A Summary: Before the Adoption

First off, before I begin my story, I do not feel sorry for myself. I realize some of the stuff that I went through was bad, but it made me who I am today, and for that, I love my life: past, present, and future. I realize that there are others who have gone through a lot worse than I have, and that I do not have a lot of room to complain, though some say I do; I do not. Okay, now to begin my story.

I do not remember much of my childhood. I remember that when I was a kid, I thought that my life was normal. I was used to going from home to home, to not having a family at all, or to having several different families, depending on how you look at it. I was born in Chattanooga, TN at Erlanger Hospital. My birth certificate does not have my weight or even the time of birth on it, so I can not tell you little details like that, not that it matters.

I guess I lived with my biological family until I was three years old before the cops came and took my brother and sister and I away because my parents were on drugs. They say that we went to live with my grandmother. I have conflicting stories as to what happened there. My brother and sister, who were both a few years older than I was, said that my grandmother locked me in a closet because she hated me so much. Social workers later on told me (after the adoption) that she had locked both of them in the closet because they were really wild and she could not handle them very well. She refused to put me down because she had loved me so much. As a result of that, I had not learned to walk until I was five years old.

My adoptive parents now tell me that there was talk that I was autistic as a child. This was mainly because of the not learning to walk for so long and also because one of the foster homes that I was in had an autistic child in it, and because that was around the time that I was learning how to walk and talk, I actually started to talk as that other child did. Just to clear the air, I was not autistic. All that was wrong was that no one was spending enough time with me on learning anything.

One of my fondest homes that I remember was the group home that I was frequently placed in. I actually loved that place. The people at the group home were more a family to me than any home that I was ever in. I guess this was because they were the only ones that I could count on being there. Though, I still did not talk a lot. I remember playing Monopoly and Sorry a few times with different people, but I would wind up playing them by myself most of the time. I made up a great banking game, that I still play if my daughter falls asleep. It was basically, I would have 2 or three pawns that would go around the board, like in Monopoly, but they would buy the properties from the bank, and I was the bank. Not really very challenging but it took up a lot of time, and I wasn't thinking, which is always good. Sadly, I got too good at Monopoly and now no one will play with me.

One home I was in had my best friend, well, what I considered to be my best friend. She was a beautiful little blonde girl with blue eyes. We played and played and played. We had a neighbor....he was an older boy who was really amazingly good with younger children. He would pull us on the sled when it snowed. Well, the Christmas that I was with them, the family told me that they had decided to move to Florida, and I was going to go live with the neighbors soon. So I went to live with them, and the boy had gotten a slide for Christmas. It was in his bedroom. We were playing on it the day I moved there and the slide all of a sudden fell over, the boy told his parents that I had pushed it over when he was on top of it. I was sent up to the bedroom with nothing to eat and a social worker came that night and picked me up. I was back in the group home.

I had another family that worked out sort of in that manner also, meaning that I wound up in another family through this one. I started out with a single woman who was really nice. I had a beautiful daybed, and the walls had cute bunnies all over them. We used to go to this little deli/candy store . She always bought me these big dinosaur eggs that had chocolate in them, and under the chocolate there was a gummy dinosaur. The owners were always very nice. She wanted to adopt me, believe it or not. So she did. I was ecstatic, I had a home. There was a bad part to this though. She had had a teenage son before, who had died in a car crash. Two weeks after she adopted me, she picked me up from school and told me it was not going to work out. She was so scared that when I got older, I was going to die in some way also. She could not handle that. The woman dropped me off at DHS and dropped me into the arms of the owners to the deli we always went to. Turns out that they wanted me to live with them. So I did, until the woman found out she had cancer a few months later. They decided I should not be around for the treatment and I was back in the group home.

I have one more home that I remember before I was adopted. I had seven foster brothers in this home. I think I stayed in this home the longest...what added up to two years actually. They kept promising adopted but I don't think they ever adopted any of us. They never planned on it. Something happened in this home, something that made a huge impact on me, though I didn't realize it was any big deal at the time. They had two biological children in that home, a girl and a boy. They were all grown up though, and only came to visit. The "boy" was almost thirty years old, and I was nine years old. He was the greatest thing in the world. He protected me from the boys. They picked on my a lot and would wrestle with me. If they got too rough they put a stop to it. He would give me piggy back rides. Well he was left alone with us one night, babysitting. He sent the boys to bed and asked me to give him a back massage. This was not unusual because the foster mom would always get me to give her one, so I did not think anything of it that he wanted one. He locked the door and eventually told me he was going to "teach" me how to please a man. I will spare you the details. The other foster brothers were not as innocent as I was at the time apparantly and figured out what was going on. They started banging on the door and made so much commotion that he had to stop and let me out. We all shared room, with bunk beds, and the brother I bunked with was trying to talk to me and find out exactly what happend. I refused to talk because they scared me. I couldn't figure out what the big deal was. I had been molested before but I was so young I did not realize that it was a bad thing. The boys talked to the parents the next day. The parents then asked me about it, and when I told them exactly what he had me do, they told him to leave, and I stayed. This home was actually the last one that I was in before I was adopted. They fought like crazy to keep me there when my adoptive parents found me. I found out later that they wanted to keep us all in permanant foster care so they could keep making money off of us.