have taken your parents into custody. Adding to this already bleak situation, a social worker has arrived and places you and your siblings into DHS custody. Since you have no other relatives to take care of you, you and your siblings are placed into the foster care system—in separate homes—without the ones you love most to comfort you.

For every change within a society, personal changes with “self” must happen. These social changes are important to people while, people who don’t benefit from it think changes within the self isn’t important for social changes. Personal change is a journey a person takes of discovering something within themselves and acting upon a social change. That social change is society evolving to better ways. Jane Goodall talks about her experience in a moment of truth with self being absent in a moment of need in her writing titled In the Forest of Gombe, where she spends a few weeks in the forest following chimpanzees has helped her cope with her grief of her husband. She comes to the realization that her “self” was nonexistent and everyone in

There are many events that stand out in my life that were significant and helped me grow stronger. One of these events stands out in particular to me and had the greatest impact in my life. When I attended high school my focus was never on the academics but only on sports and having fun with my friends. I never payed attention for more than five seconds and failed to complete any type of work given to me. My lack of care for high school affected me on going to a four year college, playing a sport in college, and taking remedial classes.

Life changing events can sometimes be difficult. In the stories “I Never Had it Made,” By Jackie Robinson Warriors Don’t Cry By Melba Patillo Beals and “The Father of Chinese Aviation.” By Rebecca Maskel. Melba Beals, Jackie Robinson, and Feng Ru all experienced life changing events that impacted their lives. If you did not know these people went through danger to break segregation. Melba Beals and Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier by playing on a white ball team and going to a white school as blacks.

I went to camp for the first time last summer to get away from the pressures of home and school. Camp was a month long, I have never been away from my parents more than a week. I was very anxious. I had no idea what situations to expect and how I would handle them. I started to really wonder about my life. The way it was going was not the best for me. I can “run away” from my reality, but I know that I was going to have to come back to it in a month. The way I treat people was total opposite from how I treated my parents. What my friends were capable of doing was not a bit close to what my parents would let me do, my parents are very narrow minded. My grandparents were even more

In my life, I have been exposed to a challenge called change. Change can occur in many different ways and is dealt with in many different ways. I have come to the awareness that change can be the deepest of all things. I always thought that change occurred when you moved to a state or when you lost someone real close to you. Those are a challenge to change, yes, but change doesn’t have to occur over a climactic incident. It can just appear overnight when your brain winds up when it’s time to do something different. Even with friends that you used to have and know that move on. For example, most of my friends from elementary school, I don’t even talk to them anymore.

My life has been a crazy roller coaster with many events that have affected my life all in different ways. There have been times where my life has been at its highest peak in the world then it falls down, right into a deep valley. From the time my lovable younger sister came into my life to when my grandpa had a near death experience, I have learned many valuable lessons through the rough times as well as the more happy times. When I was a young girl, my mom had always told me the same thing over and over again. I never really thought about how a few words would have a deep effect on me in a short amount of time.

In life we all have something that has changed the way we perceive things. Most things that change a person’s perception happens to be an experience that they have gone thru and learned from. In my case it wasn’t necessarily an experience, it was a dog that changed my perception on life. My mind and heart was opened in a whole new way. I never thought I could love an animal just as much as I loved the people in my life. I always thought it was strange that pet owners loved and treated their pets the same way they treated their children. My perception on dogs or pets in general definitely changed. Throughout this paper you will see why I am a totally different person because of a dog that entered my life.

gorgeous and from the moment I set my eyes on her I fell in love with