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Listen to this episode: “Foster care”
In 2005, I visited the house where I lived in the early 1980s.
It was a large two-story mint-green house in Somerville, Massachusetts. The family I stayed with—the LoBuonos—was an Italian family with three teenage children and an assortment of other foster kids who would come and go over the years.
Foster home in Somerville, MA. 1983.
Those teenage kids became my friends and sometimes protectors during my time living with them in foster care.
The foster care experience was terrifying.
I lived with this family from the time I was five years old until the time I was 7 when I was adopted.
The family did their best to make me feel welcome, but I knew the whole time that I was not one of them. I knew I didn’t fully belong and would move again one day.
They differed from my mother and me, who I desperately wanted to return to.
My mother, an erudite and stylish immigrant from Europe, often expressed displeasure at the clothes my foster mother would dress me in—maybe mesh tank tops and cut-off shorts—as it was the early 1980s. My mother had a habit of dressing me in tiny blazers and would take me to museums and piano concerts.
With my mother, Valda Valdheims, during a supervised visit while I was in foster care.
But the LoBuonos had different priorities.
I learned about heavy metal and breakdancing from the teenagers, and I loved it. I loved roaming with a pack of 8th graders who, for some reason, chose to look out for me. They gave me a spiked bracelet to wear to first grade and would take me to record stores with them.
With Frankie, my foster brother. Last I heard, he was an Army Ranger in the Iraq War.
I loved that part of it.
But despite how much they tried to make me feel cared for and looked after, they could do nothing about my longing to be back with my mother. I didn’t understand what was happening and why I could not go back with her.
I still felt daily the existential terror of being separated from her by force.
I felt angry, scared, lonely, and out of place, and those feelings worked deep into my nervous system.
They stayed embedded there until recently, when I started learning to feel and alchemize these experiences into something different.
Something that helps me.
Maybe something that can shed light on someone else’s situation, even if it’s not foster care.
I share this stuff because even though my experience might be unusual or unlike yours, it might hit on some universal experiences.
Or perhaps it’s just a way to feel better by sharing what I’ve been through.
Hard to say.
Give a listen, and you decide.
Listen to this episode: “Foster care”
PS - I am learning to share stuff like this and would love your impressions. Hearing from you teaches me a great deal. 🖤