I don’t remember the day I was taken.
I was three. Whatever happened before that lives in paperwork and fragments and the way my body still reacts to certain tones of voice. My life inside the system starts not with a clean break but with a long blur of doors closing behind me—front doors, bedroom doors, car doors—until “moving” became my normal and “home” became a temporary word.
Over fifteen years I lived in roughly thirty-two foster homes and two residential homes. You don’t move that many times because you’re “unlucky.” You move because trauma turns kids into puzzles most adults were never trained to solve. You move because carers get overwhelmed. You move because you start testing people before they can leave you—pushing, melting down, stealing food, saying the ugly truth out loud—anything to see if they’ll fight for you. And when they don’t, you move again. That pattern wires itself into your bones.
My longest placement lasted three and a half years, from three to six. After that, everything blurred into weeks and months: emergency beds, respite carers, short-term homes. Being handed a bag of clothes and driven to a stranger’s house feels a lot like being dropped on a random street and told to pick a door. You learn to scan rooms quickly. You learn where to put your shoes so you don’t get yelled at. You learn not to get attached to pets. You learn to eat fast and hide food because sometimes dinner disappears.
People imagine foster care as either rescue or disaster. It was both, sometimes in the same house.
There were good moments—rare, bright ones that still live in my body. A young couple who sat me on the counter and showed me how to crack an egg. A woman who laughed when I made a mess instead of punishing me. Being hugged after a nightmare. Small things, but when you’re a kid who’s always waiting for the next move, small kindnesses feel like oxygen.
There were also homes that should never have been allowed near children.
One temporary placement still stands out like a bruise you keep touching to make sure it was real. I was about ten. I watched that carer choke a six-year-old because he didn’t pick up toys fast enough. Then she turned on me. She left me outside overnight. She slammed my head into a brick wall while I slept and gave me a concussion. She cut my face and body with keys or fake nails. She tried to keep me from school so no one would see. A driver came anyway. He asked questions. Teachers saw my injuries. I was removed the same day.
She was never punished. Years later I learned she kept fostering for four more years.
If you want to understand why foster kids don’t trust systems, start there.
Abuse didn’t only come from carers. In some homes, it came from other foster kids. In some, from distant relatives who had access to us. In residential care, it came in different shapes: favoritism, power plays, staff who joked about restraints, rules enforced as humiliation instead of safety. Once, a staff member pushed me into an “amygdala hijack”—the kind of trauma response where your body decides you’re in danger before your brain can catch up. I lost control. Doors came off hinges. Police came with tasers. I was restrained, handcuffed, taken to hospital. Later I learned a worker joked about it to other kids.
That’s how you learn to be afraid of authority and desperate for it at the same time.
Moving that much also broke something in my attachment system. I was eventually diagnosed with Reactive Attachment Disorder and disorganized attachment. I remember feeling like a rag doll—picked up, put down, moved, forgotten. I remember another kid telling her mom she didn’t want me anymore because I wasn’t fun. I learned to self-sabotage. I learned to dare adults to leave so at least I’d be right when they did.
Family, for me, became an idea I planned to build later, not something I belonged to now. I imagined dinners at the same table, Sunday movies, boring routines. Those things felt sacred because I’d never had them long enough to trust they’d stay.
The person who finally interrupted that pattern was my case manager.
I’d known her for seven years when I was seventeen and falling apart during the second COVID lockdown. I told her I couldn’t see a future for myself. A week later she called and said she and her partner had decided I was coming to live with them. She had already started the process. That was the first time I felt chosen in a way that stuck. She taught me to cook. She taught me how to keep a routine. She taught me how to live in a house that wasn’t temporary. That choice—hers—changed the trajectory of my life.
When I turned eighteen, I was accepted into an independent living program and moved into my own place a month later. I remember standing in my empty apartment with keys in my hand thinking, Fifteen years just ended. The unknown was terrifying, but it was also the first time the future felt like something I could shape. Later, when I received my case files, I read what had been written about my life. I understood why they wait until you’re an adult to hand those over.
I went to therapy—real, trauma-informed therapy. EMDR helped me step out of the “victim mindset” and into an adult one. It took years. I still struggle with attachment. I still catch myself self-sabotaging. Healing isn’t a straight line. But I’m here, living independently, paying my bills, keeping plants alive, learning to build relationships that don’t revolve around fear.
If you ask what I wish people understood, it’s this: most kids in care are not “difficult.” They are injured. Trauma changes behavior. Meltdowns, stealing food, inappropriate sexual behavior—those are symptoms, not moral failures. Training for carers needs to reflect that reality. Therapy should start early and be mandatory. Background checks should be thorough. Support shouldn’t vanish the day a kid turns eighteen. Housing, life-skills training, and long-term mental health care matter as much as a bed.
“Home,” for me, is still something I’m building. Right now it’s me—my routines, my safety, my rules. One day it will be a table with chairs and a movie night that never gets canceled because we’re moving again.
I’m not telling this story because it’s shocking. I’m telling it because it’s common. Because behind the tidy words—placement, respite, residential care—there are kids learning how to read rooms faster than they read books, learning how to pack their lives into trash bags, learning not to hope too loudly.
And because sometimes, one adult choosing you—really choosing you—can change everything.