Tag: Homelessness

Unexpected Breakdown

The challenges of trying to help in an impossible situation from today’s story.

I signed up to foster teens and older kids. Had an emergency placement as my 1st. Teen was essentially homeless – no family would take her. She would have spent the night on Div of Family and Child Services’ (DFCS) floor or in a hotel. This type situation is pretty much what I envisioned as far as the kind of placements I would get.

She did well a few weeks. I treated her like a visiting niece. Introduced her to family and kids her age. Took her places. Got her all food she wanted from grocery store. She cooks and likes a lot of ingredients. Did normal things I’d do with any teen relative, watched movies, played with dog she loved, got her nails done. She wants to age out and be in an LINK>Independent Living Program. I asked for a DFCS meeting to discuss options according to her wishes.

Some of her family refused contact with her. They could/would not foster her for certain reasons. It was not a financial issue – all her family had money. I don’t have their contact info. Per her suggestion, I made friends via phone with her other extended family who live several hours away. We got along great.

DFCS, for legal reasons, had many restrictions placed on her. I will not get into those. I am not looking to adopt. She’s in serious legal trouble. I have to abide by the rules. Due to the strict restrictions, she had a huge mental occurrence from that. She is smart but has mental health diagnoses that will make anything like this worse. The restrictions were not from any self harm or violence towards others, but still very serious.

DFCS removed her from my home, due to her mental issues, and they said she needs a group home or a strict experienced therapeutic home. I agree because she was very mentally ill. Had she been my biological teen, I’d have put her in lots of therapy and maybe sent her to a reputable overnight summer camp, if she wanted to go. DFCS would not grant permission for her to do either, based on her legal situations.

Her personality was outgoing, she loved doing activities like in certain kinds of teen summer camps. I did not sign her up for any, as I didn’t know how long she’d be with me. She has some extended family who might have changed their mind and taken her in. That would have been great.

I asked DFCS from day one for a recommendation of mental health therapy for her. The teen actually also asked for it herself – many times. Long story shorter, I could not get it for her – DFCS said they were working on it. It took a month to get a call back just to set up an appointment. On that day, by sheer coincidence, she had her big crisis/breakdown. It was so bad – they did not give me an option as to whether to terminate the placement or not. Her issue was from the DFCS situation she was in.

Now, I’m really wishing I had gone against DFCS and personally tried even harder get her the mental health therapy faster, even though they said to wait for their referral to call.

One good thing is I got her a job. I think she still has it but I will not be able to go by to check. I gave her a small allowance and she only had to clean her areas in the house. She smiled a lot but also cried a lot.

Div of Family and Child Services in my area has a policy that non-kin fosters can not contact a child, if a placemat is disrupted. I understand. I’ll never see or hear from her again. After her breakdown, she said she hates everyone, she named them by name. Extended family, me, even pets she used to love.

My question: I’m wondering if there’s anything else I could have done to help her. Mental health assistance sooner, I guess. But without DFCS ? They would not help, until it was too late.

I did not know she was that bad off mentally. The breakdown was unexpected. She was great otherwise, only the kinds of minor issues many teens have. They won’t let her come back to me, even though she liked it ok here. The breakdown she had was unfortunately severe.

Trying to make sense of it. Could I have helped a little more somehow ? It was all unfair, how things happened, especially the lack of mental health assistance – after she had asked for it herself.

blogger’s note – this is how the system is. If anyone reading this is contemplating being a part of it, this is the kind of situation you may be getting yourself into.

Kid’s Count

Someone noted – Foster Care causes 61% of All Child Abuse in America. So I went looking and found this, at The Annie E Casey Foundation – LINK>Child Welfare and Foster Care Statistics. KIDS COUNT is a robust source of the best avail­able data on child well-being in the nation. This includes state-by-state data on child abuse and neglect and chil­dren liv­ing in out-of-home care from the Nation­al Child Abuse and Neglect Data Sys­tem, the fed­er­al Adop­tion and Fos­ter Care Analy­sis and Report­ing Sys­tem, and the Nation­al Youth in Tran­si­tion Data­base. These data help our Foun­da­tion and lead­ers across the coun­try to mon­i­tor trends, assess the child wel­fare sys­tem, and advance poli­cies and prac­tices to improve out­comes for chil­dren, youth and fam­i­lies — par­tic­u­lar­ly for children of color who are overrepresented in the system and more like­ly to expe­ri­ence neg­a­tive outcomes.

KIDS COUNT offers more than 60 mea­sures of child wel­fare, encom­pass­ing how many chil­dren and youth are in the sys­tem, the rates at which they enter it, their demo­graph­ic char­ac­ter­is­tics (includ­ing race and eth­nic­i­ty when avail­able) and their expe­ri­ences in fos­ter care, exit­ing care, being adopt­ed when applic­a­ble, aging out of the sys­tem and more. In addi­tion to child wel­fare sta­tis­tics at the nation­al and state lev­els, KIDS COUNT also pro­vides data by ter­ri­to­ry, when pos­si­ble. Pol­i­cy­mak­ers, child wel­fare agen­cies and oth­ers have used these data for decades to under­stand how well the sys­tem is meet­ing the needs of vul­ner­a­ble chil­dren, youth and fam­i­lies, and how it can be strength­ened so that all abused and neglect­ed chil­dren can heal and grow up with safe, sta­ble families.

Chil­dren and youth who expe­ri­ence trau­ma, includ­ing abuse or neglect, are at increased risk for long-term emo­tion­al, behav­ioral and phys­i­cal health prob­lems, among oth­er chal­lenges. The data measures high-risk behav­ior, such as juve­nile jus­tice sys­tem involve­ment and sub­stance abuse, dif­fi­cul­ties with men­tal health, phys­i­cal health and aca­d­e­m­ic per­for­mance. The con­se­quences of child mal­treat­ment can be mit­i­gat­ed with equi­table access to trau­ma-informed ser­vices and nur­tur­ing, last­ing fam­i­ly rela­tion­ships and support.

Fos­ter care is meant to pro­vide safe, tem­po­rary liv­ing arrange­ments and sup­port ser­vices for chil­dren who have been removed from their fam­i­lies due to mal­treat­ment, lack of safe­ty or inad­e­quate care. The rate of children entering foster care has hov­ered at 3 or 4 per 1,000 for two decades. Kids ages 1 to 5 make up the largest share (29% in 2021) of chil­dren enter­ing care. Nation­al data also show that Black and Amer­i­can Indi­an and Alas­ka Native chil­dren con­tin­ue to be over­rep­re­sent­ed among those enter­ing fos­ter care. The rea­sons for this are com­plex, and efforts to improve racial equi­ty in child wel­fare have been under­way for many years.

In encour­ag­ing news, placements with relatives increased from 25% to 35% dur­ing 2000–2021, while place­ments in group homes or oth­er facil­i­ties were cut in half, from 18% to 9%. Few­er chil­dren are placed in pre-adop­tive homes (4% in 2021) or have tri­al home vis­its (5%), and some old­er youth live inde­pen­dent­ly with super­vi­sion (2%). Over a third of fos­ter chil­dren and youth expe­ri­ence more than two place­ments each year, mean­ing their liv­ing arrange­ments change at least three times a year.  Child wel­fare agen­cies are work­ing to min­i­mize these moves, as they are dis­rup­tive, stress­ful and often trau­ma­tiz­ing. Sta­ble rela­tion­ships and home envi­ron­ments are crit­i­cal for healthy child and youth development.

Of the more than 54,000 kids adopt­ed out of the child wel­fare sys­tem in 2021, over half were young kids ages 1 to 5, con­sis­tent with pre­vi­ous years. Most of these adop­tions are by the fos­ter par­ents (either rel­a­tives or non-rel­a­tives), who cared for the chil­dren while in fos­ter care. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the medi­an amount of time in fos­ter care has increased over the last decade — from 13.2 months in 2011 to 17.5 months in 2021, based on chil­dren who exit­ed care in each year. How­ev­er, the per­cent­age of kids who spent 5+ years in care declined slight­ly from 7% to 5% in the same time peri­od. Among chil­dren who exit­ed fos­ter care in 2021, about a third (35%) were there less than a year, while near­ly half (48%) spent 1 to 3 years in care and 12% stayed in fos­ter care 3+ years.

More than 19,000 youth left fos­ter care in 2021 with­out reunit­ing with their par­ents or hav­ing anoth­er per­ma­nent fam­i­ly home. Thankfully, this fig­ure has declined since peak­ing at near­ly 30,000 in 2008. The tran­si­tion to adult­hood is a sig­nif­i­cant and chal­leng­ing devel­op­men­tal phase of life for all young peo­ple, but youth aging out of fos­ter care on their own must face this with­out the sup­port of a sta­ble, lov­ing fam­i­ly. Many also lose access to ser­vices and sup­ports that were offered to them through the fos­ter care sys­tem. Not sur­pris­ing­ly, these youth and young adults are more like­ly to expe­ri­ence behav­ioral, men­tal and phys­i­cal health issues, hous­ing prob­lems and home­less­ness, employ­ment and aca­d­e­m­ic dif­fi­cul­ties, ear­ly par­ent­hood, incar­cer­a­tion and oth­er poten­tial­ly life­long adver­si­ties. In line with the racial inequities not­ed ear­li­er, youth of col­or are more like­ly to expe­ri­ence these chal­lenges. The tra­jec­to­ries of these young peo­ple are not unavoidable. They can be pos­i­tive­ly influ­enced by poli­cies and prac­tices that ensure these vul­ner­a­ble youths receive cul­­tur­al­­ly-respon­­sive, trau­­ma-informed tran­si­tion ser­vices and sup­port to nav­i­gate the steps to adult­hood, achieve sta­bil­i­ty and reach their full potential.

National Former Foster Youth Month

Cindy Olsen McQuay

I didn’t even know but my all things adoption community appreciates the voices of former foster care youth as much as it does adoptees. So I saw the graphic and then read – May is National Former Foster Youth Month. A month when former foster youth use our voices. As a demographic of the population expected to be grateful for being “saved”, it high time we spoke up and corrected the perception that society has about our situations.

When I googled it though, that was not the focus even though it should be. I saw focus on foster parents and adoptions. One year, wanting to learn more about foster care as I have no experience with the system (I only see stories about it), anyway I found a book – LINK>Foster Girl, A Memoir by Georgette Todd. That certainly expanded my awareness by seeing things through one person’s experiences as told in the written word.

In California the counties with the highest median incomes have the lowest number of children in foster care, and vice versa. The poorest counties have the highest number of children in foster care. If the stipends that are used to employ other people to care for the children of poor families were used to help create families with less generational trauma, while minimizing the stigma throughout society of being on government assistance, we as society would be wholly better off.

Please take the time this month to amplify the voices of former foster youth, listen to what we have had to endure, and consider ways in which our suffering does not have to be carried into the future.

From Chris Chmielewski, LINK>Foster Focus – I love May. I love learning what foster care groups are passionate about this year. Then June 1st will appear and we disappear from your consciousness. We go back to being the first or last story on the newscast. We become the story on your newsfeed you pass by. We fade back into the background. That isn’t the case for me. I run the nation’s only monthly foster care magazine, Foster Focus. I am a former foster kid. I care about the kids in care and the kids who age out, get too old for the state to care for, every single day. Every month is foster care month for me because it deserves to be.

He goes on to note – Kids will still enter foster care at age 9, on average, and stay in care for more than two years. Traumatized kids will still be misdiagnosed and given psychotropic medications they don’t need. There will still be kids who will attend 10 schools and move to a dozen homes while in care. Kids in care will still fuel the pipeline that is Human Trafficking. 

When they leave care, they will populate your prisons, somewhere in the neighborhood of 40-70 percent of all prisoners spent time in foster care, depending on the source. They will fill your streets. Former foster kids account for nearly 50 percent of the homeless population in this country. They aren’t going to go away just because the calendar says it is summer. The road ahead is long and filled with the obstacles that thwart progress. 

Difficult Challenges

Ok, sometime platitudes simply don’t cut it. Some people have such enormous challenges that life is going to be ongoingly difficult.

Here’s one example –

4 mos pregnant with her 4th child in Texas. Birth control failure. Homeless. Two of the other three kids are autistic. Husband is a disabled vet and is autistic as well. The VA trying to get them into a housing program. No familial support. Employment challenges, childcare issues. She has depression, anxiety, and OCD. “I feel stupid and lost and hopeless. I feel like the only solution is giving this baby up for adoption and that makes me feel ashamed.”

So, here is the impossible choice – abort or parent. She already understands adoption is trauma. Her question – is staying with parents so ill equipped to handle another child just trauma too? The thought of raising another child fills her with dread. She doesn’t know how she can handle it. She has no clue how they’ll do it, where they will be living, where she’ll give birth, etc. So many unknowns make her constantly feel on edge and like panicking.

Then came lots of suggestions and even some offers to help in some way or other but maybe the most important was this affirmation and encouragement –

Ok first off, take some deep breaths.

Let’s address some issues with how you are feeling first, then we can go into options and resources.

This is the most important part.

You are not dumb.

You are not useless.

You are not a hopeless case.

You are not a failure.

You are not a bad parent.

You have nothing to be ashamed of.

You are not any of those things that negative, evil voice in the back of your head is telling you.

You are not any of those things others in society may tell you.

I know that voice and those people all too well myself. They are all liars.

Now let’s talk about what you ARE and why.

You are strong.

It takes strength to make the hard decisions. To put the needs of your kids above your own and that’s what you have been doing. You could have bailed on your kids anytime. But you haven’t. You are pushing through.

You are worthy.

You are so worthy of love, compassion and empathy for zero reason other than you being you.

You are smart.

You are taking time to really evaluate a situation and try to make the best decision. You are reaching out for help, and that’s wisdom.

You are not a failure or hopeless.

You are not either of those things because you aren’t giving up. You are trying. As long as you are trying, you are never a failure.

Now to your issue.

Take your husband out of the equation. Do you want to have this baby? If you do, I assure you resources can be found to help you parent.

If you want an abortion, I assure you, safe access can be found for you.

But the alternative to abortion isn’t adoption. The alternative to abortion is parenting.

I think you should stop and think through if you want to continue this pregnancy or not. Its your decision, period.

Either way, there are people who will support you and I’ve seen miracles in this regard – either to help someone parent, or to get whatever help or access is needed.

Life simply wants us to never give up – take the next logical step and know the temporary nature of many challenges we each inevitably face.

It’s OK to Ask for Help

It may be rough going but it is OK to ask for help. Today’s story –

When I was first pregnant, I was terrified and reached out to an adoption agency! I just turned 20 weeks (today) and have mostly changed my mind but still unsure.

Today, the adoption coordinator has been harassing me! It’s been a few weeks since I have decided to reach out but I haven’t felt the need, have been busy working (I work 3 jobs to save up for birth, etc) and also need space! I also HAVEN’T signed anything. Today, she sent me a text, had the prospective Mom send me a text, called and sent an email. I’m feeling a little trapped at the moment, already feel guilty.

I have most things ironed out, other than my living situation and expectations and arrangements with the dad (we’re not together and he was emotionally abusive when together) which also weighs on why I don’t have a solid decision yet.

Some encouragement from someone who has been there and made it work –

I was homeless and moved 4 times while pregnant and 3 times since having my son – I was a waitress during Covid (he was born in 2021) and my hours were very low/tips were bad. We had a 1 room basement bachelor apartment. I didn’t have a car until I was over 20 weeks along.

We managed to make it. He is 2 now and thriving with me. I do think that a lot of people, had they known the extent of my situation, would’ve absolutely pressured me to put him up for adoption or called Child Protective Services on us. But I was determined to be his mom.

A lot of my success was due to the kindness of other people – who passed down hand me downs, baby clothing, furniture, etc. Don’t be afraid to ask for help and accept free stuff.

Messy Complicated and Beautiful

The joy and heartache of friendships. We love our friends and they can break our hearts – just being the messy, complicated and beautiful human beings we all are. That said, some lives are much more challenging than ours. And when our dear friend has such a life, out of love, we do our best with the reality. This is one such story.

I’ve adopted two little girls from a childhood friend. They are ages 5 and 3. The five year old, I brought home when she was born, her mom was very ill at that time. The 3 year old came to me through the foster care system, when she was 9 months old at her mom’s request. My friend had stage 4 cirrhosis during both of the pregnancies, as well as substance abuse and varying illnesses and had been homeless most of her life, was suicidal and with a history of violent behavior. She was in and out of jail. She passed unexpectedly in December two years ago.

I knew the girls had 3 older sisters who were adopted out by the state years ago. I had promised their mom I would look for them but today, they found me. They are 16, 18 and 19. They were looking for their mom. They asked me point blank if their mom was still alive. I answered that and a few questions. I did let them know that she loved them and missed them and thought of them every day and wondered how they were doing. She had hoped to connect with them again. I let them know they had little sisters We exchanged photos.

I just don’t know how to navigate this. I don’t want to give them a negative image of their mom. I’m thinking of just letting them know that she had had a lot of trauma that led to her addictions and illnesses, kind of a negative spiral she got caught up in but that she was a beautiful, amazing person with a big heart and a brilliant mind who was funny and creative and one of a kind….

Some responses to this sad story about life’s more difficult realities.

You tell those sisters that she was a human being that battled a war. With her self, her world, and still loved her children. Even while she fought. There’s something terribly strong and loving about that.

Let them know the truth as much as age appropriate for them to grasp. The real truth is people are messy & complicated & beautiful all at the same time, and that’s something they can grasp at any age, regardless of depth of details.

Please tell the older girls everything – the good, the bad, the ugly. They can handle it and it’ll be valuable information as they navigate their own trauma and mental health issues (and questions about their lives).

The woman replied – I’ve talked to two of the older girls and answered their questions. I sent them videos of their mom telling her life story, about her paintings and stuff.

Unequal Treatment

This is really so common for so many adoptees that came out of foster care into families with biological children through adoption. I’m not going to catalog all of it but will hit a few highlights and say only – it is tough enough to come from a difficult environment and feel so completely disregarded. One wonders why these people do it. One theory expressed in the most recent story rings true – My adoptive parents have high status in my smallish town. Both very well known. I now believe we were trophies for them to flash and extra income that paid for fancy car loans.

The biological children were all younger. The woman notes – I remember thinking their two story home was a mansion. They had a tree house and trampoline. Sooo much property. Any poor kids dream. Even though she also notes – The family who fostered/adopted my sister and I were lower middle class. Their family photos never included the adoptees.

As me and my sister aged things got worse and worse. I had felt very loved initially. Me and my bio sister were much more well behaved than their own. We did as we were told. Mostly because, if we didn’t, we’d be disciplined. My biological sister and I would take on the majority of the house work, simply because the others refused to participate and no one enforced that they helped.

When me and my biological sister pushed back on things, we were told life’s not fair or just gaslit into thinking – it’s what we deserved, as we needed more structure due to our past. My older sister and I were placed into the foster care system the last time at ages 7 & 10. Our emergency placement that night was where we stayed for 2 years as foster kids, until ages 9 & 12, when the family adopted us. Her biological mother suffered mental illness with frightening episodes. She was dependent on sketchy men. They moved a lot, due to homelessness or the men the mother was using for survival. They went without food often.

When her biological sister pushed back harder and grew a bit defiant in her teen years, the adoptive parents went so far as putting her back into foster care. That was devastating for this woman as her sister had been her only constant in life. She admits that her sister was treated much more poorly than her and it causes her to feel regret that she did not stand up for her sister more often. Months later, the adoptive parents brought her sister back home, and readopted her because she had suffered abuse in that foster home. She notes that her biological sister eventually moved out at the age of 18 and went no contact with their adoptive parents for awhile.

She notes – Even so, I was grateful. I had been a good kid and caused as little disruption to their lives as possible. I wanted to please everyone so badly. I thought I should be grateful for what they did offer me because I could’ve had it so much worse without them. When I moved out at age 19, the disconnect got worse for me. My adoptive mother doesn’t acknowledge there’s a disconnect at all. Even though, we live close but go months without seeing each other and weeks without contact. Some outsiders notice how my sister and I were treated differently.

And so now, the woman accepts it for what it was and is. She is willing to play nice for family events and holidays. Without them, she wouldn’t have any family. She responds promptly to any of her adoptive mother’s texts, where the adoptive mother pretends to care. Like, she will make empty promises or fake plans, but clearly she never actually intends to follow through. Which leads the woman to fully believe, anything that does happen is just due to concern for her adoptive mother’s public reputation. What if the adoptee went no contact completely ? Sometimes, the adoptive mother actually follows through and does something special for her, like a baby shower for her 1st child. She notes, however, that it was a very public affair. Anytime, it is something private, her adoptive mother is clearly not as nice.

Not A “New” Life

This comment came up in a discussion about how adoptive parents change the name of their adoptee when the adoption is finalized. One woman commented – “Nothing wrong with that, we started using his new name too to get him used to it. New life, new name.” She was quickly corrected – “I need you to fucking not. Adoption isn’t a “new life”, it’s a continuation of the life they are already living. This comment is insensitive at best.” This one had started new childcare job. She is a domestic infant adoptee. One child in her class is in the process of being adopted and that X is their legal name and Y is the name the adoptive parents have chosen to change it to. This child isn’t an infant, so the childcare workers are basically having to train the child to respond to a new name.

I will admit, I did a little sleuthing into the one who made the insensitive comment but could find nothing definite except that she is relatively new in the all things adoption group. There are some interesting photos but nothing certain as to her status in adoptionland but her comment seems to indicate an adoption there.

Lacking that, I looked for some context and found this recent (Oct 2022) article in The Atlantic LINK>Adoption Is Not a Fairy-Tale Ending, with the subtitle – It’s a complicated beginning. While maybe not perfectly what I was looking for, I did see how it begins – In America, popular narratives about adoption tend to focus on happy endings. Poor mothers who were predestined to give their children away for a “better life”; unwanted kids turned into chosen ones; made-for-television reunions years later. Since childhood, these story lines about the industry of infant adoptions had gradually seeped into my subconscious from movies, books, and the news.

The author, Erika Hayasaki, notes – researching a book on identical twins raised in radically different circumstances, the reality of adoption is far more complicated than some might think—and, as many adoptees and scholars have argued, deserving of a more clear-eyed appraisal across American culture. Her book, Somewhere Sisters, chronicles identical twins Isabella and Hà were born in Vietnam in 1998, and their mother struggled to care for them. Isabella (born Loan) was adopted by a wealthy, white American family that gave her a new name and raised her in the suburbs of Chicago. Hà was adopted by a biological aunt and her partner, and grew up in a rural village in Vietnam with sporadic electricity and frequent monsoons.

Twins have always fascinated me. I was born a Gemini and have always wondered what happened to my twin. When I was a child, my 13 month younger sister and I were often dressed alike and sometimes people thought we were twins. When my daughter was preschool age, she used to claim we were twins. I suppose I’ve had at least two surrogate twins in my life. I digress.

The author discovered that when reunions with birth families do happen, they aren’t always happy; they can be painful, confusing, or traumatic. Adoptees who are parents, lawyers, educators, or activists are challenging the rosy image of adoption that stubbornly persists in our culture. Children are not offered up for adoption in a vacuum. Many of them “are available because of certain, very strategic political policies.” Often the reasons for removing children from their parents comes under the heading of “neglect.” Throughout adoption history, this broad category has encompassed homelessness, poor hygiene, absent parents, and drug abuse in some instances, or simply leaving a child with caregivers outside the nuclear family.

A happily ever story after adoption often comes at the cost of forsaking everything that came before. The process, known in the adoptee community as coming out of the fog, refers to when an adoptee starts to see beyond the narrative about fate and question their true feelings about the adoption system, and how it has impacted their relationships, personalities, and identity formation. As the child of two adoptees, I also had my moment of coming out of the fog because adoption had seemed like the most natural thing to me until I was over 50, both of my parents had died and I began to discover my families true origins.

For me, coming out of the fog was, and continues to be, a process that involves simultaneously holding my adoptive grandparent’s love and good intentions in my heart’s memories alongside all the ways that adoption robbed me of what, for most people, is almost an unconsidered common reality. There are all of these contradictory realities within one’s experience of belonging to a family created by adoptions. The duality of that space can be hard for those without such a background to reasonably understand.

When It Feels Like No One Cares

A birth mother story about what it is like when the entire deck is stacked against you.

I placed my daughter for adoption back in 2017 when I didn’t have custody of my 3 older kids. I was homeless, depressed and struggling. The adoption process was very traumatic for me. Although my daughter is very loved and happy, I wish I would have been encouraged or supported to keep her.

I got my life back together and fought my family for custody. I have my older two children back in my care but my third child is with a different family member. I had been doing much better in life, until …

I had just moved into a big house the couple weeks before I found out I was pregnant, was working, making great money. And then I found out I was pregnant. Everything has gone downhill from there. I have severe morning sickness – so severe that it’s classified as hyperemesis gravidarum. I was constantly in and out of the hospital, so I quickly fell behind on bills and the baby’s dad became obsessed with a stripper and left us at the time we moved into the house. I wound up losing my job due to missing so much work and was facing eviction.

The baby’s dad stepped in to try and work things out. We were all staying in a motel. I don’t make nearly the money I did at my job doing side gigs and he makes minimum wage. The cheapest motels around here cost about $2,000/month. Realizing we didn’t really have many options, we decided to sign on with an adoption agency that would pay our motel expenses. He was there for me when I gave up my daughter for adoption, even though he is not her birth father. We viewed this decision as staying strong and doing it for the baby.

I am getting closer to my due date. I can’t help but to feel like I’m only choosing to do this as we are technically homeless. We have no plan or anywhere to go after this baby is born. Does this mean I’m not good enough to parent my other children, if I can’t take care of this one? I haven’t told them about the adoption because I don’t know how to explain “I want this baby to have a better life than the crappy one I can provide for you guys.”

I feel like not only does nobody care about this baby, nobody cares about what’s going to happen to my other kids either… it’s so depressing. I don’t know what to do/where to turn anymore. I started using hard substances a couple months after I placed my daughter for adoption to numb that hole in my heart. Deep down I fear if I go through this again, I’m going to want to go back to numbing that pain, except I probably won’t survive it this time around. I have no family, not many friends, no support. Baby’s father and I are on better terms now but it’s not the way I pictured any of this unfolding, especially when my life was going so well before this pregnancy.

What It’s Like To Age Out

Today’s story (not my story) –

I’m in Kansas. From age 2 to 18 I was in and out of the foster system. I aged out 4/27/2022, 11 days after my 18th birthday. The state aged me out and left me with nothing. I stayed living with my kinship placement for awhile. The night before graduation she kicked me out and the day of graduation texted me telling me she expected me to come home and get ready for graduation. She kicked me out again, after I told her I was taking a semester off before starting college. I spent the hottest part of summer homeless and couch surfing. I came back to her house 9/21/2022 and it’s been rocky. She continuously threatens to kick me out, which would be fine but I have nowhere to go. I have a Div of Child and Family Services worker at the moment, who is somewhat helping me out but she is hard to get ahold of. I am currently working as a server and about to become a manager as well as starting college this month. I don’t have many options right now and don’t really know what to do.

One adoptee offered this advice (which I agree with) – Don’t go back to that house. And honestly if u make more as a server don’t take the management position unless it’s more money. I’ve only taken lead server roles where I made more hourly and got to keep my tips also. Look on LINK>Roomster – it’s an app for roommates. That way you can at least get a room of your own. While you work on yourself. And it turns out that the management position is $2 more than what she is making now. And if she get tips while being a manager, she gets to keep them.

Since she indicated transportation issues, one person suggested that in some states, the Department of Vocational Rehabilitation will provide Driver’s Education classes for people who need to be able to drive themselves to and from job searches/work. She wrote back – I passed the driver’s education class, but had to be medically cleared. By the time I was finally medically cleared I had to retake to test and haven’t been able to.

Re: the housing issues, after someone suggested Catholic Charities (and talking to an advisor at the college about what might be available to share), she adds – “I did have rapid rehousing with Catholic Charities but when I worked at Amazon, I lost it because I made too much.”

And I didn’t realize Reddit could be helpful – there was this – Reddit is more anonymous and you can post on your local sub (probably r/”city name” as well as r/assistance, r/almost homeless, r/ex_foster and r/fosterit.) Your college might also have some resource suggestions, google “college name” + “counseling department.” Assuming you’re in the US, call 211 as well.

I rented rooms in apartments and houses from age 19-28 with roommates I found off of Craigslist, despite it’s bad rap. Many rooms do not require a credit score (I moved countries once, and credit scores don’t transfer.)

Also look up YMCA Host Homes to see if that’s a thing in your city, it’s a small program but could be an option.

All this, just to give you an idea of what these young people are up against. There is much more and I am hopeful that somehow my group which is so resourceful will be able to help this young woman somehow.