Why, oh why, did Tay-Tay call my house as soon as Number Two got out of jail?
Foster Mama didn't play that. She called Number Two and asked to speak to Tay-Tay. He refused to put her on the phone. So she told him in her meanest Foster Mama voice to "leave all that bullsh*t in Connecticut" because she "wouldn't have any of that breaking up her home."
Then I called. "Hello, is Tay-Tay there?"
"Who is this?"
"This is Anita. Put that bitch on the phone."
"Oh, man, I don't believe it," Number Two groaned.
"Well, believe it, baby, put that bitch on the phone!"
He handed the phone to her and click! That trouble-making bitch hung up on me.
I called right back. "Is there a motherf*cking reason why I was hung up on?"
"Uh ... the cord is broke," Number Two mumbled.
And that's when I started cussing him out from can't do to can't try. But it wasn't a particularly empowering cuss-out session. Because I was cussing him out for still being with her, instead of cussing him out for who he'd been to me. My tirade continued until he said, "I guess it's your turn to hang up now."
Bam! I took his suggestion.
By this time, Foster Mama and my foster sisters had gathered around like they had ringside seats to the most comical Friday Night Fight ever.
Number Two called back seconds later on Foster Mama's phone. I went into my bedroom, closed the door and called him back on my phone line.
"Anita, I don't understand why you're cussing me out. I haven't given you any reason to do that. I guess all this time you were secretly hating me and I just never knew it."
That instigated another barrage of cursing about how he threw me out at 3 a.m., how he didn't care about me, how he was stupid for still dating Tay-Tay.
"Anita, why are you cursing so much?"
"Because I motherf*cking can!!!! Now that I'm home with my family and I'm free, I can talk how I want, look how I want and be how I want, without somebody trying to change me into somebody else!"
Around this time, Tay-Tay started cutting up in the background. "Who's on the phone?"
"Tell that bitch Anita's on the phone!"
He didn't.
"Well since you're her motherf*cking guardian, give her this message. Tell her ugly black ass that she's a stank ho, and I'm just glad I didn't get her cooties."
Tay-Tay started throwing things. "Who are you talking to? Who's on the phone?"
Number Two, probably while ducking, gasped, "Tay-Tay stop that. Why are you breaking my stuff. That phone cost a lot of money!"
I continued screaming into the phone, until it dawned on me: This fool wasn't even paying attention to me at my angriest, most foul-mouthed best. Tay-Tay had truly won.
"Well, I hope you two live in unhappy bliss. Don't call me, and I never care if I see your face again, and tell that bitch she better not call my house no more, and if I see her face again, her ass is mine!"
With that I slammed the phone down, with red flames shooting from both ears, and yanked my bedroom door open to storm out of the room ...
... only to have Foster Mama and at least two sisters almost fall on top of me. They'd had their ears pressed to the door the whole time.
Showing posts with label Foster Mama. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Foster Mama. Show all posts
Sunday, January 10, 2010
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Janitorial Urges and Summer Flings
The person I kinda wanted to give my virginity up to was a janitor at Yale. Janitor was fine. Dark chocolate with luscious, plum-colored lips.
Right before the end of my freshman year, I screwed up every ounce of courage that I had and told him I liked him.
I can't overemphasize how difficult that was for me. I was almost paralyzingly shy around men I was interested in. More like completely shut down. Often, I had a hard time getting anything out of my mouth at all.
I entered the summer aglow with the half-promised notion that when the fall semester started, Janitor might become my first real boyfriend.
I went home to Detroit to stay with Foster Mama, who'd called me up a few weeks earlier and said, "I was afraid you was going to run home to your real mama, so I said, 'Let me call up my child and see what her plans are.'" It meant so much to know that her home was still open to me.
The most eventful happening of the summer was that finally, at age 19, I learned to drive. My dad bought me a $500, six-year-old, stick-shift-hoopty Ford Escort that needed tons of repairs. My dad still purrs with pride at how he made me cut my fingernails, install my own brake pads and change my own oil (all without really knowing what the hell I was doing).
I scared the piss out of both Foster Mama and Daddy with my bad driving. With Foster Mama, I almost hit a light pole. With Daddy, I stalled in the middle of a busy intersection, unable to get the car into first gear. All eclipsed by my ultimate crowning moment – backing my car into Foster Mama's porch, knocking a whole column of bricks askew.
But that's not all that happened.
I started fooling around with a friend's almost ex-boyfriend. My friend claimed she didn't mind, but Foster Mama didn't buy it. She expressed her disapproval, telling me that messing with my friend's boyfriend was a good way to lose my friend.
But initially, I didn't listen, leading to a couple of heavy-petting sessions in the front seat of a car and the dark quiet of a school playground. Sessions that left me with the increasingly familiar feeling of stop-go, no-yes as the pleasure of my body warred with the shame of my mind.
I truly believed that premarital sex would doom me to eternal damnation because it necessitated breaking my third-grade virginity pledge.
A few weeks into my would-be summer fling, I got cold feet. I didn't think I could fool around with him and not get emotionally attached, and what was the point? We were both going back to school the following month.
He agreed and said it would probably be better if we just stayed friends. Then he added, "I've been feeling that what we have had is mostly physical, and it doesn't feel right – it almost feels like a one-night stand."
He was 100% right. But hearing him say that made me feel like I was a soiled garment that was getting him grimy and greasy. I had less sexual morals, apparently, than a guy. What kind of woman was I?
So I went back to school to pick things up where me and Janitor had left them ... only to have things go nowhere. He'd avoid me, stand me up, not return my calls. And then he'd act really happy to see me, kiss me on the forehead and lamely explain that he was going through a lot and was "trying to get himself together."
Eventually I gave up on Janitor and settled for a Puerto Rican drug dealer.
And 12 years and tons of drama later, my friend and Almost Ex-Boyfriend married each other, proving that Foster Mama really did know what the hell she was talking about.
Right before the end of my freshman year, I screwed up every ounce of courage that I had and told him I liked him.
I can't overemphasize how difficult that was for me. I was almost paralyzingly shy around men I was interested in. More like completely shut down. Often, I had a hard time getting anything out of my mouth at all.
I entered the summer aglow with the half-promised notion that when the fall semester started, Janitor might become my first real boyfriend.
I went home to Detroit to stay with Foster Mama, who'd called me up a few weeks earlier and said, "I was afraid you was going to run home to your real mama, so I said, 'Let me call up my child and see what her plans are.'" It meant so much to know that her home was still open to me.
The most eventful happening of the summer was that finally, at age 19, I learned to drive. My dad bought me a $500, six-year-old, stick-shift-hoopty Ford Escort that needed tons of repairs. My dad still purrs with pride at how he made me cut my fingernails, install my own brake pads and change my own oil (all without really knowing what the hell I was doing).
I scared the piss out of both Foster Mama and Daddy with my bad driving. With Foster Mama, I almost hit a light pole. With Daddy, I stalled in the middle of a busy intersection, unable to get the car into first gear. All eclipsed by my ultimate crowning moment – backing my car into Foster Mama's porch, knocking a whole column of bricks askew.
But that's not all that happened.
I started fooling around with a friend's almost ex-boyfriend. My friend claimed she didn't mind, but Foster Mama didn't buy it. She expressed her disapproval, telling me that messing with my friend's boyfriend was a good way to lose my friend.
But initially, I didn't listen, leading to a couple of heavy-petting sessions in the front seat of a car and the dark quiet of a school playground. Sessions that left me with the increasingly familiar feeling of stop-go, no-yes as the pleasure of my body warred with the shame of my mind.
I truly believed that premarital sex would doom me to eternal damnation because it necessitated breaking my third-grade virginity pledge.
A few weeks into my would-be summer fling, I got cold feet. I didn't think I could fool around with him and not get emotionally attached, and what was the point? We were both going back to school the following month.
He agreed and said it would probably be better if we just stayed friends. Then he added, "I've been feeling that what we have had is mostly physical, and it doesn't feel right – it almost feels like a one-night stand."
He was 100% right. But hearing him say that made me feel like I was a soiled garment that was getting him grimy and greasy. I had less sexual morals, apparently, than a guy. What kind of woman was I?
So I went back to school to pick things up where me and Janitor had left them ... only to have things go nowhere. He'd avoid me, stand me up, not return my calls. And then he'd act really happy to see me, kiss me on the forehead and lamely explain that he was going through a lot and was "trying to get himself together."
Eventually I gave up on Janitor and settled for a Puerto Rican drug dealer.
And 12 years and tons of drama later, my friend and Almost Ex-Boyfriend married each other, proving that Foster Mama really did know what the hell she was talking about.
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
The Passing of Foster Mama
I moved in with Foster Mama two months shy of my 18th birthday, and I stayed in touch with her for the rest of her life, which turned out to be only eight more years.
As I mentioned, Foster Mama had a con for every situation ... so it was only a matter of time before she conned me. In my case, a credit-card company was kind enough to issue a credit card in my name, but foolish enough to send it to her address in Detroit while I was off at school.
One of my foster sisters called me on the phone: "Girl, Mama got a hold of one of your credit cards, and she is going to town!"
I dismissed her warning as a jealous lie. Foster Mama wouldn't do that to me.
But sure enough, a few months later, I learned I had bad credit and a delinquent, $1,200 Visa bill. With a few persistent phone calls, I was able to prove to Visa that I was away at school when the card arrived in Detroit, and ultimately I wasn't held responsible for the charges.
The incident damaged, but didn't destroy, my relationship with Foster Mama.
I saw her about a month before she died. I was living with Great Aunt at the time and had temporarily escaped the hell of Los Angeles for a quick Detroit visit. I sat in Foster Mama's basement beauty salon and sang her a sad song about my hard-knock life. Her last act of kindness was to hand me a sorely needed $50 bill.
A few weeks later, I learned that a tornado had touched down in Highland Park, just a few miles from Foster Mama's home. I called to find out how she was doing.
She replied, "I heard they was looting in Highland Park."
Before I could express my disapproval, she added, "Sure coulda used me a new TV set."
That was our last conversation.
I didn't attend her funeral.
Not because I didn't care enough to pay my respects, but because I didn't find out in time.
You see, my foster sister – the same one who'd warned me years earlier about the credit card – didn't have my personal phone number. For whatever reason, she only had my 90-year-old Great Aunt's phone number.
And Great Aunt, bless her heart, would talk to my frantic foster sister, then toddle into my room and say sorrowfully, "I'm so sorry about your mother." This happened two or three times, but since I had no idea what she was talking about, I didn't give Great Aunt's strange words of comfort much thought.
Finally, about a week after the funeral, my foster sister found a letter I'd written to Foster Mama that had my real phone number on it.
That's when I learned Foster Mama was gone.
It was a shock, but not a surprise, even though Foster Mama was only in her early fifties.
Foster Mama was morbidly obese, around 5'5" and a size 26. She smoked, even while wearing the nicotine patch that's supposed to help you quit. She was a diabetic with a two-liter-a-day Pepsi habit. And when her doctor yelled at her for drinking Pepsi, her health-conscious solution was to switch to 7-Up.
Regular 7-Up, not diet.
As I get back to the story of my life as a slut, Foster Mama will make the occasional guest appearance. But before I relegate her to a supporting role in my stories of boyfriends past, I wanted to acknowledge the starring role she will always have in my heart.
As I mentioned, Foster Mama had a con for every situation ... so it was only a matter of time before she conned me. In my case, a credit-card company was kind enough to issue a credit card in my name, but foolish enough to send it to her address in Detroit while I was off at school.
One of my foster sisters called me on the phone: "Girl, Mama got a hold of one of your credit cards, and she is going to town!"
I dismissed her warning as a jealous lie. Foster Mama wouldn't do that to me.
But sure enough, a few months later, I learned I had bad credit and a delinquent, $1,200 Visa bill. With a few persistent phone calls, I was able to prove to Visa that I was away at school when the card arrived in Detroit, and ultimately I wasn't held responsible for the charges.
The incident damaged, but didn't destroy, my relationship with Foster Mama.
I saw her about a month before she died. I was living with Great Aunt at the time and had temporarily escaped the hell of Los Angeles for a quick Detroit visit. I sat in Foster Mama's basement beauty salon and sang her a sad song about my hard-knock life. Her last act of kindness was to hand me a sorely needed $50 bill.
A few weeks later, I learned that a tornado had touched down in Highland Park, just a few miles from Foster Mama's home. I called to find out how she was doing.
She replied, "I heard they was looting in Highland Park."
Before I could express my disapproval, she added, "Sure coulda used me a new TV set."
That was our last conversation.
I didn't attend her funeral.
Not because I didn't care enough to pay my respects, but because I didn't find out in time.
You see, my foster sister – the same one who'd warned me years earlier about the credit card – didn't have my personal phone number. For whatever reason, she only had my 90-year-old Great Aunt's phone number.
And Great Aunt, bless her heart, would talk to my frantic foster sister, then toddle into my room and say sorrowfully, "I'm so sorry about your mother." This happened two or three times, but since I had no idea what she was talking about, I didn't give Great Aunt's strange words of comfort much thought.
Finally, about a week after the funeral, my foster sister found a letter I'd written to Foster Mama that had my real phone number on it.
That's when I learned Foster Mama was gone.
It was a shock, but not a surprise, even though Foster Mama was only in her early fifties.
Foster Mama was morbidly obese, around 5'5" and a size 26. She smoked, even while wearing the nicotine patch that's supposed to help you quit. She was a diabetic with a two-liter-a-day Pepsi habit. And when her doctor yelled at her for drinking Pepsi, her health-conscious solution was to switch to 7-Up.
Regular 7-Up, not diet.
As I get back to the story of my life as a slut, Foster Mama will make the occasional guest appearance. But before I relegate her to a supporting role in my stories of boyfriends past, I wanted to acknowledge the starring role she will always have in my heart.
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
At Home With My New Mama
Foster Mama was a straight-up hustler, but she was also a down-home, big-hearted person.
Life with her meant trips to the mall, home-made BBQ dinners, fast food, roadside carnivals, after-hours clubs, summer picnics, camaraderie and cat fights with my new foster sisters, rowdy dancing, drive-in movies, raunchy girl talk, loud laughter and an endless supply of mother wit.
She was the kind of person who had seen it all and done half of it.
She was the one who explained to me that my dad's bow-wow babes were really hookers. I naively protested my dad's innocence. "Hummph!" Foster Mama sniffed. "I saw him last week at a Coney Island with a woman I know is a ho."
Daddy would drive across town to visit me, and talk to Foster Mama at length about how I moved out because I was hard-headed and stubborn and didn't want to do chores.
Not true.
I did more chores at Foster Mama's in a week than I'd done at my dad's house in a year.
Despite her free-wheeling nature, when it came to running her house, Foster Mama had rules. There were dishes to be washed, floors to be mopped, tables to be dusted, beds to be made, dinners to be cooked.
Some of her rules related to hygiene. You were to take a bath or wash up at the sink every single morning without fail.
I honestly didn't know that's what normal people did. I washed my face and brushed my teeth twice a day, but the rest of my body got attention once a week. If that.
"Lord, that girl will take care of that face," I'd hear her remark to the other girls as I performed my nightly Noxzema ritual. Then she'd add that maybe I should wash my ass, too.
Thank God she took me in.
I was starved for order and for maternal affection.
From ages 12 to 16, I hadn't seen my own mother at all. Just before I entered 7th grade, Mommy tried one last time to win custody of us. During our annual summer visit, she took us to see a lawyer. When Daddy arrived, she presented him with court papers that said he couldn't take us back to Detroit.
He responded by bellowing, "Kids, get in the damned car!"
He got arrested for kidnapping ... but the charges were dropped when he proved that Michigan had jurisdiction over our custody case, and that everything my mom had tried to do through her local Pennsylvanian courts was null and void.
I had no more face-to-face contact with my mother until my junior year of high school.
With Foster Mama, suddenly, I had a mom again.
Someone to do my hair. Someone to buy me clothes. Someone to talk to about boys and sex and relationships, not that I had anything to talk about. I was the only virgin in the house, aside from the precocious three-year-old. So I mostly listened to the other girls' tales of love lost and sex had.
Foster Mama had been married once. Now her attitude was, "F*ck a damn husband! Unless he's somebody else's."
She'd never had children of her own, save for one miscarriage.
And she'd been in the foster-care business for over 10 years.
We were part business decision, part labor of love. For each child in her care, the state paid her $200-$300 per month.
So year in and year out, she took in the girls that nobody wanted and dealt with their emotional damage. She taught them how to cook and clean and care for their kids. And she helped set some of her "chirren" up with apartments, cars and furniture after they turned 18.
I loved Foster Mama, and I literally followed her from room to room like a baby chick.
She never once ridiculed me or tried to make me stop.
Life with her meant trips to the mall, home-made BBQ dinners, fast food, roadside carnivals, after-hours clubs, summer picnics, camaraderie and cat fights with my new foster sisters, rowdy dancing, drive-in movies, raunchy girl talk, loud laughter and an endless supply of mother wit.
She was the kind of person who had seen it all and done half of it.
She was the one who explained to me that my dad's bow-wow babes were really hookers. I naively protested my dad's innocence. "Hummph!" Foster Mama sniffed. "I saw him last week at a Coney Island with a woman I know is a ho."
Daddy would drive across town to visit me, and talk to Foster Mama at length about how I moved out because I was hard-headed and stubborn and didn't want to do chores.
Not true.
I did more chores at Foster Mama's in a week than I'd done at my dad's house in a year.
Despite her free-wheeling nature, when it came to running her house, Foster Mama had rules. There were dishes to be washed, floors to be mopped, tables to be dusted, beds to be made, dinners to be cooked.
Some of her rules related to hygiene. You were to take a bath or wash up at the sink every single morning without fail.
I honestly didn't know that's what normal people did. I washed my face and brushed my teeth twice a day, but the rest of my body got attention once a week. If that.
"Lord, that girl will take care of that face," I'd hear her remark to the other girls as I performed my nightly Noxzema ritual. Then she'd add that maybe I should wash my ass, too.
Thank God she took me in.
I was starved for order and for maternal affection.
From ages 12 to 16, I hadn't seen my own mother at all. Just before I entered 7th grade, Mommy tried one last time to win custody of us. During our annual summer visit, she took us to see a lawyer. When Daddy arrived, she presented him with court papers that said he couldn't take us back to Detroit.
He responded by bellowing, "Kids, get in the damned car!"
He got arrested for kidnapping ... but the charges were dropped when he proved that Michigan had jurisdiction over our custody case, and that everything my mom had tried to do through her local Pennsylvanian courts was null and void.
I had no more face-to-face contact with my mother until my junior year of high school.
With Foster Mama, suddenly, I had a mom again.
Someone to do my hair. Someone to buy me clothes. Someone to talk to about boys and sex and relationships, not that I had anything to talk about. I was the only virgin in the house, aside from the precocious three-year-old. So I mostly listened to the other girls' tales of love lost and sex had.
Foster Mama had been married once. Now her attitude was, "F*ck a damn husband! Unless he's somebody else's."
She'd never had children of her own, save for one miscarriage.
And she'd been in the foster-care business for over 10 years.
We were part business decision, part labor of love. For each child in her care, the state paid her $200-$300 per month.
So year in and year out, she took in the girls that nobody wanted and dealt with their emotional damage. She taught them how to cook and clean and care for their kids. And she helped set some of her "chirren" up with apartments, cars and furniture after they turned 18.
I loved Foster Mama, and I literally followed her from room to room like a baby chick.
She never once ridiculed me or tried to make me stop.
Monday, June 15, 2009
Introduction to the Detroit Hustle
Before I moved into the house for unwed teenage moms, I'd lived a pretty sheltered existence. Even though we ate welfare cheese and got free lunch and wore second-hand clothes and lived in a raggedy house, my family was mostly middle class in its values, if not in its outward appearances.
Foster Mama was anything but. She was unabashedly old-school ghetto, the queen of the Detroit hustle:
At least until she eventually hustled me, and until I eventually realized that in all of her hustling, she never, ever came out ahead.
But those realizations came years later.
In the short term, I blossomed under her unorthodox and unethical tutelage in a way that I hadn't under my dad's rule.
Foster Mama was anything but. She was unabashedly old-school ghetto, the queen of the Detroit hustle:
- She had two different names and two different ID cards that she used for different purposes.
- She had a beauty shop in her basement, and you could bet your life she wasn't reporting the income to any government entity in existence.
- She had an arrangement worked out with a cashier at a local supermarket. The cashier would ring up a small portion of Foster Mama's groceries. Foster Mama would slip her $50 as a bribe and take home most of her shopping cart for free.
- She kept in touch with someone who worked at a beauty school. He'd leave a stash of stolen hair supplies in a dumpster, and she'd swing by in the evening to pick it up.
- She knew where to buy food stamps for half their face value from local drug addicts who bought their drugs with their government provisions.
- She had a business relationship with one of Detroit's biggest drug dealers, an unassuming, unattractive seemingly poor guy – until he pulled a four-inch-thick wad of cash from his sock. He was her loan shark. (And he died a particularly bloody death a few years later – 40-something bullet wounds.)
- One of Drug Dealer's many side businesses was running Detroit's illegal lottery, where people would pay a nickel, dime or quarter to play the three-digit or four-digit numbers. For a while, Foster Mama was "the house" where people placed their bets, and I was the accountant who used my straight A's in algebra to keep track of the earnings. But Foster Mama even had a hustle on top of this hustle – every so often, but not often enough that Drug Dealer would get suspicious – she arranged for herself and a friend to hit the winning number for $500 and split it 50-50.
- And my absolute favorite of all her hustles was her booster clothing liquidations. She had a working relationship with boosters, slang for professional shoplifters. They would steal clothes from department stores, and Foster Mama would hold clearance sales in her dining room. The rule was, the consumer paid 1/3 of the ticket price. I went off to college looking real cute in all my 67 percent off stolen outfits.
At least until she eventually hustled me, and until I eventually realized that in all of her hustling, she never, ever came out ahead.
But those realizations came years later.
In the short term, I blossomed under her unorthodox and unethical tutelage in a way that I hadn't under my dad's rule.
Saturday, June 13, 2009
House for Unwed Teenage Moms
When I became an emancipated minor just shy of my 18th birthday, I went straight from my dad's cluttered kingdom to a neat, clean queendom ruled by Foster Mama.
Foster Mama specialized in the least sought-after foster kids imaginable: teenage foster girls who were now mothers themselves.
When I moved in, there was a twenty-year-old mom and her adorable three-year-old daughter. She'd been with Foster Mama since she was 16. And before that, she'd been in a group home, the last-ditch institution for foster kids who couldn't get adopted or placed in private homes. And before that, she'd been severely beaten by her own mother, who was still alive.
The other girl, who was a year younger than me, was very, very pregnant. She'd recently run away to Ohio with her boyfriend, and the cops had just brought her back. Her mother was dead. And she once admitted, with a mixture of embarrassment, sadness and humor, that her mom had tried to "rob a damned D.O.T. bus."
The saddest case was that of little Ingenue. She was 12 when I first moved in. Foster Mama had taken care of Ingenue and her two little brothers back when they were still in preschool. She had pictures of them in their little school clothes and was very close to adopting all three of them, when their biological grandmother stepped in and fought for custody. Not because the grandmother loved them, but because she wanted the welfare check.
Now seven years later, Ingenue lived in a broken-down house on the East Side of Detroit with her grandmother and a host of drug-addicted uncles, while her two juvenile-delinquent brothers ran the streets unsupervised.
I wasn't a high-school dropout with a baby. I was a high-school scholar with a future.
Foster Mama specialized in the least sought-after foster kids imaginable: teenage foster girls who were now mothers themselves.
When I moved in, there was a twenty-year-old mom and her adorable three-year-old daughter. She'd been with Foster Mama since she was 16. And before that, she'd been in a group home, the last-ditch institution for foster kids who couldn't get adopted or placed in private homes. And before that, she'd been severely beaten by her own mother, who was still alive.
The other girl, who was a year younger than me, was very, very pregnant. She'd recently run away to Ohio with her boyfriend, and the cops had just brought her back. Her mother was dead. And she once admitted, with a mixture of embarrassment, sadness and humor, that her mom had tried to "rob a damned D.O.T. bus."
The saddest case was that of little Ingenue. She was 12 when I first moved in. Foster Mama had taken care of Ingenue and her two little brothers back when they were still in preschool. She had pictures of them in their little school clothes and was very close to adopting all three of them, when their biological grandmother stepped in and fought for custody. Not because the grandmother loved them, but because she wanted the welfare check.
Now seven years later, Ingenue lived in a broken-down house on the East Side of Detroit with her grandmother and a host of drug-addicted uncles, while her two juvenile-delinquent brothers ran the streets unsupervised.
(Foster Mama eventually won custody of teenage Ingenue, but the story doesn't have a happy ending. Ingenue, an unwed mother of two, was shot dead by one of her baby's fathers at age 19, in front of one of her toddlers. And Foster Mama died of heartbreak shortly thereafter.)Moving into foster care was my first real inkling that as bad and as sad and as weird as I'd had it, there were a lot of kids who'd had it much, much worse.
I wasn't a high-school dropout with a baby. I was a high-school scholar with a future.
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