You Never Know What You Can Do

Could you survive such emotional, psychological or physical traumas?

You go through childhood barely remembering what your mother smelled like. Since you never knew your mother, you’re moved from home to home 16 times by the age of 19 feeling you had about a hundred mothers.

In the process of being moved all over the place, you lose your brothers and sisters, a particular pair of shoes that felt just right, your absolutely most favorite cuddly, and a certain place on the inside of your last crib where you used to scratch with your fingernail to help you go to sleep.

You’re placed in a juvenile detention center when your only crime was not having a family of your own, and raped numerous times with no one paying the price, giving up on life and attempting suicide at the young age of ten?

I’d like to share a story with you about a little boy who has just been born.

He should be wrapped in his loving mother’s arms with his mother’s scent all about him, and with family gathering ‘round, full of joy at his birth. But he doesn’t feel those loving arms nor hear the sounds of joy. He is moved from one nursery to another. He is alone.

Days, weeks and months go by. The calendar moves toward his first birthday, yet he still remains…alone!

He hears someone…a stranger…calling his name. Someone is picking him up and saying they are taking him home.

Years pass. He has heard strangers repeat his name and say “Pack your bag…you are leaving!” ten different times. He is only six years old. Each time he has heard it, he had just begun to make friends…now they are gone. He begins to feel comfortable where he is, but now it’s time to move again. Stability and permanence would be words in a dictionary, not in his ordinary life.

Each move has brought him to unfamiliar surroundings and people. Each time he has had to pack his “brown paper bag” with all his worldly possessions. The bag is never full. No one has yet called him Son…he is only called by his first name. He hears he is a foster child for the first time. He hears the word “bastard” in relation to him as well.

No one loves him. He doesn’t belong wherever he has gone. He is treated differently than others and no one wants him. He has no permanent home. He walks from school to his temporary home slowly, having developed a fear that it may no longer be his home when he gets there.

He suddenly finds himself in a home where things are different, where he is treated with love. He is treated as part of the family and starts to lose his fear of leaving school to go home. He is getting comfortable where he is.

He is in this home one, two, three years. He believes he has finally found a home. He has made and kept friends for longer than a few months. He passes a fourth year and is half way through another.

He arrives home from school one day and sees a stranger in the house. He slows down going up the walkway and begins to tremble. He sees the one he loves and calls “Mom” crying. The stranger in the room is a caseworker from Catholic Charities. He goes to his Mom to hold her…to cry with her and comfort her.

He knows what this means and packs his “paper bag” once again. Carrying it, he is walking out of the house he has known for four and one half years as home. He looks back as he is slowly driven away…he knows in his heart he won’t be back to live here again.

He is placed in a juvenile detention center with young men who have committed every imaginable crime. His only crime is he has no parents or home to call his own.

He is the youngest boy on the block, as well as the smallest. Though he attempts to fight, he is unable to overcome the attacks of older boys. He is repeatedly sexually assaulted.

One day after being assaulted and left naked in a cell, he feels his life is no longer worth living. He attempts to hang himself with a belt, but is discovered and placed in isolation. Those responsible for the repeated rapes are never charged.

He lives in isolation for over two months while yet another temporary home is found for him.

He is in a strange place once again. He is in a new school and has no friends. He is treated as a stranger. He is not a part of this family. He is forced to eat alone.

He is given but one meal a day, and no seconds were allowed. This forces him to steal from classmates’ lunches to lessen his hunger pangs. The back porch serves as his bedroom both in summer’s heat and winter’s cold.

Christmas comes…the only gifts he receives are the clothes that were given him by the St. Vincent de Paul Society a week earlier as his semiannual clothing allotment. There is nothing from this family for him under the tree.

Months pass. He is told to “pack his bag.” They are coming for him in the morning. He is being moved yet again.

He is asleep this last night, when suddenly he is jolted awake. Before him stands another person… the biological 16 year old son of the foster parents…exposing himself. He intends to have the boy remember his last night in this house. The boy screams out in terror and lashes out every way possible.

He hears someone coming, asking, “What is going on?”

He tells his story, but is not believed. He is told, “You no good, ungrateful, lying little bastard! No wonder no one wants you! Get your bag and get your ass out of this house!”

He hears and feels the hard slap and sting of a hand across his reddened face. He is forced to sit on the outside stoop in the cold night, to await them coming to get him in the morning. He is picked up, and soon on a plane for the first time in his life and doesn’t know where he is being taken. The person taking him is not speaking to him. He lands in a place he has never heard of and has no idea where he is, only that he has been moved again.

You have been reading this for just a few minutes. In that short time, this young boy has been moved 15 times. He has been uprooted from the only place he considered home and the people he loved. He has made friends and lost them. He has changed schools. He has been made to feel a part of a family and as a stranger. He has been sexually assaulted. He has attempted suicide. He is alone again. He is but 11 years old!

Can you imagine how this young boy felt? I don’t need to imagine any of the story just shared with you or the feelings this young boy felt. It is a story not just about any little boy. It is a TRUE story…and I WAS that young boy.

I was placed in foster care the day of my birth. Though my birth mother had indicated months before my birth that she was placing me for adoption, the home for unwed mothers did nothing prior to my birth to arrange one. I spent my first six months in the nursery of the hospital where I was born and then was moved back to the nursery of the home for unwed mothers for almost another six months. The merry go round of the system had already begun.

Shortly before my first birthday I was placed in a foster home…already in three places by age one and none to really call home! I was bounced from place to place; a total of 15 times in 11 years. I sometimes slipped through the cracks and got shuffled around unnoticed and forgotten. No reason was ever given for the move, nor was I ever spoken to about moving. I was voiceless as others controlled what was to happen to me.

What were they thinking when they sent me to a foster home without telling them about the special ways I needed to be handled because I had never stayed anywhere long enough to get attached to anybody? And when that family got rid of me, and the next, and the next, did they think I was going to take it all lying down? Did they think I was supposed to just be sweet and adorable and ready to connect to yet another family who was going to throw me away?

After a while, I had lost too many people that I might have cared about. I had been with too many “parents” who really weren’t, because they couldn’t hold me tightly in their hearts at all. No one understood how I was being changed by all these losses (in my heart and in my behavior).

I became known as a loner. I depended on nobody but myself. This caused more problems.

I built brick walls and didn’t let anyone in. Once the walls were in place it took much to take them down. If they start to come down and something happened, I would put them back up higher than they were before.

I shared my experiences and memories of my seven plus years at Boys Town in June 2013 issue of this magazine and won’t repeat it here, just a brief synopsis.

At age 11 the state gave up on me and sent me off to Boys Town, Nebraska to be someone else’s burden, even though I was born in Detroit, Michigan. They put an 11 year old boy who had never been out of Detroit or on a plane, with a caseworker who would not say a word to me throughout the over four-hour flight as to where I was being sent.

I arrived at Father Flanagan’s Home for Boys; better known as Boys Town, Nebraska an embittered young boy, angry at the world, caring less about school, hating any type of authority. I was already well on my way of becoming just another failing statistic of the system. I would go from fifth grade through the tenth with this type of attitude.

It appeared to me that all Boys Town wanted to do was to keep me there until I aged out of the system. Teachers passed me on from grade to grade no matter how little effort I made. By the end of my sophomore year, I ranked near the bottom of my class. It was not due to lack of intelligence but rather that I just didn’t care.

Going to college was something that never even entered into my mind. No one was there to attempt to deal with all the anger that was within me.

Things slowly began changing after five years at Boys Town. Three people entered my life that was to have an influence upon me. They took it upon themselves to take a young man under siege in his life and teach him to reach for his fullest potential. Though all three are now deceased, they continue to influence me and will do so for the rest of my life.

The Executive Director of Boys Town took me under his wing as I went to work for him as his cook’s assistant. We spent hours talking. He always had an open door for me when I felt I needed to talk. He provided me with a “father” figure, missing from the early days of my childhood. He went further out of his way to support me than his position required.

As a small child I loved to argue. My tenth grade English teacher that year saw something positive in my argumentative nature. She kept me after school one day early in the school year. She talked to me about my arguing and how she saw it as ability, if it were directed in the proper way. I had no idea what she was talking about.

She took me to another English teacher, also the coach for the newly begun Speech and Debate Team. She simply told him, “I think I have a debater for you.” Yeah, I could now argue, and get away with it!

The debate coach, of course, let me know that with the ability to argue, I now had to prove my case. This meant lots of hard work researching the question being debated. It also meant that to be part of the debate team and go to tournaments, my grades had to improve. I was determined to do whatever it took to make the team.

Someone finally saw something positive in me!

I made the novice debate team that year. I was a good debater, even though rough around the edges. My senior year; I made the varsity debate team. My partner and I were, if I say so myself, great. We were rarely defeated. We traveled throughout the Midwest on weekends during the season, accumulating numerous trophies as winners of the tournaments. Our record at the end of the season was 289 wins as opposed to only 29 defeats.

I finally felt I had accomplished something. I was worth something. I could do more with my life than the low expectations the foster care system and I had previously set for me.

When that light bulb went on in my head, I knew I had a decision to make that would determine where my life was headed. I could sit on the sidelines of the highway of life whining about my childhood, blaming others for my failures and actually make my life a failure. Or, I could decide to say, “OK, I was dealt a bad hand at birth and my childhood had been a disaster.