My Life Poem
If you were to ask me about my childhood, I don’t know where I would start.
Do I start with foster care? The court dates, the social workers, the parents who promised things they never meant?
Or do I start with my brother? Because somehow, every road leads back to him.
When people talk about childhood, they talk about birthday parties, family vacations, bedtime stories.
I remember DSS rooms. Caseworkers. Packing my life into bags too many times for a child to understand why. I remember adults making decisions that changed everything.
But through it all, I remember my brother. Before we were divided, before different last names, before different homes, there was just me and him.
Two kids trying to understand a world that felt unfair in ways we couldn’t explain at the time.
When we lived with our dad, I was small, back when life still felt like it might be stable.
But it didn”t stay that way for long. He lost his rights.
And after that, we moved through homes faster than we could unpack. Always packing. Always leaving. Always starting over.
My dad fought for us for years. And I remember that visit. The one that felt too short and too heavy all at the same time. It was a day at the park. Just a normal place, like nothing life changing was happening, right?
Wrong!! Something did change and it changed fast. I finally got the courage to tell him I wanted to be adopted. My brother said he wanted the same. Not because we didn’t love him. But because we were tired. Tired of instability. Tired of waiting for life to finally settle.
I told him we could still talk. Still stay connected. But he said no. That they wouldn’t let us. I don’t know if that was true. But I remember the way it sounded. Like something breaking. Something I didn’t know how to fix. And for a long time after that, I thought maybe I broke him. Like my words were the reason everything fell apart.
And I still carry that feeling with me. Like if I had said something different, done something different, maybe my dad would still be in my life today.
I’ll never forget his face that day. At the park. Both of us crying.
My mother stayed around longer but not in the way a mother should. She made promises too. She said she would visit. My adopted mother would prepare for it.
We would clean the house, decorate, make plans like it was real.
And I would wait. Listening for a knock at the door. Imagining what I would say.
Imagining her arms open wide. Imagining what it would feel like to finally be wanted by my own blood.
But the door never opened. The visit never happened. The promises became excuses. The excuses became silence. And eventually, silence became normal.
Some people lose their parents all at once. I lost mine a little at a time. It was like pulling my heart out one vein at a time instead of just ripping it all out at once.
One broken promise after another. One disappointment after another and another and another and another and another!!!
I cried myself to sleep most nights, wondering would it have been different? If I was different? If I was older, could I have fixed things? If drugs didn’t exist, could we have been happy?
I worried myself until there was almost nothing left. Nothing except my brother. Because even after everything, he was still there.
We don’t live together anymore. We don’t share every-day problems anymore. But we share where it all began. And sometimes we still find pieces of that past like recently finding an old cousin again-someone who was a little hard to face at first, but turned out to be a blessing. Fragments of a childhood that never fully disappeared.
Now my siblings are scattered. Different places. Different lives.
Sometimes it feels like my whole family exists in different directions while I’m standing in the middle trying to figure out where I belong.
I have sisters. Good sisters at that. But they were raised together. They have memories that don’t include me. Inside jokes I wasn’t there for. Stories I never got to live. And sometimes I feel like a guest in my own family tree.
But life isn’t all that bad. I have a home now. I have people who chose me.
And after all of this I’ll be starting high school soon.
I laugh. I smile. I make plans for the future.
The trauma still follows me.
And even now it still shows up in small ways. In loud rooms that make me feel too small. In silence that feels way too familiar. In moments where I overthink a simple goodbye
before it even happens.
I get scared of things I can’t explain. People leaving without warning. Promises that sound too familiar. Doors closing before I’m ready.
Some days I’m fine. I laugh. I talk. I move on like everyone else.
Other days, it feels like my mind is still back there waiting for something to go wrong again. Like I’m still learning how to live in a life that isn’t temporary anymore.
But it’s getting easier to remind myself, I’m not there anymore. I’m here.
And I’ve learned something from the people who left. I can’t spend my life chasing them. I can’t keep standing at doors that will never open. Life keeps moving. And, so do I.
Still, when I think about where I came from, I don’t think about courtrooms first. I don’t think about caseworkers first. I think about my brother.
Because when everything else shifted, he didn’t disappear.
And maybe that’s what my childhood really is-not just what I lost, but what I still carry.
Author: One of our brave SC children
(Shared with her permission.)
