If you ask me how many homes I lived in, I honestly couldn’t tell you. Was it twelve? Fifteen? More? After a while, they all blur together. Each one was supposed to be a “fresh start,” but when you’re a kid in foster care, that phrase loses meaning real quick. Fresh starts just mean more garbage bags to cram your life into. And that’s how it is, by the way—your whole childhood, your entire sense of safety and stability, reduced to a few battered trash bags and whatever you can grab when it’s time to go.
Sometimes, they didn’t even wait for me to be home. I got yanked out of class by social workers and cops. Imagine that: you’re a kid, trying to hold it together in front of your classmates, and suddenly you’re being escorted out with all the subtlety of a fire drill.
People imagine foster care is a “rescue.” Sometimes it is, at first. I was taken from my parents young because of drugs and chaos, and if I’d stayed, who knows if I’d be here. But survival isn’t the same thing as living. The truth is, the system isn’t built to create happy, well-adjusted kids. It’s a patchwork, a conveyor belt of homes and rules and unfamiliar faces, staffed by overworked, underpaid adults—many of whom gave up caring long before I arrived.
You learn early not to get comfortable. Every time you start to relax, maybe even feel a bit normal, the rug gets yanked out from under you. New home, new school, new “family,” new rules. And most of the time, you’re treated like an outsider, no matter how much they claim you’re “one of the family.” There’s a difference between living somewhere and belonging there. Some people just wanted a paycheck. You could always tell. There were foster homes where I was more like free labor than a child. Some places, I felt invisible. In group homes, you weren’t invisible—you just wished you were, because the neglect and abuse was out in the open.
And it’s not just the adults. You’re usually “the foster kid” at school, too. If you’re lucky, no one notices. But when they do, you get bullied, gossiped about, or just ignored. Friends? Hard to keep any when you move every few months. After a while, you stop bothering to try. If you’re separated from your siblings, that’s just more loss you have to accept.
I had a social worker. Sometimes two, sometimes more, depending on how many times the staff changed over. I saw them a handful of times a year—usually when I was being moved, not because they wanted to check how I was. No one ever explained what was going on, either. One time, I requested my care records years later and was shocked by all the things that happened to me—things I’d forgotten, things they lied to me about, things that never made sense as a kid. Suddenly, my own life felt like a stranger’s.
People don’t realize how much foster kids have to grow up before they’re ready. I turned 18, and that was it: aged out, on my own, whether I was ready or not. If you’re lucky, you’ve found a placement that lets you stay a little longer, maybe even lets you rent a room. Most of us aren’t lucky. On your 18th birthday, your “family” evaporates with the last state check. Graduation day meant packing up, again—no party, no hugs, just good luck and goodbye.
No one teaches you the basics. When you finally become an adult, everyone just assumes you know how to manage life, like you magically learned how to find an apartment or enroll in college or even buy another pair of shoes (which you probably didn’t have growing up because anything extra got stolen). Health? Forget it—missing records, missed vaccines, ruined teeth from never getting follow-ups. You learn to fake it, to tell people what they want to hear, because there’s no net beneath you. There’s just the street, and if you’re lucky, a crappy job or some half-known resource that you stumble on by accident.
It’s easy for people to look at you and think, “You made it! You seem so normal!” They’re always surprised, as if foster kids are supposed to be broken forever. They have no idea what it took—how much stubbornness, how many nights I told myself I wasn’t going to be a victim, how many times I had to choose not to let the system, or the world, define who I’d become.
But it’s not all dark, all the time. I did meet a few people who genuinely cared. There were foster parents who didn’t treat me like a burden or a paycheck. I had one carer who fought for me, told me she was proud, gave me a little hope. For some of us, it’s a volunteer, a worker, or a rare good home that gives us a taste of what it’s like to be loved, even if only for a while.
Still, the scars run deep. I see it in others, too. Some of the kids I grew up with are lost—homeless, in jail, repeating the cycle because the world never gave them a chance. Sometimes I wonder why I made it and they didn’t. But the truth is, even those of us who “make it” never really leave foster care behind. It shapes everything—how you trust, how you love, how you fight for every scrap of stability you’ve got.
If I could say one thing, it’s this: Foster kids are just kids, but they have to learn to be adults way too soon. And the world—your world—would be better if you saw us, not as statistics or cautionary tales, but as people who survived more than you’ll ever know.