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Excerpts from A Rage to Do Better
“All they see are the boundaries.”
Jessica, 24, spent her teenage years in group homes and residential treatment centers. She recently started a support group for former foster youth on her college campus.
I was in my senior year of college before I realized that I wasn’t the only student who had been in foster care. I was in a social work class and another student stood up and started talking about having been in foster care. After he shared his story, I immediately stoodup and shared mine. My voice was shaking the first time I said it in class, buit the response I got made me feel really good. The professor said, “You two don’t know how lucky you are [to have made it to college].” And I said, “Yes, we do.”
What keeps us from talking about being in foster care? It’s mostly the pity response that we get. I really don’t like to see that, because I don’t feel sorry for myself. I feel like if anything, we deserve extra support instead of pity. Imagine your own family member were somehow to get into the system. You’d want to support them. But that’s not the response that you generally get. You don’t get, “Is there anything I can do?” You get, “Oh, my God,” or “That must have been really hard.” It hurts to hear those kinds of comments, because instead of them focusing on how far you got, the first response is, “I’m so sorry.”
These days I’ve matured and I am not so worried about people’s responses. I can see from their perspective - how not being educated about it, or having been brought up with certain mind-sets about it, they might come up with these statements. Knowing that, it doesn’t hurt as much to reveal the information. They just need to see me be confident, and that might change their minds.
I’ve helped form an organization on campus for former foster youth. We want to go back out into the system and work with other foster youth, mentoring them, and bring then into the university and let them see beyond the limitations that they see in the system. Because when kids are in the system, all they see are the boundaries, the parameters that are set by them living in that particular setting. They’re not looking beyond that.
The system focuses on, “OK, maybe these kids are mentally ill, or they’ve committed crimes, so right now we are going to focus on the basics, on keeping it together on a day-to-day basis.” If you’re focusing just on you day-to-day bare necessities for survival and keeping certain behaviors in check, what you’re missing is the hope. I don’t care what these kids have done, they need to see that somehow there’s a future and there’s a way to get to it.