How To Write A Narrative Essay On Foster Care

Foster care and abandonment

The baggage that remains

By Shaylah O’Hara

Guest writer

I had always felt that my mother did not want me. While she had several opportunities to get me back by simply providing a few clean drug tests, she was unable to do so.

I tell myself that I ended up in the foster care system due to her addiction and that she did not intentionally choose drugs over me; while I do believe that, it still hurts.

I got stuck with staff as parent figures; staff not properly trained to deal with ‘troubled youth.’ Troubled? Me? I was taken from my mom due to her use of drugs, her abuse and neglect and the system called me troubled.

I’d run away, right back to my mom—despite how mean and crazy she was; I just wanted my mom. Every time we would picked up

I wasn’t learning anything conducive to living a healthy life. I had so many obvious issues that needed to be addressed—such as abandonment, trauma, depression—but nobody cared enough or knew enough to consider that I was acting out because I had been abandoned by my mother.

Instead, I was given a look of disgust, treated like a delinquent, restrained and put on high doses of sedatives.

I was not placed in a foster home or with a foster family. I was placed in institutions that smelled and looked like mental hospitals. I could never settle in and get comfortable. It was not a home. Living out of big black plastic trash bags, I had nowhere to go, no structure, no future, and no place to call home.

Drugs became my only friend. I became my mother. I did all of the same patterns, the ones I said I would never have. I was living a miserable existence. I was not living. I was in a constant state of fear, which I expressed through anger, rage and destruction. I was a tornado.

I aged out of the foster “care” system at the age of 18 years old and was thrown into a world as if I was thrown into an ocean but never taught to