By Al Desetta

"It was funny how we were in pain, but the world never stopped for us, it still moved on. I guess you could say it's just like the moon and the stars-you want them to shine forever, but then they disappear and you're left hoping for tomorrow."

With a direct and striking simplicity, 18-year-old Wunika Hicks describes the night she and her brother were taken away from their mother and placed into foster care. Although she could not know it at the time, that night was the beginning for Wunika of a ten-year journey through "the system," as foster care is universally known to hundreds of thousands of young people across the United States. As a young woman looking back on that bewildered eight-year-old child, Wunika touches on two of the central emotional themes that 39 young writers explore in The Heart Knows Something Different-the pain of separation from family, and the stubborn resiliency of hope for the future.

The teenaged writers in the following pages left their natural families because they were abused or neglected, or because poverty, death, illness, or other circumstances beyond their control prevented their families from properly caring for them. They write about losing loved ones, but also about finding new families in foster care. They describe coming to terms with difficult childhoods, and drawing strength from the past. After reading their stories we know how they feel about living in foster care, about preparing for life beyond it, and, all the while, they give us insights into how the system might possibly be changed for the better.

Rarely have these experiences been told with such immediacy. Most books about foster care are either clinical accounts written by child welfare professionals, policy tracts by bureaucrats, or memoirs in which adult "survivors" look back from great distance on their early years. The Heart Knows Something Different, in contrast, is a unique insider's record: it collects first-hand accounts by writers who are living in foster care right now and who are speaking directly to others their age in the same situation.

They were originally published for other teens in Foster Care Youth United, a bi-monthly magazine founded in 1993 to give a voice to young people living in foster families, group homes, residential campuses, and other out-of-home facilities. The magazine's motto, selected by the teens, is "On the Inside, Looking Out." These writers have broken through their isolation to speak to and for their peers. Through writing they have acknowledged and even shed their unease about being in foster care, and they now have a forum where they can express complex feelings they've been holding inside for much of their young lives.

They reveal a world that remains largely shielded from public view for reasons that are both bureaucratic and deeply personal. That world needs to be seen by adults-biological parents, foster parents, childcare workers, foster care administrators, politicians, policy makers, and anyone who cares about our youth. Although rooted in the personal, these stories have a wider public accountability. The writers in this book are not venting or self-absorbed. They are trying to articulate and reflect on their experiences to reach their peers, but also to speak the truth about foster care to adults. They remind us of our responsibilities to them, because after hearing their voices we cannot help but see them as individuals, lifted from the abstract statistics of "the system."

Since children without parents are a reflection of the vulnerability of families, foster care can be viewed as a barometer of our national well-being. The first orphan asylum in North America was founded in New Orleans in 1728. By the mid-1800s orphanages had spread across the U.S., their growth fueled by the family dislocation caused by the Civil War and waves of immigration. In the early 1900s, more than 100,000 orphans and destitute children were living in some 1,100 institutions throughout the country, and between 1853 and 1929 orphan trains shipped many thousands of children from the East coast to live with foster parents (and, in many cases, provide inexpensive farm labor) in the rural West. During the Depression, regimented institutions with hundreds of beds were the norm.

In the 1960s, a heroin epidemic flooded the system with children. More recently, the impact of crack cocaine and HIV and AIDS on families has pushed a new wave of children into foster care. (By the end of this decade [year?], a projected 100,000 children will have lost their mothers to AIDS.)

In New York City alone, the foster care population almost tripled from 16,230 at the end of 1984 to 48,068 in 1993. The extreme stresses on the poorest and most threatened families are evident in the fact that, nationwide, nearly 460,000 children were living in foster care in 1995 [update to 1999?], up from 276,000 in 1985.

But while the statistics may fluctuate and the reasons for being in care vary, the experience of growing up without parents has remained constant throughout the years.

In New York City, the Administration for Children's Services or ACS (still known to many by its old name, the Bureau of Child Welfare or BCW), is the agency responsible for foster care. The ACS, in turn, pays scores of private agencies to care for young people in group homes and foster homes. This arrangement between public and private agencies is similar across the U.S. Ideally, foster care is supposed to provide a temporary stay in a "homelike" setting before the child is either returned to family or adopted by a new one, but for many youth this never happens. Instead, they spend years languishing in the system without the love, attention, and stability they need.

Foster care, then, is too often assigned (or expected to accomplish) an impossible task: replacing the biological family. For children in care, the system becomes the Parent, carrying all the burdens and ambivalence of that role. The system can largely meet the physical needs of the young people it serves, provide food on the table and a roof over their heads, but whether it can meet their emotional needs is a question that is asked in a multitude of ways in this book.

Through their distinct voices we come to know these young writers and grow close to them, to identify with their hopes and fears. For Miranda "Nikki" Kent, 15, who lives in foster care in Alabama, the most basic wish of foster care youth is to have "real parents to call their own" and homes "where they can love and be loved in return." She adds: "I'm only a kid, but maybe by the time I'm grown there will be a better way and other children won't have to go through what my brother, sister, and I have gone through. Maybe all children with parents who don't love them, or who can't care for them, will have the chance to live as part of a real family with all the love and security of knowing that they are loved...."

To best follow this search for family and security, The Heart Knows Something Different is organized into four parts, "Family," "Living in the System," "Who Am I?" and "Looking to the Future," each exploring a core aspect of lives in foster care. The book follows the path that most of these young people take: they grow up in troubled homes; they leave their families to live in a new setting; they begin to deal with the identity of being a "foster child"; and, out of the turmoil of these experiences, they begin to overcome adversity and build independence.

In "Questions Without Answers," the story that opens the "Family" section, Shaniqua Sockwell looks up at the apartment building where she lived as a young child and is overcome by painful memories. But those memories have another side: "They have taught me a lot about the person I want to someday become." Shaniqua describes her loss of faith in her parents, who were ravaged by drug addiction, but her ability to confront that past also reveals her strength in facing the future.

In the section's second piece, "Six Months on the Run from the B.C.W.," Shawan Raheem Samuels gives us a dramatic narrative of his family's disintegration. He runs away from home to escape a social worker who wants to put him in the system, and he ends up committing crimes. It would be easy to dismiss this as a story about a "bad boy" and his gun, but it is better read as a story about a child who has aged too quickly because he has no parental affection or guidance, who has nowhere to go and no one to trust. Shawan writes, "A man who hates his family is a man who hates himself." Fueling his intense anger is his sensitivity to that dilemma. And the chaos of the story he tells had become a way of life for him by the time he began writing about it. Shawan would complete entire drafts by hand at one sitting, and then would disappear for weeks at a time, reappearing to pick up his narrative as if he'd been gone for only a day.

In "My Foster Mother Is My Best Friend," Omar Sharif is finally able to call his foster mother "Mom" and accept her love after many months of living with her, but he can't bring himself to be adopted by her, and wonders if he's made the right decision. Craig Jaffe in "My Crew Was My Family" ends up living on the streets, but he establishes a closeness with his peers that he never had with his adoptive family.

It is also in this section that Wunika Hicks begins to explore her past in the first of four interrelated stories that raise elemental questions about family. She recalls her shock when her only sibling is separated from her in a sealed adopted ("I Lost My Brother to Adoption"): "Was this really going on? I suddenly felt so protective of David. I hadn't wanted the responsibility of being his mother, but now I didn't want anyone taking him away." She questions, with a child's self-doubt, whether the adoption is somehow her fault. Wunika's next story, "She'll Always Be My Mother," probes deeper into her past with an unsparing eye, as she considers the person with whom she had the closest bond and who subjected her to the greatest abuse. The divided emotions of allegiance and alienation that resonate throughout her piece also resonate throughout the entire "Family" section.

In the book's second part, "Living in the System," the writers take us inside the foster care system and give us an intimate view of day-to-day life there. Most of these stories take place in group homes, small residences housing 12-20 young people, decentralized versions of the impersonal and overcrowded orphanages of the past.

Here we see young people coping with the challenge of starting over as they begin to regroup and forge new relationships in unfamiliar settings. "My Day in the Group Home" opens the section with dark comedy, as Carlford Wadley maneuvers through an institutional maze characterized by mediocre food, odd roommates, and a frenetic routine.

We also learn that foster care can be a literal lifesaver for those who have been removed from abusive homes, and who now begin to heal and grow in safe environments. Clarissa Venable ("Finding a Father in the System") learns to trust a caring male staff member. Angela Rutman ("Why I'm Better Off in Foster Care") discovers the structure and discipline her family could not provide her. Lorraine Fonseca ("Making a New Family") describes how she creates a new family through the friendship of understanding peers.

A recurrent theme in this section is "the staff"-the workers who have daily contact with the group home residents and who enforce the rules, strive to provide structure and love, and become the object of all kinds of emotions. It is an unfortunate fact that some group home staff and foster parents abuse the power they wield, and a system that is supposed to protect ends up having the opposite effect. This is the subject of "Why Are You Doing This, Mr. Jones?", an account by a young woman of having been raped by her social worker. The writer spent an entire summer working on it. She sat on a couch in our lounge, bent over her notepad, writing furiously, then giving it up, walking away only to return, engaged in almost a physical fight with herself to get it down on paper. But when she finished she was "a stronger person...not alone," and the response from readers was enormous because the story touches on a prime concern: the ever-present power dynamic between surrogate parents and children in great need.

Other stories about coping and persevering round out the section. In "How I Became a Stronger Mother," Anzula Richardson gets much-needed support from other young mothers in her residence. In "Peer Pressure and Me," we pick up Craig Jaffe's story again, begun in the book's first part. He has now left the streets and is living in a group home, successfully casting off destructive behavior from his past. In "Kicked to the Curb at 21," Rick Bullard shows the wisdom of 20-20 hindsight as he analyzes how the system could have better prepared him to live on his own after foster care. Rick reminds us that not all struggles in foster care are emotional: young people in care need to be able to find and hold jobs, secure adequate housing, and further their educations. Taken together, the stories in "Living in the System" ask an essential question: absent the support of the biological family, how do kids get what they need in order to grow up?

"Who Am I?", the book's third part, follows with stories that reflect further on the struggle to develop a positive sense of self and define one's identity in relation to others. It begins with a series of pieces that discuss a main preoccupation of many youth in the system: the stigma and shame they feel about being in care, and their need to hide that fact for fear of being stereotyped or teased. One particular worry is telling a potential boyfriend or girlfriend that they're in the system. The sense that one is "different" or "strange" and unable to communicate this reality to outsiders permeates these stories.

In "How I Lived a Double Life", True remembers how he "pretended" to be a "normal" kid during the day in school, and then was free to be a "group home kid" at night. In "Kicked Out Because I Was Gay," Shameek Williamson describes how she is not only compelled to hide her foster care identity from friends, but also cannot tell her foster mother or grandmother she's gay because she may be asked to leave and has no place left to go.

But realizing they are more similar to others than they might first imagine, the writers also begin to react against their fears and see their foster care experiences as a source of strength. Lenny Jones interviews his classmates at school without telling them he's in foster care ("What They Say Behind Our Backs"), to find out what stereotypes they have about him, and then counters their often insensitive assumptions with humorous asides to the reader. One boy tells Lenny, "I think I'd try to hide it because I'd feel embarrassed not having a parent." Lenny responds: "We have parents....It's just that they're temporarily out of order. And what's so spectacular about living with biological family, anyway?" When another boy says, "They're just regular kids," Lenny answers, "Amen."

Other issues of adolescent identity that are not unique to teenagers in foster care are raised in "Who Am I?": a girl tries to understand her compulsion to shoplift ("Is Stealing My Addiction?"); Shawan Raheem Samuels illustrates, with a brilliant juxtaposition of slang and traditional language, the gulf between middle-class social workers and kids from the projects ("Phat Flows, Honeys, and the Booms"); Jessica DeSince describes her valiant attempt to be a good mother before her own childhood is yet over ("I'm the Mommy Now"). And in the final story, "Who's the Real Problem Child?", Marcus Howell returns to the theme of stigma by demolishing, with subtle power, the myth that the biological family is inherently good.

In the concluding section, "Looking to the Future," answers begin to emerge to familiar questions. How can a difficult past be overcome? Where does responsibility lie? How can one move forward? Is it possible to learn from the past? Refusing to see themselves as victims, the writers understand that no "system" alone will provide the answers. They have been helped by peer counseling, social workers, therapists, and staff, but now they reflect on individual responsibility and choices they need to make. Here we see the roots of change, in some cases tentative, in others firmly grounded.

Lenny Jones, in "Therapy Changed My Life," describes his recovery from sexual abuse. He originally drafted this story in the third person, but eventually shifted into the first person as the writing progressed, a heroic admission. (Originally published anonymously in Foster Care Youth United, Lenny has taken the further step of claiming authorship of the story in this book.) Kenyetta Ivy, in "From Fighter to Friend," changes, with the aid of an attentive and affectionate peer, from a violent and destructive person into a model resident. In "How I Made Peace with the Past", Paula Byrd shows courage and wisdom in confronting her dying mother with her anger, expressing her true feelings for the first time, a difficult but necessary process before Paula can then begin to forgive her. And Tasheen Davis ("Staying with the Hurt") and Saretta Burkett ("I Won't Abuse My Kids") strive to break away from family legacies of child abuse by coming to terms with the abuser in themselves. If the past cannot be left behind, the stories in this section display visions of a more productive future to balance the adversity of the past.

Each of the book's first three parts ends with "Short Takes," a selection of pieces that were mailed into Foster Care Youth United by readers from around the country (the magazine has subscribers in forty-five [?] states). These pieces echo the main themes of each section and show the universality of the foster care experience, whether it is lived in California, Oklahoma, Alabama, or New York. The book's fourth section is followed by "Messages from the Writers," where several of the authors have a last word about what they hope to accomplish with their stories and this book.

Included at the end of The Heart Knows Something Different is a Glossary of Slang to help the reader with forms of usage common among young people today, a Subject Guide that cross-indexes, by story, the major topics addressed, and a Resource List to assist you in finding out more about foster care.

The process that has produced this writing deserves some explanation. One of the goals of Foster Care Youth United is to teach writing in a rigorous way, yet within a meaningful context. Our students' real-life experiences are not buried in a teacher's desk or journal entries, but are published for readers in a nationwide magazine. Achieving writing of that quality demands the discipline of revising and rewriting through many drafts. Students come to the magazine as volunteers or for school credit, and work on these drafts with an editor in the same way all writers do. They apply much skill and tenacity to putting a public face on their personal experiences.

Wunika Hicks, author of four pieces in this collection, had a burning desire to write her first story about her younger brother David, the only family she had left when they went into foster care together as small children, and from whom she had been separated for years by his adoption. "I Lost My Brother to Adoption" took several months to complete (as did many in this volume). Although it is not an overly long piece, the emotions and complications involved in its writing ran deep. Wunika's first draft acknowledged her sadness over the loss of her brother, but ended in a phony way, as she played down her anger about the separation.

Through many drafts, she rewrote the story. It eventually acquired a beginning: how, as a young child, she had to stay home from school to care for David while their mother was gone for days at a time, and how she resented him for robbing her of her childhood. Then a middle took form: Wunika's anger over David's adoption, along with guilt that she had been a "bad" sister for feeling resentful toward him. And, finally, an end: continuing anger that the system could "allow" her to be separated from her brother, and the hope that she might one day see him again.

That first story accomplished many things for Wunika. She began to let out some of her anger and she began to trust others to the point of sharing more episodes of her life with readers in her next stories. Each of these examined her past from a new perspective and with increasing narrative sophistication, as the disunity of that past began to take on a coherent shape. There were many times she wanted to give up or found it hard to go forward, but she stuck with it and completed her task as a writer.

Perhaps there's a parallel between navigating the foster care journey and writing about it. Both challenge one's ability to continue on, to avoid the false turns and the blind thickets, to find an identity, to complete the story. The writers in these pages have made that journey and their narratives have given it a form.

In a sense, it is a journey all of us must make. Despite the secrecy and stigma that often surround young people in foster care, despite the extremities of experience described in many of the following pages, the crucial challenges faced by these writers are reflected in our own personal histories, no matter what kind of home or family we come from. These stories resonate powerfully in us because we recognize in them aspects of ourselves, the part of us that is attempting to come to terms with our own versions of loss or disappointment, as well as independence from the past and responsibility toward others. Like Wunika Hicks, who, in the book's final piece, "takes a vacation" from unrealistic hopes for her family, exchanging hurtful illusions for a more healthy reality, we are all challenged, to one extent or another, to also give up those illusions. Underneath our outward differences from these writers, the primal issues of separation from family, finding an identity, and coming to terms with adolescence and adulthood are recognizable to us and therefore very much our own. This is the essential truth that underlies every story in this book.

We hope these writers emerge not as "foster children," but as rich and multifaceted individuals who, because of adult situations beyond their control, happen to be in foster care. We hope each story sheds light on a world that has been hidden and stigmatized for too long. We hope The Heart Knows Something Different challenges stereotypes and questions assumptions and helps adults who work with these young people to better meet their needs.

And we hope that this book has an impact on changing foster care for the better. These young people are simply trying to grow up and mature and move into adulthood. They are asking us to recognize that basic fact and to understand how difficult it is to undertake alone. Perhaps their voices will help make the system more responsive, but they also warn us that there are limits to what foster care can accomplish. They tell us, although not always directly, that we must try to keep families together, to do all we can to keep children from living without parents. They are asking us to think hard about what we mean when we talk about "the best interests" of the child, to understand the full dimensions and complexities of that term. These stories, so fiercely truthful, are a tribute to those who have struggled to make sense of themselves in order to help others.