Then the cycle ended. Social Services finally caught up with us. I remember my mom just giving me to them. I didn’t understand. Didn’t she love me? Or was it true what some of the men in her life would sometimes tell me. It wasn’t that she didn’t love me, she just loved her drugs and parties more. I hated it. It was just after my ninth birthday. For the last time, I held out hope that she would remember that birthday. That I’d get a present or cake like the other kids at school talked about. Maybe even have a party like the other kids. Add this birthday to the rest of them where nothing happened. And with being placed in care shortly after, that was my first lesson that nothing was easy, nothing was free, and nothing went the way you wanted or hoped it would.

In that first year in care, I went through five “homes”. The first one had six other kids there when I arrived. I shared a room with three other girls. I remember not eating much, mattresses on the floor that needed vacuuming, and never really seeing the foster parents. I do remember hearing them though. The walls were thin, and they spent a lot of time in the bedroom. I remember walking past the room one day, the door open, and seeing the same needles and white powdered piles in their room that my mom had laying about our home. I remember my foster dad seeing me see all that, and being too wasted to really care. After a month there, somehow Social Services found out about all of it, and the seven foster kids were uprooted and moved to other places.

I ended up in North Austin somewhere, and my second home also meant a new school. I remember getting teased at school at first. I was small, skinny, undernourished, needed a hair cut, and all of my clothes had at least one hole and were too small. But I remember liking the family. This foster mom was nice. She would brush my hair at night. She took me to a doctor, and followed the diet they put me on to get me healthy again. The faster dad tried to get me to play soccer. I liked living there, thought they liked me. I felt safe. And for whatever reason, I started having nightmares. Looking back, I figure I felt safe, I let my walls down, I let myself feel. And everything that had been my life so far, the partying, the drugs, the men that came into my room, all of it, must have suddenly caught up with me and slapped me in the ass. I freaked out these lovely, normal, unprepared foster parents. They wanted a sweet little girl, they had no idea how to deal with a child with “issues”. It lasted all of four months.