The Foster Child

(Trigger Warning: This story includes loss of loved ones, drug use, and profanity.

Names have been changed for privacy.)

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Let me tell you what I know about Megan.

She has an infectious smile, and the sweetest laugh. I would know, since we have cackled to the point of tears together many a late night; whether walking home from after-work drinks, or just sitting sober in my bed reading ‘texts from last night’. She is warm and welcoming. She enjoys cooking, hiking, and lives happily with her beautiful girlfriend in the Bay Area.

Megan has about 300 friends. And you may think I’m exaggerating, but it’s true. She is the only person I know who literally gets stopped every single time we are out anywhere, by someone who considers her a good friend. I plan ahead to allot extra time for this. I’ve watched her interact with these friends, and it’s always so sweet and genuine. Megan has a knack for making people feel welcome around her, and they subsequently want to be her friend. And she juggles each of these friendships with care and precision. If we want to take a small girls’ trip to Palm Springs? Better extend the trip, she’s got a good friend there. Shall we stop at this restaurant? The manager is her pal, we have to account for that.

Being a massive introvert, I have always found this to be fascinating and beautiful. I have a hard time keeping up with the few close friends I have. She seems to live this way with ease, with joy. And it is all a testament to who she is at her core; a wonderful person with so much love to share. She is a gem, and I feel it’s a bit self-serving to admit that she is one of my best friends.

But what lies underneath? How did Megan become the social butterfly she is today? That is what I aimed to answer in an interview with her. And while we’ve had hundreds, if not thousands of calls during our friendship, I knew this one would be different. And I felt jittery knowing she was fully onboard. Because that’s who Megan is. She shows up for her friends, (all 300 of them), and when I ask for help, she is instantly all in.

Megan had lived many lives before the vast majority of us could read or write. And she endured experiences most can’t imagine, before she aged into double digits. The following story is not for the faint of heart, but it is such an important one.

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I nervously balanced my phone, setting it to record as I heard the familiar FaceTime ping on my computer. Megan’s face popped up with her usual grin, inspiring me to smile back. I wonder why I feel nervous. I’ve known her since fourth grade, I remind myself.

After some regular chit chat, we both sit up a little straighter. I ask her if she’s ready, and if she consents to me recording. Yep, yep.

“I want to talk about being a former foster youth,” she says firmly. Megan came ready to go. That’s my girl. So I just nod, glance down at my phone to triple check its recording, and start scribbling notes.

Megan was born to parents who were never married, and not together romantically since she was about 3. She recalls in the beginning how it was seemingly normal; she was with birth Mom mid-week, Dad on weekends.

She has a clear image of who her parents have always been. While her birth Mom was more intense and high strung, her dad was more level-headed. She has fond memories of her weekends with him; eating dodger dogs at the local baseball game, donuts and chocolate milk were always on the menu.

But as she got older, her father began to distance himself, while her birth mom began to live an increasingly dangerous lifestyle. Megan summarizes this by simply saying ‘She started hanging around with the wrong dudes. And doing drugs.’ Meg was only two or three years old.

“I can remember houses we lived in,” she told me. “But eventually we didn’t have a place to live… I was basically like a homeless kid.”

As the drug addiction escalated, so did Megan’s sense of instability. She has a memory of seeing her birth Mom rolling a joint with a strange man after preschool one day. She vividly remembers the moving trucks packed full of their belongings, toted to different motel rooms around Hollywood. She feels thankful that they could even live in motels, compared to the alternative of having no roof over her head at all. And she recounts how one day, before she could begin to process what was happening or why, her birth mother left Megan at a ‘family friend’s’ house with the vague sentiment she’d be staying there a while. So little Megan walked her suitcase into a new house in Palmdale, California, not knowing when she’d see her birth mother again. Megan was five.

She got used to this situation quickly enough, but regularly wondered why her Dad didn’t just take her in, after all he was more stable. She has one sole memory of him buying a bike for her and dropping it off at this new residence, but that’s about it. She ponders to me now; He had a full time job. Maybe he just didn’t know how to emotionally handle a child? As for her birth Mom, she speculates whether this sudden and under-explained ‘stay with friends’ was because she was actually in jail. She’ll never know though, because from her experience, ‘I can’t ever get the truth from her.’

I ask her what it was like to have Child Protective Services coming to her class, a very regular occurrence for her at that age. Surely other kids in her class weren’t experiencing this? Did she have any sense of discomfort, or feel it was odd she was the only one?

“Honestly, I don’t remember thinking it was weird,” she says, gazing off to think. “I had been through so much shit by then, this was just another thing.”

I need to reiterate: Megan is now speaking about her six year old self. A kindergartener. I think of my son who is that age; how he still mispronounces words and calls me “mommy”. He is so young, and so was she. While most kids were worried about which playground amenity they’d visit first at recess, Megan was regularly pulled aside to have conversations with strangers holding clipboards, asking personal questions about her home life. As she learned later, they were there to rule out abuse. My son’s face flashes into my brain, and I shudder at the thought.

Megan’s birth mom showed up again after six months. She recalls this vividly, because the family turned her away. Meg still doesn’t know exactly why, though she has her suspicions. Namely, she thinks at this stage her birth mother was far too deep into a years-long meth addiction for any decent human to willingly send a child with her. And additionally, much later in life Megan learned that during one of her birth Mom’s stints in jail, she was required by law to take parenting classes. And to this day, Megan has yet to receive an explanation as to why those classes were never completed.

“She wasn’t allowed to have me back because she never finished the classes she was supposed to take in jail,” Megan tells me. She cites this as an underlying cause for one of her biggest pet-peeves; as she puts it, ‘I get pissed when people can’t get their shit together’.

After a while of CPS visits by day and couch crashing by night, she left the family friends and was placed into her first foster home. She jokingly tells me ‘I don’t know who thought this was a good idea, but she was 76 years old.”

The woman was nice enough and had her adult children around (in their 40’s, she estimates) to help care for Megan. Makes me think this situation could have panned out so differently had it not been for what came next. In the span of a year, she watched her home and foster family literally crumble. By a stroke of poor fate, her new house was located at the epicenter of one of Southern California’s worst and most damaging earthquakes. (Northridge, 1994, for those who didn’t live it.) She recalls the violent shaking, seeing the actual walls of her house falling apart around her. She was terrified. And she vividly recalls slugging mattresses and futons outside to sleep in the backyard, for fear they were no longer safe indoors.

Shortly after, things took an even sadder turn when her elderly foster mom passed away. And at seven years old, Megan was once again re-located. Her second foster home would be back in Palmdale.

Megan’s face changed when she talked about this new home. She describes a loving family, getting to experience life with siblings. It was in her eyes, normal. But when it came time for their daughter to go to college, the foster family broke the news to her that they would all be moving out of state… without Megan. And at the age of nine, Meg wound up in her third foster home, and with the woman who would finally adopt her.

This is an important note: I’ve referred to the woman who birthed Megan as her “birth Mom” in this story thus far, because that is how she has always spoken about her. Megan’s “Mom”, has always been the woman who adopted her; a woman named Jane.

Megan didn’t take to Jane right away. In fact, she retracts a bit at this part. She feels embarrassed by this stage of her life. She refers to herself as ‘a little shit’ at that age. She admits to being aggressive, angry, and at times violent and bullying other kids.

This is the part of the story where young me and young Megan met. We went to the same elementary school. It was an affluent beach town with top schools and safe neighborhoods. But the truth is neither of us truly recognized that, or the importance it played in our lives until we were older. At that time, we were acquaintances who played AYSO soccer together. I remember her being a bit rough around the edges, but I had no idea what she had been through to get to that point. We were nine. I had only ever known one home. By then, Megan had known more homes than I can count.

It took two years for the adoption to be finalized, and Megan tells me she was a troubled child that entire time. Despite the knowledge that Jane would adopt her, she still felt resentful. She got in trouble, she admits she was mean to Jane. Deep down, she wished she could still be with her previous family, the one who gave her that desperately craved sense of normalcy. Jane was single, no other children. She lived alone in a big house near the beach. Megan didn’t care about any of that, she was just angry.

I watch her try to over-explain her childhood behavior, and when she’s done, I remind her that anger is more than expected from what she went through. She had been on a spinning wheel basically since birth, and now that it had finally stopped her child self was undoubtedly dizzy from it. She would’ve actually had to sit still long enough to feel everything, with no coping skills in sight. She couldn’t possibly have seen then that compared to the statistics, she was one of the lucky few to be adopted at that age. And how could she? She had been through hell. And she was a child.

I feel myself getting protective and emotional at this point, because I won’t let any negative self-talk fly in our friendship, but I dial it back in so she can continue. She goes on to tell me how at the age of 11 she was formally adopted, thus dubbing Jane with the title of “Mom”. They continued to find their footing in this new life together. Her Mom was strict, and Megan was rebellious. They tested one another in ways they had never been before. And in time, they polished things down to a routine, then to stability, and then to their own little family of two.

It was in High School that Megan finally began to feel appreciative of what she’d received from her Mom. She had long pushed her birth parents out of mind. And it’s not like they’d made any attempt to reconcile with her either. Megan got into sports and music. She found herself a group of friends. And that’s when things started to blossom for her.

It was surprising to me to hear that there was a time when Megan wasn’t a social queen. She says it wasn’t until Senior Year of high school that she began to find her footing in a social sense. Until then, she had friends here and there, but she was much more recluse back then.

In a twist, she credits her birth mom for getting her out of her shell despite not having spoken to her for years at that point. Her birth mom was very social, and Megan observed this side of her when she’d accompany her out as a child. ‘She would take me to poker games, she’d bring me around people constantly’. As Meg grew older, she recalled that sensation. She saw the power in building a social community. And she wanted that for herself.

By the time Megan and I started hanging out on a regular (i.e. daily) basis, we were in our early college years. Megan had an expansive friend group by then, though it would grow even larger in the coming decade. She was already having run-ins with people around town who loved her, and this is when we began a deep friendship resulting in those late-night cackling sessions.

As a legal adult, her birth parents made few attempts to find her. Her birth mom continues to reappear in vague and destructive ways. Most notably, a couple of years ago she tried to steal Megan’s identity (a story that could fill another 8 pages on its own). After going through the process of recovering from this both emotionally and legally, Megan wisely cut contact for her own mental health.

As for her Dad, he has showed up exactly one time to visit her new life in the Bay Area. Megan recalls being about 24 at that time, and spending a short afternoon of a promised long weekend together. But the next day, he never showed to pick her up for their plans. And though she waited for him, she knew in her heart he wasn’t coming. She hasn’t seen or spoken to him since.

This is another part of the story where my protective friend-side wants to jump out and scream with her, but we will save that for another day. Megan has made peace with it all in her own time, and has no plans to have a relationship with either of her birth parents.

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I would bet most people don’t know these things about Megan, I admittedly knew a lot less than I thought. I bring this up to her at this point, apologizing for being less of a friend than I should have. I wish I had known so much more of what’s in these stories. She admits that she kept it buried inside most of the time. She didn’t want to acknowledge that those stories were an integral part of who she is; but she knows that now more than ever.

Megan lost her Mom in 2020 to a long battle with cancer. I remember the text, she asked not to be called while she processed, and I respected it. But I knew how deeply she was hurting. Jane had been her family, the only true parent she’d ever had. I could see her putting up her walls again, she began to toughen up. After all, that’s what she had to do her whole life. She couldn’t cry, she didn’t have time before the next thing rolled around. But this time would be different. She would have to face herself as an adult; she would have to go inward in a new way.

Megan began to experience years of trauma, fear of abandonment, and desperation for a sense of normalcy, culminating into anxiety and panic attacks. She lived that way for a while until she couldn’t, and she got help. And even at her lowest, she held herself up. She fought back. She began to see therapist, and she turned to her (huge) group of friends for support. And they were ready.

Seeing (and being a part of) this support, it dawned on me that in her adulthood, Megan had created a different kind of family. She spent years of her life bonding with people in ways that continue to amaze me. She has family of her choosing; one she crafted carefully and with intention. She turned friends into family. And I believe that this is entirely due to the life she experienced before she was even a pre-teen. She could have given up on the world, many of us would have. She could have understandably tossed her hands up in retreat and given a middle finger to the heavens. Life was unkind to child Megan, to put it very mildly.

But she persevered, and she grew, and she never gave up until she began to succeed, and then thrive. Surrounded by an army of people who would come to her aid in a second, I see now what she did. She created something that she was never given. She built a community herself. After the walls meant to support her literally crumbled around her, she built them back up inside herself, in her own way. She fought past the anger and resentment, and found pieces of love and joy in the rubble. Brick by brick, Megan created the life she always wanted.

Today, Megan is studying psychology. Can you guess her current field of work? She mentors foster youths. If that isn’t a hot damn beautiful full circle moment, I don’t know what is.

“Did you know that only 3 or 4 % of foster youth graduate college?” Megan had asked me at the beginning of our conversation. I didn’t know. This statistic is what gave her a sense of curiosity, and pride. It’s what ignited the fire inside her to find a new place in the system that raised her, this time coming back in from the opposite end. She realized she was an outlier; the entirety of the foster care system has morbidly high rates of failure. And she wanted to do something about it, so she did. Weekdays, you can find her giving foster kids academic, social, and emotional mentoring, “so they can go to college, and succeed.”

These days Megan feels proud of what she went through. She is not just willing to talk about her childhood, she wants to. She sees the immense value in who she has always been. She still wonders what life would have been like if things had been, as she puts it, ‘normal.’ But she knows she couldn’t be where she is today: Living with her soulmate (who adores her), pursuing her dream career, with a family of hundreds.

“All of these things have made me feel good, and made me realize how amazing I am,” she says with a smile.

“Hell yeah you are,” I say back. And it’s the truest thing I’ve said today.

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