I was in foster care for the first four years of my life. Calling it difficult would be an understatement. Even from that young age, I was already watching other children with their parents and trying to figure out my identity: Will I ever have a family? Will I find my biological mother? Who did […]

Being a foster family was both a rewarding and frustrating experience.  My husband and I heard about babies being placed in overcrowded, unsafe shelters and wanted to help. We were ready to love and take care of these infants, and provide them a safe, stable home. But we had no idea about the struggles that […]

I lived in foster care for the majority of my life. A police report in my file indicates that when I was about a year old, my father was driving under the influence with me in the back seat. No family members wanted to take me, so I went into state care. I was adopted […]

When he was six years old, James* entered foster care after the state heard that his brother had been physically abused. Over the next two years, his life became increasingly uncertain as he was shuffled through 12 different foster care placements in four different counties and was assigned a revolving door of caseworkers. James spent […]

My 17-year-old mother was in foster care when she had me. She left me with her mother, whom she ran away from years earlier because of abuse. My grandmother carried the abuse down to me and I still have a half-inch scar above my right eye from when she pushed me into the dining room […]

I once read that the average amount of time a kid spends in foster care is something like three years. It’s a piece of trivia that still floors me. I spent so much of my own childhood in foster care that I can’t remember anything that came before it. I entered the system when I […]

Ever since I was a kid, I knew that I wanted to become something great – whether it was a doctor, a lawyer or a princess. It always seemed that I was meant to accomplish something big. However, life isn’t easy and, at a young age, I got thrown one hell of a curveball. My […]

Growing up in the cold, hard streets of Lowell, Massachusetts, it was easy to get wrapped up in some kind of trouble. I always looked up to my older brother so it was inevitable I started gang banging just like he did. It was all we knew. Living in a lower-class neighborhood with immigrant parents […]

My son Robert went through a lot of instability in his first year. My husband and I first met him when we brought him home from the hospital at just 2 days old. The plan was for Robert and his sister Katie, whom we were already fostering, to stay with us for a short time […]

I was 11 months old when the state took me away from a home where my mother used heroin and strange men paid the bills. How could a woman struggling with drug addiction possibly care for the fifth of her eight children? The state decided I would have a better life in foster care. They […]