My Step Brother For 1 : I Don 't Know Where We 're Going

After being dropped off from dance late at night, I was expecting to walk into a silent house where everyone was asleep. Instead, I walked into my living room to find the rest of my family sitting on the couch with the television off, which was strange for my family. It was clear they were waiting for me to get home, so I sat down too. My mom and dad exchanged a look and a sigh then turned back towards my brother and me. They babbled absently for a few minutes, then, my mom quickly spit out the words, as if ripping off a Band-Aid, "We are moving back to Arizona." There was a brief moment of stunned silence before I burst into tears. I could not imagine why my parents would decide to separate me from my best friends six months before we were supposed to

I only spent two nights with my first foster parent. She was genuinely sweet and helped me cope with the fact that this was only temporary. After a few days we went to visit my mother at rehab. We held each other tight and cried our sorrows away. Spilling all the sorry’s and I love you’s while we had the chance. Everything turned for the worse when we were driving back to my foster parent’s house. In a matter of seconds the front of the car was engulfed in flames. She was calling out to me to help her unbuckle her seatbelt, it was jammed. I escaped the car and started yelling until the neighbors scooped me up. I never heard from her again. I was released back into foster care. This time I was even more anxious to be put into a new family. I had no mother to turn to, and no one to help

He stops abruptly and spins to face her. "I know you would," The fake psychic's free hand raises to his forehead to indicate a higher entity told him so, despite knowing Juliet is already in the loop regarding his secret. "But this is a safe place," He gestures between them. "You know you can tell me anything and there will be no judgment here."

By the sixth hour, my mom had already contacted a pastor and he was at the house as well. We all cried together and prayed as a unit. Surprisingly, my sisters were sad, but they were also strong with me. We all had to sit and talk to the children about what was going on. They could see and hear everyone in the house, but no one had sat down to talk with them. I had also notified my best friend Nicole, she was so good with words to. I had asked her to sit with us to explain to the kids. While we were trying to get the kids situated to talk, we saw it was going to be impossible with the little ones. So we took the big kids only, Theo, Junior, Dajah, AnaRosa, Isaiah, TJ, Mikala, Janecia, and had a long talk.

JULIET: I am not agreeing of what you are doing. I am thankful that you have done this and I know it was for my best intentions but I can never be grateful or glad when I know their true faces.

On a Sunday morning of March 15 1998, we woke up super early to the phone ringing on the other side was my dad. My grandmother answered the phone her face paled as she heard the words “mom I shot myself.” After talking to him for a bit my grandmother rushed out of her room to get my uncle up and they rushed to the house to see him up walking around with a hole in his stomach. Ambulance came to get him then rushed him to meet life force. He flat lined once on the helicopter. They were able to bring him back and stabilized him, and kept him stabled till they got to the hospital. They rushed him immediately into the OR, it was around 15 to 20 minutes into surgery that he had passed away, they were unable to bring him back due to the major loss of blood. My mom soon remarried and I gained two annoying step brothers and a step dad. One step brother didn’t bother me to bad, the other one poked and picked on me trying to pick fights. My step dad had episodes where he was violent and threw things at me and my mom. I withdrew more and more until a few of my friends literally grabbed me by my arm and told me to wake up that they were not going to let me push them away

After a couple minutes I got up and she took me to my room which I shared with 3 other kids that were around my age and so happens to me the room all the way down at the end of the hallway. That day was the longest day and one of the roughest days of my life but it went and another day came. Still not over the fact that I don’t get to see my mom until who knows. A year has passed and I have made friends and lost friends because they either went back to their family or got a new family and I was one of the few that were there since I arrived a year ago. I knew after that year that I would never see my mom again all though she said she would get me back soon which hurts because she lied to me which wasn’t anything new, but just knowing that I never knew my real dad and now never will see my mom or any other family just stuck with me and every night I would just lay there crying and thinking about what is going to happen to me when or if I ever leave this place and that happened the entire time I was in this children’s home which was for four

I was 33 years old on November 9th, 2000. My family was made of myself, my husband, Doug, my daughter, Haley, and our dog, Josie. Haley was only 2 years and 9 months old at the time of the birth of her new baby brother, but I wasn’t quite sure how she would handle not having all of the attention. I could tell something was off from the moment I woke up that day. To start, Haley wouldn’t stop crying from the moment she woke up. As for me, I was feeling sick, and was having a few contractions here and there. I was packing my things for the hospital because I was scheduled to have a C-section November 10th. Afternoon came and my condition was getting worse and worse, things got so bad that Doug and I decided we should go to the hospital. I was mortified because I just needed the baby to wait a couple more hours. I could not have this baby come out of the birth canal, my

Juliet does not make the best of

“Oh, but, why would you need to. Yeah! Why would you do that when you just could go home and use your phone, since you were the one that stole your phone.” I retorted.

Little did I know Social Services had already taken my siblings. I was the last one to leave, I saw my mother crying. I can only assume she was crying because she was losing all of her children. She walked over to me and told me “Don’t ever forget that I love you, and will always love you.” Ten to fifteen minutes later a Social Services worker had arrived to take me to my foster bed. A foster bed is just the temporary home before my actual foster home. Two weeks later I was taken to the Social Services building where I was going to meet my foster parents. To my surprise both of my older sisters were there. I was told that we were all going to be with the same foster

On April 1, 2000, I was placed into a group home because of my behavior at the home. My dad and I didn’t get along. So he sent me to a placed called Bowman House. When I arrived there the first person I met was a lady name Alexander, she begin showing me around the units. Alexander was called the granny of the units. It was two units for the boys and girls. She took me to the boys unit first to look at the units. After I looked at the boys unit she took me to the girls unit. Where I would be staying. I had the chance to bond with Alexander, it wasn’t something I was trying to do it just happen. I had to stay with Alexander until the staff came back from picking the other peers up from school. An hour pass and the peers came back I had to go

Before I went into foster care, I was heading back to Iowa, from Arkansas, to see my older sister Shantell’s graduation. I left early that night and fell asleep in the car. It took us 22 hours ,but we also stopped a lot, and when we got to Iowa Falls, it was like 5:00 p.m. We got lost until my mom called Shantell’s foster mom, and she told us where the house was. So when we got there, my sister Patience and I went into the house and went into the living room where my older sister Shantell was sitting on the couch watching TV, and she saw us, and we saw her we hugged. She cried then we asked her foster mom if we could stay the entire summer. The foster mom said yes, and then me and Patience asked our mom if we could, and she said yes Then she was told by Shantell’s foster mom, if she was gone over a week it would be called abandonment. Our mom didn’t tell us that. Then she left a week later.

In the early years I didn’t understand much of what was going on. I just thought that he was my twin brother, and like any twins at the time, I thought we were exactly alike. We played games together and roamed around our driveway on our bikes whenever he wanted to. Lots of times when I would want to play games he wouldn’t want to and would throw a tantrum. I didn’t think much of it and would just go to my sister and we would just play instead. I thought that was normal. I was under the impression that it was normal for kids like me to spend their whole afternoons in various waiting rooms for their sibling’s therapy. I didn 't understand that instead most people went and played sports or had play dates. By the age of 7 I began to realize that all of this was not the case.

Devastated, I ran to my room gushing my eyes out. All these emotions going through my head of how my life would be without my parents in the same room or even house. From what I remember it all started about mid-June, the weeks before that were crucial. My parents would always argue over how to deal with a situation between me and my brother, Skyler. They hardly spoke to one another, but when they did they would just start bickering. I remember, one night after dinner they both went into ''their'' room with the door locked yelling at one another. Skyler and I didn’t know what to do, so we went downstairs and tried to figure out what was going to happen. With a scared tone I asked if mom and dad were going to get a divorce?" He answered back '' No, they love each other, they wouldn’t do that to us." That following night, was a school night everything was quiet except for my crying. I couldn’t sleep; all I was thinking about how it's going to affect my family.