Throughout my life, I’ve never known the privilege of being under the care of biological parents. When I was born, I tested positive for illegal drugs in the hospital’s labor room, which, combined with my parents’ substance addiction, led me to being placed in foster care. I eventually was given to the care of my grandparents, along with my two sisters who were born in the following six years.
The subsequent six years of my life is the only period of my childhood in which I can recall memories that were something other than trauma. It all took a turn for the worse in 2008 when my grandfather passed away, leaving my grandmother to solely take care of me.
The issue was, while I loved my grandmother, she loved her abusive, addicted son and daughter-in-law even more. She let my biological parents live in her house when my youngest sister was born. What followed was a decade I can describe as nothing short of hell.
As soon as I reached third grade, it was like clockwork. Every couple of months, a teacher, counselor, or someone I didn’t know would come up to me and tell me that I needed to go speak to a social worker during lunch. To avoid losing my father and mother, my grandmother would say, “Whatever you do, don’t say they’re at the house. They aren’t at the house. You don’t see them.” And time and time again, I listened. I hated that I listened.
This continued for a few years. I continued to witness my father and mother’s continued reliance on substances. By the time I was 11 or 12, I saw my father push my grandmother to the floor and stabbed her with her own car keys. I called 911 and hid under a bed, and they came and took away my father. The next day at school, I was met with praise by my teachers who expressed how “brave” I was.
I didn’t feel brave. I felt scared for my grandmother and my sisters. I especially didn’t feel brave when, on the very same day, I came back to my grandmother’s house to find my dad sleeping nude on his usual spot on the couch in the living room. This trend of speaking up, only for nothing to change, was one I would soon become very familiar with.
At 13, my father and mother were still present in my life. My mom often got high with her friends in the garage and in the backyard. There were about seven to 10 people living there at any given time. One of them even lived up in the attic and would take my clothes and ADHD medication at opportune moments. A couple of times, I came back to find the contents of my room and our possessions stolen by a friend of my parents. I no longer liked having anything expensive with the understanding that it would just get stolen at some point. The only exception to this was an old desktop computer, which I tried my best to unplug and hide whenever I was out of the house for long periods.
My dad’s abuse also persisted as he went on homophobic and transphobic rants after he found a gay pride sock I had hidden in my room. The abuse I had suffered hit a breaking point during my sophomore year of high school when my dad had broken down my door and beat me with a golf club. One of the couchsurfing friends of my parents had also hit me in the face and smashed my computer — one of my few escapes from the constant violence — because I said I didn’t like how he’d been sleeping in my bed or living in our house. I called 911 on both occasions. I later learned my dad and the couchsurfer claimed that I had actually attacked them, and my family corroborated this. It was here that I realized that my family loved the men who hit me more than they loved me.
In my regular social worker meetings, I had begun to share more and more about the situation going on in my house. Yet, they constantly told me that my family continued to say that my father and mother weren’t at the house. That was evidence enough to them that there wasn’t any wrongdoing.
Begging my teachers, counselors, and social workers to do something and help me became a daily chore. An assistant principal had actually told me once that it was getting irritating having so many emails every day by various teachers about me and the paperwork I was causing. One time, a counselor cried just because I had described a regular day in my life, a schedule that persisted despite my outcry. I even heard a counselor, who had been in regular contact with social workers, say, “They straight up don’t believe you.” What can I do when the ones who are supposed to be a child’s last line of defense refuse to listen? What can I do when an entire family turns against me? I would unfortunately find out that the answer is nothing. There was nothing I or any child could do when they alone voice their oppression.
My family got increasingly irritated at my outspokenness. I had become the one tearing the family apart, and my parents especially despised me for it. I had become a threat to the dysfunctional equilibrium that my parents had facilitated.
Social workers only believed me when, at a random visit, my dad chased the social worker with the same golf club he struck upon me. The police placed me in foster care that night, even though I had described for years how the dangers of my parents escalated.
While my time in foster care wasn’t much better, the fact that it took years for impactful action has fueled a passion for a career in child welfare. I managed to become valedictorian at my community college, College of the Desert, and transferred to UCLA where I’m currently in my senior year. I’m researching best support practices for queer foster youth. I am also doing an internship in D.C. soon with the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute to work on policy relating to foster youth, so I can make my lived experiences and tribulations heard to those who can make change.
As for my parents, my mother continues to couchsurf, and my father passed away in October of 2023 after getting high on meth, stealing, and subsequently crashing my car. Through the bitter legacy my father leaves, I hope to build a better future for the voices that need to be heard, not discounted.
