When I was young they took us from our mom also. While in foster care I learned how to read, they fixed all my teeth which the majority of them needed fillings, one so bad I had to have a cap put on it and most importantly for that very short one year period in my life I learned the difference between what an abusive household looked like and what a normal household looked like. My foster parents weren't alcoholic's like my parents were though my dad was out of the picture at the time of removal he was no more fit to have ever been a parent himself. Our history as children often dictates what we carry on to our own children and my parents were no exception to that rule, they themselves by far didn't have shining examples of what being a parent should have really been like. My mom hadn't even accomplished getting us all back when she started drinking again. At that time the system here hadn't dealt with six children taken from the same family with each child facing their own emotional tolls over the abuse they suffered. I had one sister and a brother that found themselves placed numerous times in different foster homes or in the case of my sister some agency care because no one could handle them. By the time the cycle of abuse started happening again they simply just opted to leave those of us already back home there to deal with the abuse ourselves while continuing to shield the younger ones in foster care. Maybe back then that was the way the system was set up here, there may have not been in place a system that helped teenage children nor enough foster parents that wanted teenage children as that was the excuse given to me being dropped off in the street one morning after having to run down the street barefoot in my pajama's in darkness screaming for help against my mother. A neighbor took me in and they called the police who contacted the agency who sent my old foster family to pick me up. The next day the caseworker came and got me, pulled up in front of our house and told me I was to old for a foster home anymore. She didn't even bother pulling to the curb. At that point in my life I had went from a fifth grade child with a rotted mouth who couldn't read to being on the honor
roll in seventh grade, the director of my drama class, on the girls basketball team and the front page editor of our junior high school newspaper, by the end of seventh grade I was awarded the Principles Academic For Excellence Award. In essence a system that had saved me also failed me as I could have went on to have really achieved something in this life but rather found myself running away from home at the age of sixteen. A month before my seventeenth birthday I turned myself in. I went before the judge and he said it looked as though I had taken good care of myself, he said if I went home until I turned seventeen he would emancipate me as that was the age of emancipation our state allowed. Once I turned seventeen I left again but not before I told my mom that if she ever drank again I'd be back to take all the kids away from her when I turned eighteen, from that day forward she never drank again. In the meantime I went back and got my high school diploma by taking advantage of a federal program that would pay you to go back to school to train in a technical field. They paid me two hundred and thirty eight dollars every two weeks to go to a local college for clerical training whereas you could get high school credits but not college credits for. There I needed two more credits to graduate, science and physical education. I went to a neighborhood school where they offered night school for adults and took a science and first aid course that qualified for physical education credit. When I got ready to graduate they told me my IQ was to high to graduate with a basic adult education diploma and they put me in a class of high school students graduating across from the college so I could get a regular high school diploma. I graduated from a school that I never attended except to get my gown and on graduation night to walk across that stage. I ended up graduating in the same year I would have if I hadn't have had to drop out to escape the abuse. In comparison to my older sister who wouldn't stay put in any foster home, found herself lodged in several agencies, given way more support to try and overcome the abuses suffered she continued on her path to self destruction every opportunity she could get. One of the reasons that I came home before her but not before one younger brother with whom no one could control either. She'd never end up coming back. After they exhausted every avenue with her they placed her for two years in a locked facility that was known as a girls training school. Once released from there they thought maybe placing her in another town where she had no connections to her friends who were bad elements they'd put her in a group home for young adults in another city. She wasn't even there a week and out the door she went. There she hooked up with a pimp whom she'd go on to live with him in an abusive relationship, produce three children she was incapable of being a mother to and ultimately in the end he'd talk her into moving to California where he took two of the kids and left her there as he didn't believe the younger child was his. She lost custody of the child after the child suffered horrendous abuse. While her child was in foster care she met up with two guys out there who promised her she could come live on their farm with horses in the remote Sierra Nevada Mountains but instead of finding herself on a farm with horses she had met two men who had built an eighteen by twenty foot concrete torture chamber where they took and chopped her into tiny bits and burned her body in a barrel in the backyard. These two men became California's two worst mass murders as they had later found to have been responsible for twenty six people's murders.

Now if I had decided to go hang out with the homeless, go hang out with the bad elements, go hang out on a street corner, had decided to do anything other than what I did I also one day may have found myself in the same exact circumstances as my sister or the girl in this article. I could go on to detail how two brothers ended up serving life sentences, one brother who served seventeen years, a younger sister that ended up being a stripper before finally overcoming some pretty hard (knocks) obstacles to buying her own home in a predominately good area where she raised four kids on her own to graduation. Ultimately in the end it's the decisions that we make that determine our path, one can be given all the help in the world but if they don't want it there is nothing anybody is going to do to change that.