I Beat the Odds_ From Homelessness, to the Blind Side, and Beyond - Michael Oher [20]
In the meantime, though, the court system was making certain I would never get my wish. My grandmother was offered custody of all of us, but she said she only wanted Marcus. After about six months, though, she decided that was too much, too, and Marcus was sent to live in a group home until he "aged out" of the system. That meant he would turn eighteen, become a legal adult, and the state would no longer have to worry about him. One by one, the same decision was made about each of my older brothers. It was ruled that the goal would be for each one to age out of the system by staying put in the stable place they'd been placed by the state rather than returning home to live with our mother and the kind of life that they would have there.
Things were different for the girls, though. We learned that there was an effort to make my little sisters eligible for adoption. That meant that the courts had no hope that my mother would even get her act together long enough to make a safe home that they could be returned to, and thought that it would be best if she just gave up her parental rights for the little ones so they could have a chance to find homes with permanent families. There was another baby or two that had come along by then and been taken away by the state, and I know at least one of my little sisters was adopted by a family member on her dad's side.
With my big brothers aging out and my younger siblings possibly joining other families, I found myself right in the middle of those two groups.
The legal term that everyone kept using was that custody would be "awarded" to one person or another, but as a kid that always struck me as strange. As far as I could tell, there was no "award" involved; it felt more like a punishment than a celebration. And I was stuck wondering what was going to happen to me.
It was a strange place to be, mentally. I wished every night that things would go back to being how they used to be, with my whole family living together. But at the same time, now that I had gotten a chance to see that not everyone lived the way I had thought was normal, I knew that there was something broken about life as I had known it. Pretty soon, I got used to living with strict rules, but even quicker than that, I got used to regular meals and having a bed to sleep in. It may not have been a fancy mattress, but it was better than the floor. I started to feel pride when I would bring my finished schoolwork in to class the next day and when I started earning better grades on assignments and tests. I might never get used to having to go to day care after school, but the rest of the new things in my life were good, and I knew that I wanted a life more like this and less like the one I had known before.
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
And 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,