Warrior Part 2

From the time I was a very small child, my mother very lovingly characterized me as a "strong willed child." This was never said in a derogatory manner and I know that she was very well meaning in her attempts to tell me it really was a good thing and to "use my power for good not evil." However, the message I received was, "you are very difficult to love." Perhaps if I had been able to remain under my mother's care for my whole childhood this would have been tempered as I grew and matured, but unfortunately her illnesses and hospitalizations meant that I needed to go and live with other families in foster care.

My first foster home was actual a family from our church who had children of similar age to myself and the two of my siblings who also live there. This family was both verbally and physically abusive from the very first night I was there. I frequently heard words like, "You are a selfish, spoiled brat" and I believed them. Over the next five years I was in and out of foster care; being a foster child is an experience that has so much more to do with where you live because in so many ways you become kind of like communal property. Any adult in your life feels like they should have a say in raising you and helping you turn out right and all of that. It has a tendency to bring out both the best and worst sides in others, and so I  saw and experienced some of the absolute worst parts of adults that were not my parents. I remember some very specific times when in my hurt I reached out to another adult and response is so clear in my head, "You need to think about how hard it is for said person to do what they are doing for you." While I am sure the intent was to teach me to have grace for the struggles of others, keep in mind I was a child. A hurting child. A hurting who was being further hurt by the ones who were supposed to be helping me. So the translation then became, "you are so difficult to love and care for it's only expected for you to be treated poorly."

We (my siblings and I) left foster care for the last time the summer before I started 5th grade. The first year was one of regaining my feet and finding some kind of stability. The next year I was off to middle school, and things started to go downhill fast. I was still the emotionally traumatized and less mature child in desperate need of healing, and I very quickly became the target of bullying in my school. On top of that I was attending youth group with people who had been former foster siblings, and people in close contact with other former foster siblings, so it was common for me to be embarrassed by some story or other being shared about me. I internalized the shame of being different and weird very deeply; I knew I would never be fully accepted as an equal into the group.

My saving grace in that time were my two closest friends who loved me for who I was and never made me feel like less than or an outsider. Still, the leaders of our youth group were the young adult siblings whose parents had been very active in trying to help my parents. The dynamics there are all kinds of messy for many many reasons, but we'll suffice to say they didn't like me very much and while they were too "godly" to show it overtly I felt it deeply-and because of all that I'd been through before (and how loved and important this family is in the denomination to which we belong) it became one more piece of evidence against me.

To be continued...here