Aging Out Of the Foster Care System
“You
have two weeks to find an apartment and you won’t have to worry about being
with us (the Children’s Aid) anymore”
(Words said to me by a CAS worker)
I
was sitting in a cold hard plastic chair off to the side of my social worker’s
desk at the Children’s Aid Society. I had been called in earlier, and I had
taken the city bus to the CAS office because my social worker, Lynn had called
and said
“
You need to come to the office. I have some concerns that I need to speak with
you about.”
I
didn’t really want to go. The social worker I had had been growing more and
more distant from me. I felt that she was almost disgusted with how I was doing
at my new residence- the Independent Living residence that I had moved into upon
leaving my foster home in the county. She didn’t tell me, that the worker from
the residence was going to be there for the meeting also.
I
remember walking down a dreary hallway, my eyes kind of squinting as they tried
to adjust to a dull yellowish light. As I walked slowly down this hallway, I
felt a certain sense of apprehension, which was making my heart pump extra
hard, and my palms were feeling sweaty because I didn’t know what I was being
called in for. My hands were clenched into fists. As I walked, I nervously
began to clutch each finger and cracked my knuckles. The pop..pop..pop… sound
of my knuckles cracking was almost soothing to me, but I wasn’t really sure
why. There was a cacophony of voices from other offices that hit my ears, as I
walked down the hallway to my worker’s office.
I
walked for maybe a minute or two, and then I stopped in front of her door. I
heard two voices behind that closed door, but I couldn’t make out what they
were saying. I felt my chest contract as I took a deep breath and knocked. The wood of the door resounding as my knuckles
hit the door.
There
was silence for a couple of minutes, and I heard footsteps. Lynn opened the
door, looked at me for a couple of seconds and then said
“Come
on in Christine,” as she turned and walked back to her desk.
As
I followed Lynn into her office, I noticed the worker Laura, from the residence
sitting there before Lynn’s desk. I remember gulping and feeling my heart go
KA
THUMP……KA THUMP…. KA THUMP…
I
sat down, wincing as the bones in my butt hit the cold unyielding chair. Lynn
and Laura were sitting across from me. Right away, I could tell that this meeting
wasn’t going to be a good. The tension in the air was as thick as knives, and
the worker Laura wouldn’t look my way, and neither would Lynn.
I
looked past Lynn’s shoulder, and out the huge window behind her. The sun was
shining, the birds were chirping, and every once in awhile I could hear the
sound of car engines go by. Her office was not far from the parking lot, and a
busy thoroughfare.
I
had been back living in Windsor at this residence for about six months, maybe
longer, maybe less, my memory isn’t too clear about this time because of all
the turmoil I was going through. The house I lived in was a fair sized brown
and cream coloured house. It was located in the city I had spent my first 11
years in.
The
house had been bought by the Roman Catholic Children’s Aid Society of Essex
County and was being used as a home for teenagers who were preparing to leave
the CAS in the next year or so. It was a fair sized house. One staff member
lived there full time, along with three other girls. While staying at the house, we were supposed
to learn how to cook for ourselves, clean, and budget the allowances we got
each week or month.
I
remember, when I first heard that I was going back to my hometown to live, I
was living in my third and final foster home and I had been excited. My foster
parents at the time lived out in the county, about an hour’s drive away in
Kingsville, Ontario. I was going to be graduating from grade 12, and heading to
college to study Journalism-Print. I was
excited because I thought that living almost on my own would mean more freedom
from the parental guidance of my foster home, and that I could reestablish a
relationship with my adoptive father, and my biological sister.
I
hadn’t seen them in years, and I had the illusion that reconnecting with my
adoptive father would mean that I would finally have a father again, and get
reacquainted with my sister. The turmoil that ensued proved to be more
problematic than I ever dreamed.
It
wasn’t that I didn’t appreciate my foster parents; my foster parents had been
great. They took me in when no one else would, and they tried to guide me as
best as they could, even though I became ill with anorexia nervosa. I know I gave them quite a workout in learning
how to deal with that and the behaviors my illness caused. I don’ t think they knew exactly why I had
gotten ill.
I
didn’t tell them the turmoil I felt inside about being one of two foster kids
in their small town or what I endured in my classes because I rarely spoke of
what happened to me when I came home from school. I wish I had told them. They
didn’t know that I was teased mercilessly at school for being so quiet, or that
in the last four months of what should have been my happiest moment-graduating
from grade 8- certain kids made comments that intensified my already insecure
sense of self. I remember one incident where I was sitting at my desk in my
classroom with my books in front of me, and off in my own world when a fellow
classmate walked by and snidely remarked
“Look
at you! You’re so fat, you can’t fit into your desk.”
The
desks were small, and I fit into them fine, but the comment devastated me. The
girl who made the comment was the type of girl I wanted to be like. She was
pretty, popular, thin and a straight A student. I was the new kid who came into
the class halfway through the school year. I stood out from everyone because I
was the new kid. The other issue was that I was brown skinned, the only First
Nations kid, in a sea of white faces, in a primarily white school and town.
In
retrospect, I didn’t know how to deal with the feelings I was experiencing, so
it turned into something that I later came to understand as being something I
knew I could control-my intake of food. It began with cutting back foods that I
normally enjoyed-no more peanut butter and bread, no more chips and ice cream,
and definitely not any fried foods. I said good-bye to a lot of foods, without
really understanding why.
My
foster parents were perplexed at what I was doing. I remember when my foster
mom nonchalantly asked me during a conversation we were having on the deck in
their backyard
“What’s
wrong Christine? And
“Why
aren’t you eating?” and my response
“I
have to watch what I take in.”
When
I was asked
“Why?”
I
could not give a clear explanation. All rationale had begun to slip from my
mind. I started making lists of foods that I couldn’t touch. I wrote them in my
journal every night. The list kept getting bigger and bigger, until it became a
list that I absolutely had to live by. Crazy rules popped into my head, like
not eating any foods that were mixed together, eating anything with sauces on
them, no condiments were allowed, only having diet pop if I was going to drink
any pop at all, no milk and definitely no desserts.
Keeping
my list straight in my head was taxing and often had me spinning. If I went off
my list, I blamed myself for loss of self control and punished myself even
harder, by taking in less calories than I had taken in the meal before, or
going up to the washroom and purging everything that I had taken in-whether
that was through making myself vomit, or taking a bottle of Milk of Magnesia
and swallowing that. I even dipped into water pills and laxatives if I could
find them.
I
didn’t know how to voice the pain I felt from what I was experiencing at school
or the behaviors I was engaging in through my eating disorder. Anorexia
consumed me for the remainder of my stay in my foster home. I went from a
relatively quiet yet healthy kid to someone who became more withdrawn, moody,
and a shadow of my former self. I no longer laughed or smiled with ease,
essentially my spirit disappeared.
After
leaving my foster home upon graduation of high school, I thought that things
would get better for me. I foolishly believed that in some form or another, independence
was the answer to the troubles that plagued me. I was wrong. Instead of feeling
free, I became more trapped and more despondent.
With
my mental health faltering, I quickly began a routine of being in and out of
the hospital. If it wasn’t for slashing at my arms, taking excessive pills, my
visits to the hospital also became about my lack of eating and the various
treatments I had to undergo.
So,
there I was sitting in my social worker’s office, and before them, they had
bottles of medication that they had taken from my room. I don’t recall how many
bottles were there, maybe four or five, maybe more. They had opened the
bottles, and had spilled the pills out onto the desk that lay between them.
They started counting
“1……2……3……4….5……6….”
and as they counted, they looked up at me to see if I was watching.
“Do
you really have to do that?” I yelled.
I
remember sitting in that chair, my face flushing with anger, my arms crossed
over my chest and slightly rocking myself back and forth, back and forth. I was
shivering too. It could have been from the fact that I hadn’t eaten anything or
it could have been the anxiety I felt, as they sat there doing what I thought
was them “colluding against me.”
The
pills they were counting included my antidepressants, Tylenol, anti-anxiety
meds, and laxatives. I had stockpiled them in my drawer at the Independent
living home. As they continued to count
out loud, 1…..2….3….4… I grew more and more infuriated until finally the anger
that was brewing inside me burst.
All
of a sudden, I just lost it, and started yelling at the top of my lungs. The
words tumbled out in a torrent,
“I
hate you Lynn! I hate the Children’s Aid, I hate the house I’m living in, and I
wish you both would just leave me alone. “
Looking
at me with reproach, Lynn calmly said,
“Christine,
you need to calm down.”
“I’m
not going to calm down” I yelled back “I’m sick of you guys!”
After
about five minutes, I felt spent from my outburst, and I slouched back into my
chair, glowering at Lynn and Laura. A couple of minutes later, Lynn said the
words
“Christine,
you have two weeks to find an apartment and then you won’t have to worry about
being with us (the Children’s Aid) anymore”
I
shook my head to see if I heard her correctly. When Lynn repeated it one more
time,
“Christine,
you have two weeks to find an apartment, and then you won’t have to worry about
being with us (the Children’s Aid) anymore.”
I
couldn’t believe what I was hearing and I looked at her with shock. After a
couple of seconds I said
“Fine!”
I
left my CAS worker’s office a few minutes later. The two of them were still
counting my pills, as I slammed the office door behind me. I remember walking
back down that hallway at a breakneck speed. Tears that I had been holding
inside burst forth, and I ran out of the building oblivious to anything around
me. I remember I didn’t head straight back to the group home right away. I
wandered around and around, and didn’t care where I was or what people thought
as I furiously wiped away at the tears that just didn’t want to stop.
I
don’t recall how long I wandered around, it was probably a couple of hours but
eventually the sun started to go down, it was getting chillier outside and it
was growing darker by the second. I finally headed back to the group home,
where I went directly to my room, closed the door and collapsed on top of my
bed. I fell into a fitful sleep, not knowing what the next day would bring.
A
day or two later, I began the search for an apartment. At seventeen years old, I didn’t know what to
look for. I poured over newspaper advertisements and probably called a handful
of places. In between that, I began to pack up my meager belongings- a stuffed
animal here and there, my pillow, my clothes, some books and paper, my music
cassettes and ghetto blaster, and small television. Apprehension at what lay
ahead of me was always on my mind. Not long after that, I found an apartment.
The
apartment I found was down the street from the group home I had lived in with
the Children’s Aid. It was a bachelor apartment that went for a little over two
hundred and fifty dollars, and I paid for it with social assistance. It had a
big main room, a fair sized bathroom with an old fashioned tub, and a small
kitchen. The apartment was situated off the parking lot of an unsavory bar, and
the apartment itself had little guests that I had never encountered before-
cockroaches.
The
first time I saw a cockroach in my apartment was when I was in my kitchen,
trying to make some soup. I had a ladle in my hand and I was preparing to stir
my soup when I happened to glance up at the shelf above my head. I saw two
little antennas and beady little eyes looking at me.
“AAHH!”
I screeched, and I wondered
“Has
this bloody cockroach been there all this time staring at me?”
I
lost my appetite quickly, and left the soup sitting on the stove. I walked out of the kitchen and went and sat
on my bed. I remember feeling disgusted that my life had come to this- living
in a cockroach-infested apartment, and noisy neighbors who were always yelling
and fighting, and throwing things around. I remember the fear I felt every time
I would hear the resounding thump of something hitting up against my wall, and
I often lay in my bed trembling and thinking that not only something bad was
going to happen to my neighbors but something bad was going to happen to me
too.
Thinking
something was going to happen to my neighbors wasn’t far fetched. In fact,
after living there for a year, and giving my notice to my landlord, it wasn’t
long after I moved out that I heard there had been a murder in the apartment
building I had just left. It was the very neighbors I had heard yelling and
fighting. The man had killed his partner in a domestic assault.
Life
on my own was definitely a test that I wasn’t prepared for. At 17 years old, you’re
still a kid, whether you care to believe it or not. You tend to think that you
can take on the world and everyone and everything in it. I didn’t realize that
by essentially getting kicked out of the Children’s Aid, I would effectively be
on my own and that I would have to learn things such as furnishing my own
place, cooking, paying rent and paying bills. I had to be responsible for
myself, whereas before I had always had someone watching out for me. I was
still a huge child at heart, and I was thrust into a world that no one could
have prepared me for.
Amongst
the many things that happened to me upon my leaving my foster home, was my
adoptive father coming back into my life, and my sister I had not seen since I
was 10 years old came back into my life too.
Though I loved that my sister was back in my life, it was very difficult
for me to have my adoptive father back in my life. The pain that I had been
sheltered from came back when I saw him again, and I took it out in the only
way I knew how at that time, by hurting myself.
Being
away from the friends I had made and away from the only foster parents who had
given me a sense of stability was also difficult to say the least. My mental
health began to falter even more after I began living on my own. Before I had
left my foster home, I had been suffering from an eating disorder, and my
eating disorder became even worse as I tried to adjust to my new living
situation. I went through extremely intense anger and a lot of
self-destruction. Issues that had been festering inside of me for years began
to haunt me once more.
I
used to blame the foster care system and the Children’s Aid Society for being
booted out and made to live on my own, after all I was sent back to the child
welfare system at the age of ten when my adoption by a non-native family
failed. At ten years old, I went from having parents to no one other than the
workers that worked in the group home I was sent to-Maryvale, and then after
leaving Maryvale, my foster parents in three different foster homes.
Can
you imagine the struggle when you have no family or a support system to fall
back on, and you have to learn how to pay rent, buy your own groceries and
manage your own expenses? I look back now and ask myself “how did I do it?”
When I think of that question it stirs up a gamut of emotions. I go from
feeling anger and sadness and I ask myself “would I want anyone else to go
through what I did just because they old enough to be out of the child welfare
system?”
Going
from a place of support and having people around you to almost nothing is
difficult. It tests your very being. I can’t go back to change the things that
happened when I left the foster care system, but I wish that at the time there
had been more programs in place, that could have helped me to make the
transition from being in care, to being on my own, or at the most that I had
listened to those who tried to advise me back then about what could happen, and
how I could have dealt with the issues that popped up for me.
Under
the current system, when young people in foster care turn 21, they have the rug
pulled out from under them and they must sink or swim. Yes, a rug was pulled
out from me but I also played a role in having that rug pulled out from under
me. If I had known any better, which I can admit at the age of 17, I didn’t. I
know that I would not have chosen to be kicked out of the Independent Living
group Home I had been in, I would have tried to accept any help that may have
been offered to me and I wouldn’t have chosen to be reliant upon social
assistance.
Not
all foster kids choose what happens to them, when they leave the system. I
certainly didn’t. Because of some life experiences, some kids need more support
than others, and they may need it for longer. In my case, after several years
of relying on a toxic family member for periodic help, floundering on my own,
going into debt, and struggling to learn how to budget on my own, I was put
under the care of a trustee. Though being under a trustee was difficult to deal
with at first, I must admit it has helped me the most.
Aging
out of the foster care system or getting kicked out of the child welfare system
is a difficult transition. Transitioning from foster care to being on your own
is hard, but support systems are needed.
Support systems like programs that can better prepare you for life on
your own can be instrumental in your success later on in life.
I
can’t take back the years I spent floundering but I do thank the various
workers out in the mental health and social work field who took the time to
teach me the things they did even when I had my back up in anger and defiance
and didn’t want to listen. The knowledge that they passed on has helped in ways
they could never know, and I was fortunate that I was a foster kid who was able
to turn her life around.
