I Beat the Odds_ From Homelessness, to the Blind Side, and Beyond - Michael Oher [27]
For the kids who are assigned to caring, helpful families for longer than just a few months, their lives can be completely turned around. They get a chance to see what responsible adults look like. They understand what it is like to live with rules and discipline. They learn that there is a different way of living from what gets you trapped in the ghetto. They find out that you can trust and love people who are trying to help you become whatever you want to be. It can be a long road to break down the walls of distrust, anger, or sadness that a lot of children have put up as a survival mechanism, the only way they know to protect themselves from the hurt. Loving homes that offer support and encouragement are so important because they can help reprogram what the child views as normal and okay.
Unfortunately, not everyone gets placed in that kind of home.
Just because I was able to understand some things better, though, doesn't mean I was able to make the best choices. I still don't know how my mother could treat her kids the way my siblings and I were treated. I still don't know how she could think that living with the drugs and neglect and filthiness and irresponsibility was okay. I still don't know how she thought that if she kept living like that, things would get better. I heard a quote one time from S. Truett Cathy, the man who founded Chickfil-A. He said: "It's better to build boys than mend men." I thought that was a good statement and very true. Helping kids see a better way of thinking and living when they are young is so much easier than trying to re-teach them a whole new way of life when they are adults and end up making the same mistakes their parents made.
But it's not up to us kids to fix the world's problems. There are a huge number of kids in America who feel helpless and need stable homes right now. You can take action by choosing to help just one child. The ripple effect of that action can end up touching many lives and even generations.
CHAPTER SEVEN
"Home" Again
After all of my attempts to run and hide, when I was either brought back by my mother or the authorities, I finally got my wish to stay at home. After my escape from St. Joseph's, I was finally released from the system back into my mother's care.
Well, technically, I wasn't really released to her so much as no one came after me again to haul me away after I left the hospital. I don't know what changed my mother's status so that I was allowed to stay with her at that point, but they eventually decided it was okay and left us alone for a while. I just know that the goal of foster care is to return children to their birth families whenever possible, so that might have been what made them decide we were okay.
Judging from the last document I know of before I ended up back at home, though--a ruling filed in July of 1996--the Juvenile Court of Memphis and Shelby County had something very different in mind for Carlos and me. In that document, it says that they wanted to change my status to "permanent" in the foster care system. It seems that Carlos was targeted to just age out of it. He was almost thirteen at the time, and I guess whoever makes the decisions thought that nothing was going to improve with my mother in the next five years and that Carlos would be better off turning eighteen and then getting released without ever returning home.
I don't remember if we knew anything about the court's decisions for us at that time or not. Even if someone had sat us down and tried to explain it all to us, I think it would have gone right over our heads. When you're a kid, it seems like forever to think even six months down the road. Five years would be impossible. As far as we could tell, the longer we stayed in the foster system, the longer we were being kept away from the rest of our