Taking the Risk to Trust

When I entered foster care at 16, I felt confused. The adults around me saw me as a child all over again. Now, I had a curfew. I had to obey the rules set by my agency and my foster mother. If I needed money, I had to tell adults why I needed it. 

But, I didn’t feel like a child. My stepfather had repeatedly raped me and my family had disowned me. I had been living on the streets and selling drugs to support myself for two years. When I was 14, I had become a mother to a special needs child. 

I remember going to an ACS building once with my foster mother to discuss my case. I kept looking around and wondering when I could leave. I rolled my eyes to show my foster mother how uncomfortable I felt. As the meeting started, I got up to walk out. 

“Sit back down,” one of the workers said. I felt angry and without thinking twice, I began jumping on the table in front of me. “You all don’t know me!” I shouted at them. I felt so pissed off and couldn’t hold in my tears. “Now y’all want to help? Where were you when I was homeless?”

I didn’t allow one specific worker, my case planner, to do her job for half a year. Every time she came to my foster home, I would either not open the door or tell her I had something to do. She was one of the people who was always lecturing me about what rules I had to follow. I was like, “If you have your own agenda, stay with it, because I’m not interested in following your agenda.”

My Anger Wasn’t Helping

Being expected to go from being a child to an adult to a child again made me feel angry and disrespected. But the more I stood up to ACS and my agency by not following the rules and expressing myself with anger, the more they looked at me as the “troubled kid.” I felt like they didn’t bother to find out why I was behaving in the way I was.

So I kept expressing myself with more anger. I didn’t know how to be upfront about the way they were making me feel. 

I found out that ACS was going to place my daughter in foster care if I continued to disobey their rules. That’s when I realized that something had to change. They wanted me to follow my foster home’s curfew and to commit to go to therapy. 

I felt like I was being forced to do things, which triggered me and reminded me of how I was treated in my family of origin. 

But I loved my daughter more than anything and wanted to show ACS that I wasn’t an irresponsible mother. I realized that my anger wasn’t helping. 

I decided to experiment in the meetings. What if, instead of shouting, I just sat down quietly? What would happen if I didn’t react? 

In one meeting, my birth mom was on the speaker phone. The workers asked me about attending family counseling sessions with her and my brother. It enraged me to have to attend therapy with her after how she had treated me throughout my life. But instead of expressing my anger right away, I took a breath and told them that I would attend therapy with my brothers but not with my mother. 

“If she doesn’t want to have a session with me, then she can’t do it with her brothers either,” said my mom. 

My mom was being petty and was only thinking about her feelings. When the workers noticed that about her, they realized why I wanted to keep my distance from her. They didn’t ask me to attend family therapy with her again.

Seeking Adults’ Help

Once I saw some success with my new demeanor, I found things began working in my favor more. I started to seek help from my case planner, lawyer and even the hospital where my daughter was staying. 

There was a time I needed money to visit my daughter and buy clothes and shoes for her. I decided to swallow my pride, put my anger aside and ask a social worker for money.

I entered the interaction expecting the worst and even had a retort on hand for the worker. But she very calmly said that she would have a meeting to discuss my allowance. In the meantime, she said she would ask my foster mother to give me some money and would refund her. 

I felt shocked at how she had responded. My biological mother would have said something snarky about how I was “still a kid and not a grown-up.” 

I realized that when I was calmer, it was easier for me to get help. 

I started telling my workers about the world I had known as a child and how I had to struggle. I told them about how I was once homeless and had to sell drugs to provide clothes for my daughter. I asked them a question: How am I supposed to trust you after I’ve been betrayed by my own people? 

I let staff know that I won’t let go of my life experiences, especially when those experiences had made me a survivor. Each worker had to respect and accept that I couldn’t be a child again.

The 48-Hour Deadline

One day I had a friend’s funeral to go to. She was around my age and also a survivor of sexual violence. She had died by suicide. 

After the funeral, I did not want to be back in my foster home. I wanted to hang out with my friends to feel a sense of community. But I also didn’t want to be an AWOL kid. The only person that popped up in my mind who might be able to help me was my case planner. She had shown up for visits no matter how many times I had ignored her. So I called her and told her about my situation. 

Instead of giving me a lecture, she said, “Well!, I can’t tell you that it’s OK to stay outside. But I could tell you that you only get marked as an AWOL child after 48 hours. That’s when a missing person report has to be filed. If you are going to stay outside, remember to be back before 48 hours.” 

She was giving me information so I could make a choice, instead of telling me what to do! I felt as if I was being trusted to make the right choice. I had done so much work to be independent and it felt really good to feel a sense of control over my future. 

I took the information my case planner gave me and returned within 24 hours. 

After that interaction, I started trusting her more. She and I began communicating better.

Building a Team

Once I explained it to them in a calm way, my workers understood why it was so confusing for me to be a child who felt like an adult but was being treated like a child. They began listening to me more and actually respecting me. They also saw me as the responsible parent that I was: when I visited my daughter in the hospital, I would give her medication and change her feeding tube, all without the help of her nurses. They asked me about my goals and I had specific goals for myself and my child. 

The weight I had been carrying started feeling lighter because I was giving stacks of it to the adults around me. I still had trust issues, but I was also trying my best to build a team. 

I saw results: I updated my lawyer on my needs and I didn’t have to go to family court because my lawyer felt confident enough to advocate for me by herself. I felt like my social worker was listening to my needs better. When I finally aged out of foster care, my judge, who had never met me in person, said she wanted to meet me and give me a cupcake for my 21st birthday. She said she would enroll me in CASA’s program. I didn’t feel so alone anymore. 

Thanks to my team, I was able to retain custody of my daughter and receive services from Medicaid. My team realized that I wasn’t an irresponsible parent and began helping me with parenting my special needs child. 

It was my grit and survival instinct that had made me give trials to my workers. But it was also my grit that allowed me to trust people who had good intentions. I told workers who seemed like they just wanted their pay that their job was more than just a paycheck because I was trusting them with my life. 

The ones who truly cared had to win my trust by telling me my rights. The ones I came to trust didn’t just say, “Do this, do that.” 

Once I began trusting them, I appreciated when they told me the truth if I was making poor choices and showed me how some of my actions were hurting me. For example, I kept choosing abusive partners until one of my case planners pointed that out to me. Initially, I brushed off what she said (I felt like they were calling me crazy and forcing me to get therapy.) I wish they had told me that therapy was going to heal my trauma. When I eventually started seeing a therapist, I realized I may have been trying to replicate negative patterns I learned in my childhood. 

I wanted to change my behavior and in order to do so, I needed to ask for help. I learned that in order to benefit from what the people around me were offering, I had to take the risk of learning to trust them.