“You don’t make it through any stage of life alone.”
When I was in foster care, people would say things to me like, “Oh, you look like you could go to college,” encouraging kinds of things, but there wasn’t a lot of hands-on help. It was more like, “Go get yourself a job,” and “We’ll consider you successful if you can hold down a job and pay rent.” But a lot of my friends outside the [foster care] system went off to college. I looked pretty closely at what they were doing and I decided that I was going to try for it. I really didn’t know if I was going to make it, but I was going to try for it.
Some of what they teach you when you’re in the system is how to go furniture shopping or car shopping. Those are not really practical. We don’t know how to drive! It would be beneficial if they could do an assessment of people who have left the group homes and find out what the needs are really going to be.
But one thing they do teach you is, “If you don’t have something, go out and get it. Look for it until you find it.” And so I did that, and it worked. I graduated last year and now I’m pursuing a master’s degree in social work.
The image people have of former foster youth is that we’re going to become welfare dependents and rip off the state for all this money. I’d hear people who didn’t know I was in the system talking about, “Oh, those kids in group homes - they’re just gonna grow up and go to prison.” Or, “They’re gonna grow up and get welfare, and they’re going to be taking my taxpayer money, sitting on their butts eating potato chips and soda.” I had been told all my life, “You’re just going ot take, take, take.” That really hurt me, so I decided that no matter what I do, I’m going to be working. And that’s exactly what I did my whole way through college.
But it is not as clear cut as just “Pick yourself up by the bootstraps and move on” when you don’t have the supports to do that. People don’t understand that because they think that everybody has a family. In reality, for a lot of people who have been in foster care, it’s sink or swim. If you want to do it, you have to somehow get the confidence to do it. Honestly, sometimes I don’t know how I got that confidence. I think I just reached out. Seeing that other people were doing it, I took a chance that I might be able to do it. But a lot of people sink rather than swim, and that’s what scares me.
I don’t like the idea of having to pick yourself up by yourself. That’s not the way it works. Anyone who’s made it has had friends or some kind of support to make it through. You don’t make it through any stage of life alone.
-an interview with Jessica, 24, who spent her teenage years in foster homes and group homes and who recently started a support group for former foster youth on her college campus; excerpt from A Rage to Do Better: Listening to the Young People from the Foster Care System, by Nell Bernstein