“Sunshine, you’re my baby and I’m your only mother. You must listen to the one taking care of you, but she’s not your mama. Never forget, I’m the only mama who will love you forever and ever.” Ashley Rhodes Courter’s mom had told her.
Ashley Rhodes-Courter was only three years old when she was separated from her mother. She spent the next nine years bouncing from one foster family to another. Her mother, Lorraine, was only twenty years old, and she was also too young to take responsibilities for her two children. However, Ashley grew up earning straight “A’s” in her classes; she won a world-wide Harry Potter essay contest in New York, as well as many others. She was born in South Carolina, and later was taken to her first foster family in Florida. The closest family member she was kept with was her step-brother Luke, who didn’t share the same father. Later on, when Ashley was eleven years old, she got a new step-sister, who did not share the same father as she and Luke.
The book grew from an essay that Ashley wrote for a competition in which students were asked to write a moment in their lives which they learned something about themselves The most noteworthy achievement of the subject in the book, Three Little Words is when Ashley got a home after being in foster homes for a long period of time. She has spent at least ten years in foster care; which includes moving from one school to another, moving foster homes, she had seventy-three different
In the memoir Three Little Words by Ashley Rhodes-Courter, Ashley did an outstanding job at showing me the challenges of foster care that I was not aware of. Throughout the whole memoir, Ashley has difficult things thrown at her that a girl her age shouldn’t and wouldn’t have known how to handle on her own. Ashley was taken away from her mother at only 3 years old, spending almost 10 years inside Florida’s foster care and was shuffled between 14 different homes, some quite abusive, before she was adopted at age 12 from a Children’s Home.
Many children are suffering due to various complications in their life. Children of all ages end up in the foster care system year after year. Their hardships influence them to feel really depressed and stoic. Many people do not read autobiographies, but the book, Three Little Words by Ashley Rhodes-Courter teaches people about the complications of a first-hand foster child, how the foster care system is, and book reviews of famous authors and well-known magazines, as well. The story gives hope to people who believe there is no way out anymore, and it influences upon the world’s culture greatly.
Ashley is a young woman like many in today’s society born in 1985 to a single, teenage mother. However, her story is a success story. Therefore, she survived, although all odds were stacked against her. Due to her mother’s inability to provide for her, the Florida Foster Care System was her home from the tender age of 3 until her adoption at the age of twelve. During that decade, she resided in 14 different foster homes along with her brother. During this period, her brother and other children endured an abusive life which included beatings with a wooden paddle, starvation, made to drink homemade hot sauce, molestation and verbal abuse which led Ashley and her brother to attend a different school each time their foster home changed. She witnessed the tragedy of her uncle being shot and she experienced her own tragedy when thrown from a moving vehicle.
Sarah’s mom suffered from effects related to diabetes and passed away and her father passed away from cardiac dysfunction. Also, Sarah and her husband begin to have problems with her marriage. In her early 40’s, I decided that Sarah and her husband were in an unhealthy relationship and needed to file for divorce and live separate lives. She begins to focus more on herself and being with her children and close friends after the divorce. Ten years later, Sarah finds a new romance and is again married. At this point in adulthood, Sarah’s children are all grown up at this point in adulthood. Hannah graduated from school, gotten married, and has a child named Lucy. Sarah’s other child Will, has gone to college and is attending a top-ranked program for engineering. Sarah’s health must be watched closely during this stage in adulthood because previous stressors in her life caused significant weight changes earlier on in adulthood. As Sarah enters late adulthood, she comes to terms with her identity and is always finding new ways to engage in different
Alice has now passed through her by trail by fire, and she feels like an adult from the way others treat her as an individual. She declares “I am somebody: but her real maturation is not from how others respond to her, but from wise reflections on what it means to survivors the troubled times of adolescence.
They were immediately moved back to Florida to their new foster house which was not she pleasant. Their new foster home was packed to the brim full of foster kids. The conditions were terrible, and their foster parents screaming lunatics. Ashley and Luke were shortly moved out of that so called home and back to South Carolina to live with Adele. Ashley was sent back to Florida by herself this time. In Ashley’s life time she has been in 14 different foster homes. As well as talking to 44 caseworkers in only 9 years. Ashley at the age of 13, was finally adopted by this lovely
Ellen Foster by Kaye Gibbons is the story of a young white girl, Ellen, who shares her life experiences over the course of two years. In that time, both of Ellen’s parents pass away, she moves multiple times to temporary homes until she finally finds a safe welcoming place in a foster home. Ellen’s story is rich because it is told in first person narrative and the readers are given context not only to what Ellen is experiencing, but context of the environment she is experiencing it in. To better understand and analyze Ellen, we can view Ellen, and everyone and everything in the novel from a biopsychosocial and systems perspective.
This book is a memoir so it is all about Ashley’s life in the foster care program. Each chapter talks about the hardships she went through at all the different foster homes. Ashley was taken into foster care when she was only three years old. She was in 14 different homes in a total of nine years. She had a brother, Luke that was also in the foster care program with her. They were separated multiple times, but always ended up at the same foster home together. It was not until Ashley was adopted that they were separated for good. Ashley’s mom was in prison multiple times, she was also a drug addict. She had visitation rights, but her visitations were always supervised. At these visitations she always promised Ashley that she was going to turn her life around, and get both her and Luke back. It never happened; as a result, Ashley had a lot of trust issues and a hard time believing people actually cared for her. Ashley was adopted and had a tough first couple of years adjusting to having a family. It wasn’t until about the end of the book where she finally got used to having a real family.
Ashley Rhodes-Courter was three years old when police came to arrest her birth mother and place Ashley and her brother Luke in foster care. Nearly nine years later, shortly before her 12th birthday, Ashley finally moved in with Gail and Phil Courter, who would become her adoptive parents. At age 21, a recent college graduate, she decided to tell her story in a memoir to ensure that the voices of children in foster care would be heard. The result, Three Little Words, is a remarkable tribute to the strength of the human spirit.
Sonny has a “rough” time where he finds himself in “jail” for “narcotics trafficking” (208). Skloot reveals how not having a guardian and guidance leads someone to turn to occupations they would have never committed to before. Also, she emphasizes how authority is needed in a child so they may stay in the right path of life. Also, Deborah becomes so upset she cries out for help: “‘...Just being sad and crying to myself..Why, Lord, did you take my mother when I needed her so much?’” (218). Deborah changed from a happy child to someone in desperate need of a parent when she lost her mother. Skloot reveals how the requisite fostering of a parent lifts the children up in awful
Foster parent, Shanikqua Glenn, stated that the reason she requested this Review is because she would like to express her “point of view” of the incident. Ms. Glenn indicated that she is concerned about Azzore; she is receiving phone calls from his school and he is “crying for me.” Ms. Glenn expressed that Azzore has various marks on him which were inflicted by his sister, Tymani. Ms. Glenn indicated that she is concerned about Tymani and Azzore being in a foster home and the treatment Azzore is subjected to by Tymani. Ms. Glenn voiced that Tymani was not allowed to physically abuse Azzore while both children were placed in her home.
This example of a family’s interesting dynamics that come about can be seen in a show called, “The Fosters.” In this show, the Foster family lives in San Diego where Stef Foster and Lena Adams (in later seasons being Lena Adams-Foster) parent five children, four of them being foster children and one coming from a previous marriage. The children’s names are Brandon (17yrs old), who is the oldest, Mariana (16) and Jesus (16), who are twins that were adopted after Stef and Lena got together, and Callie (17) and Jude (13) who are siblings that both got adopted. Stef is the birth mother of Brandon, coming from a previous relationship with another charater named Mike.
The story is written like a diary of Paula Spencer’s good and bad memories in her life and gives the reader the impression that Paula is sharing her life story with us and she is also narrating her life as we read.
Audrey (age 10) has lived with her foster mother (Ms. Gomez) and four other non-kin foster children for one year. Due to neglect, she was removed from her mother’s care when she was eight years old. Audrey has weekly contact with her biological mother, but no contact with her biological father or siblings. She says that she feels welcomed and comfortable in Ms. Gomez’ home, but expects to live with her biological mother and siblings in the future. Audrey believes things would be different when she returns to live with her biological mother because her father will not be there to be mean to her and her mother. She also said, “I will never complain again about my daddy or anyone else, and then I won’t have to worry about the social
Ashley Reed was born on a warm Texas morning in June 1984. This blue eyed little girl was a huge surprise to everyone because they were all expecting a little boy. Named after an actress from a soap opera, this bundle of joy grew up as an only child, but shared a lot of time with cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents. Raised in the country, Reed had a passion for animals and getting dirty. There wasn’t anything that could stop this little tom- boy from jumping in a puddle of mud, climbing trees, or capturing wild horses.