But I also knew that just wanting something was never going to be enough to make it happen. I was tired of letting other people make the decisions for me. I knew what I wanted and I decided to try to get it the only way I knew how.
CHAPTER FIVE
Running Back
A
nd so I became a runner. Runners are kids who leave foster care and head anywhere else—sometimes it’s back home, sometimes it’s to a friend’s house, and sometimes it’s just to the streets. I just wanted to get back to my mother, to try to pretend that the normal life I wanted so much was waiting for me there.
Since her home wasn’t far away and I was already getting close to five feet tall with long legs, it wasn’t a difficult thing to get there. I would just take off from Velma’s yard when no one was looking and head over to my mother’s place. Sometimes she would be there and sometimes she’d be nowhere to be found. It was never too hard to track her down, though. There are no secrets in the projects. Everyone knows everyone else’s business, good, bad, pleasant, or ugly.
A couple of times I just sat by the front door and waited for her to return. It was tough to know how she would react when she found me there. At times she would grab me by the arm and march me right back over to the house I’d just left. When that happened, I think she must have been at a place emotionally where it was a relief to her that we were in someone else’s hands. It seemed like she thought if someone else had us, then we were getting looked after, fed well, and had a roof over our heads. It was more than she could guarantee when we were with her.
But other times, she would give me a big hug and let me inside. We would stay there at her house for as long as we could. I say we, because sometimes Carlos ran with me and one of our other brothers might be there at the house, too. Most of my older brothers had been placed in group homes rather than with families, and I think that might have given them a little more freedom to come and go. Or maybe they ran, too. It didn’t seem like anyone was keeping close tabs on us. Those times, when my brothers would be there, were the ones that made running worth it. Sometimes we would only get to stay a few hours, but a few times we were able to camp out at my mother’s house for several days or weeks without anyone looking for us too hard.
Usually nothing much came out of me running away because the authorities always knew where I headed and could scoop me up pretty easily. But during those times when I had a long stay with my mother, a runaway report would be filed and the police would have to get involved. That happened three times while I was with Velma. The challenge was that my mother learned the rules of the system—that the authorities couldn’t enter her residence without a court order or permit to do so. So whenever they came around looking for us while she was feeling like she could take care of us, we would not be allowed to answer the door. She would be the one to do all the talking and say that she had no idea where we were and that she hadn’t seen us. Meanwhile, I remember peeping through the curtains to watch, and even though I thought I was being sneaky, I’m sure they could see me. But the law was on her side and my mother understood that, so she used it to her advantage.
Ms. Spivey ended up getting a guy named Eric to help her with our case. He was a short guy with curly hair; her hope was that maybe if there was a man working on our case, too, we’d respond better to him and look at him as kind of a role model. It was a great thought, but it didn’t really work. It still felt to me like it was us versus them, and he was just another “them” who wanted to keep my family apart.
Eventually, though, I always got caught. Ms. Spivey was not going to give up easily. When I asked her about it recently, she laughed and told me it was always her goal to find us because she didn’t want us thinking we were smarter than she was. Usually it was at school (when I would go) that the authorities would end up getting ahold of us. They would pull me out of class like they did the first time they took me away, and I would end up right back at Velma’s house until the next time I ran. I think it even got to the point that they could predict my escapes. They almost always came right after one of our supervised family visits. My heart would hurt so badly after seeing us all together—one or two times my mother was even able to cook us dinner to eat together while we were there—and I couldn’t stop thinking about how much I wanted a nice family life. The only thing I could do, as an eight- or nine-year-old, was to run, so it seemed to me like it was better than doing nothing.
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PUBLISHED a study a few years ago about adolescents who run away more than once from foster homes.
1
According to the report the authors wrote on the study, children who run away from care more than once: “May be experiencing harm in their placements, missing family, receiving inadequate attention to their mental health needs, or lacking access to normative youth experiences such as sports.”
I realize now that I was not alone in running away. The number one reason for why kids run was to get back to their biological family, even if they know that life at home was not a good situation. The study says, “Many youth equated being around a biological family with being ‘normal,’ and their desire for a ‘real home’ (which foster care was not, in their minds).” That was definitely my mind-set.
My situation was actually pretty close to what the researchers recommend to help cut down on kids leaving care on their own. I was placed with a sibling, Carlos, and I got to visit with my family regularly. But I still had that desire to run, partly because it felt like I was getting a say in my own life when I did that. That is also a common reason for why other kids leave.
I think it is important for any adult to understand that a child’s reasons for wanting to get away from foster care might be a lot more complex—or a lot simpler—than they imagine. My social workers always seemed a little confused that I would want to leave a house where I had regular meals and was making good progress in school. What I couldn’t make them understand was that I knew where I was living was just a temporary situation. As I said before, I didn’t believe that anyone other than my family could love me and I would rather be hungry and sleeping on the floor so long as I knew that the people I was with would always be looking out for me. As much as Velma cared for me, I never could believe that she loved me.
Even though we never talked about love in my family, I felt it. Love is important in every little kid’s life. The teachers at school often seemed frustrated by me, and Velma was a strict task master. Whereas at home no one got mad at me, no one cared if I struggled with reading. All my brothers cared about was that I was with them. That was all I wanted—to feel like I belonged, instead of feeling like a burden. Running wasn’t a way of acting out, it was a way of coping with the way that my life had been turned inside out. The study talks about that, too, explaining that running is a coping method for a lot of kids.
What is scary, though, is realizing how many kids who are habitual runners end up in terrible situations. If they don’t head home, a lot of them end up as victims of abuse or hooked on drugs. It’s incredibly dangerous to set off on your own as a kid, going into the neighborhoods where a lot of runaways go.
I don’t talk about my running to glamorize what I did. I was really lucky that nothing worse happened to me while I was out by myself—just about eight or nine years old—looking for my mother. It’s actually pretty amazing that I ended up okay.
AFTER ABOUT TWO YEARS in Velma’s care, the state finally moved us to another home. It was too bad that we had to leave her home because Velma had invested a lot of work in both Carlos and me. She had a basketball hoop back behind her house and would let us play for hours. She also took us to neighborhood games of football sometimes, and always said the two of us would be going pro someday. She fought for me in school, too. When I had a 17 percent average in school and they said I wasn’t going to get moved up to the next grade because I hadn’t been showing up, she worked with me and met with the teacher and principal. Within a couple of months, my average had jumped to 62 percent and I was promoted at the end of the year.
She wasn’t perfect, of course, but Velma worked hard to be a good foster parent. With as much as I was running, though, I guess it was decided that I would be better off farther away from my mother’s home so that I couldn’t get there as easily. Carlos and I ended up getting bounced around to three or four other homes over the next year. That was when I learned firsthand that there are two very different sides to foster care.
There are people who become foster care parents because they want to make a difference in the lives of children who have been taken from bad situations. There are other people who become foster care parents because of the monthly check they get from the state. That’s the part that people don’t want to talk about, but, unfortunately, it’s very real. There are some terrible people who slip through the cracks when the state is screening applicants to the system. Their care can be as neglectful, abusive, and dangerous as the situation the child was taken from—or even worse.
Together, Carlos and I landed in a couple of homes that were less than ideal. I don’t remember a whole lot about those places, and I don’t really care to. I just know that I couldn’t imagine how anyone could think that how we were being treated was an improvement over what life had been like before we were taken away. One of those places even happened to be located right down the same street from the house we lived on when the girls and John got picked up by the DCS people. It was odd to be living in a strange and unhappy house within sight of a place where my family had once lived and, in my mind at least, been very happy.
After Velma’s, we never stayed at one foster home longer than a few months, and with each house change, there was usually a school change as well. By that point I was always so lost about where we were in the textbook that I just stopped caring. There was no reason to try because I’d just end up somewhere else pretty soon and have to do it all over again. I guess the teachers figured that I was so far behind that it wouldn’t be worth their time to try to get me caught up because I’d just be bounced out of their classroom soon enough.
I kept trying to run whenever I could and figured—I don’t know what. That just by showing up at my mother’s door maybe one day we would all magically be back together again? That by escaping my present situation I could somehow just erase the past? That if I ran enough times maybe one day DCS would get tired of chasing me and let me stay put?
I don’t think the reason mattered so much as the fact that when I ran home, I got to be with my real family and not the one the state had assigned me. Finally, I got my wish to not have to live with foster families anymore, but I had been labeled a troubled kid and I ended up in an even worse situation.
CHAPTER SIX
Escape from St. Joseph’s
I
’ve always been the quietest of my siblings, and I think that made me stand out to the social workers who were observing us. They misunderstood my shyness and the fact that I liked to observe more than participate. I’ve always been a person who studies things while I watch them; that’s how I absorbed the rules and techniques of basketball and football—I concentrated on the games as I watched them on TV. That was how I was when I was with my family for our supervised visits, too. I guess most eight- or nine-year-old boys love to run and jump around, making as much noise as they can, but that just wasn’t me.
During official, supervised visits, I tended to just watch my family talk back and forth and play together, because it felt more like being in a house. It was more like the old days, and it made me miss the times when we were all still living together.
Unfortunately, the DCS people who were supervising thought my quietness and the way I always stayed back a little bit was a sign of deeply repressed anger.
What followed was a lot of one-on-one meetings as they tried to get to the bottom of what they were afraid was pent-up rage. I didn’t say much in those meetings, which seemed to only make things worse. I didn’t laugh much, I didn’t want to open up to them, and I didn’t want to talk about my emotions. Ms. Spivey tried everything she could to get me to “give” as they call it—that is, to relate to her and let her inside my head so she could understand how I was coping with it all. For my part, I didn’t understand why everyone kept pressuring me to talk. I thought it was pretty obvious what was bothering me, and I felt like they had the power to fix it but simply wouldn’t.
When we talked recently, Ms. Spivey mentioned to me how her supervisor had a school photo of me from when I was at Gordon Elementary. The pictures were taken around Christmas, and I was in a red shirt, holding a wrapped Christmas box, which was a prop for the photo shoot. My smile worried them, she said, because it looked more like a smirk than a real smile. It seemed to them that I almost never had a genuine smile on my face. I don’t think they realize that my real smile
is
a smirk. It always has been.
So while they were concentrating all their efforts on trying to get to the bottom of my anger, I was trying to figure out how to make it through each day without breaking down in tears. I wasn’t mad, I was sad. I was a heartbroken little kid who was hurt and confused about everything that was going on around me and affected me so much but that I didn’t get any say in at all. I wanted to cry all the time, but I held it in and just shook my head when they tried to talk to me. I didn’t know how to tell them how much those supervised visits, when we were all together again, hurt so much afterward. I just kept thinking, “If we’re good together and we love each other, why are they going to take us away again?” Each time we said good-bye, it felt like the day they’d first taken the little ones away. I felt like maybe I had somehow failed to find a way to keep everyone together.