My Side Of The Story: Bleach

The system is ridiculously biased. No matter what, everyone always blames everything on the child. If a kid gets kicked out of a lot of foster homes, well obviously that by itself is a very traumatic thing, and on top of it they get sent to lockdown. If a foster parent kicks out a lot of kids, do they experience the same trauma? No. And why is it that kids have files where their foster parents can say shit about them and "evaluate" them, but foster parents don't, and kids can't say anything about their foster parents? And why is it that kids aren't even allowed to read their own files when it's more their business than anyone else's?

Never trust what you read in a kid's files. That stuff is heavily biased, warped, and some of the stuff is completely made up. Even if multiple people keep saying the same thing. I knew one kid who was in a placement where people didn't like them because they were the only white kid, so when things happened, they blamed everything on him and wrote down in his files that he was the one who was racist and was mean to them. So when he went to other placements, they read that, and they went "oh, this kid is racist, I gotta look out for him". And because of what they'd read, they already had prejudices against him and every time he did the littlest thing they interpreted it as "racist", and those people would also write down that he was racist, and the other placements he went to did the same thing.

And you can bet the social workers and foster parents will never say anything bad about themselves. They'll never tell you about the things they do wrong. They'll keep provoking you and provoking and the minute you respond everything is all the kid's fault and the kid gets made out to be the villain.

In order to improve foster care, they must make a rule that you can only write factual stuff down in their files, and not opinions. Either that, or let the children themselves read and write their files and RESPOND and tell their side of the story. Don't just sit there and gossip about them.

There was another girl whose foster parent was jealous of her because they were both writers and the girl had done things at an early age and the foster parent couldn't do at that age. So the foster parent twisted it around and said she was "arrogant". And like always, people reading it would immediatedly assume it was true with no evidence whatsoever and start repeating the same thing.

What happened in my case was that I had a lot of unpopular and controversial opinions at the time and I was self-righteous and opinionated, so they misinterpreted that. I believed that wisdom doesn't come with age and that just because an opinion is popular doesn't mean it's correct (people thought the Earth was flat once) so the whole "it can't be everyone else that's the problem" argument is BS. Because of that, they called me a know-it-all that thought she knew better than people older than her and thought she knew better than everyone else in my files. Not actually true but that's how they interpreted my opinons.

They, like everybody else I'd met so far, immediately thought they could push me around and get away with it because I was Asian (or Chinese, according to their words), and there were popular stereotypes of Asians as "goody goody role models". I was, once again, constantly on edge, defensive, just waiting for someone to start something. I had to be even more defensive than everyone else was because of that. I had to prove to them they couldn't just treat me however they wanted-fuck no.

And yes, I had to be violent.

There was no trust. There was no friendship. There was no companionship. The people that appeared to be close on the outside really distrusted and hated each other. They spoke well of each other in the other person's presence, but trashed each other behind closed doors. Kids formed "cliques" in order to feel accepted and protected so that if they started having problems with others, they would have someone to back them up. And of course, if they wanted to single out someone and bully them, their so-called "friends" would back them up on that part as well. They didn't have the balls to do anything by themselves. And while they were buddy-buddy when everything was good, if something happened and that person wasn't as respected as they used to be, they revealed their true colors and turned their backs on the people that they called their "friends" just the other day.

These girls didn't know what friendship was. Friendship is a very strong bond formed over years and years of trust. You have to know each other inside and out and you have to have been through hell together, supporting each other all the way. Someone you've talked to and get along with is not a friend-that is an acquaintance.

But if you tried to help them out by teaching them this, they got offended and pushed you away in ignorance. And then they continued to live on, as phony and fake as they could possibly be.

The adults-the staff members-were no different. They were disgustingly judgmental. They'd read a little bit about your background in your charts and pretend that they knew everything about you. Are you kidding me? Did they really think that those files revealed everything there was to know? The files only gave away bits and pieces of information, plus not everything in there was actually even true. Workers and foster parents sometimes held grudges against kids after disputes and lied about them in their charts. You couldn't trust what you read in peoples' files-that was like believing everything that gossip magazines said about famous people. That was all it was: gossip. (Fuck you, Mr. Al, who started repeating shit he'd read and called me a "know it all" 1 second after meeting me, regardless of the fact that he was the most pretentious one out of all of them and would sit out in the lobby every morning spouting his psuedo-intellectual BS at the kids thinking he's being soooo deep and thinking he's teaching the kids sooo much when he wasn't saying shit.)

Staff members had disgusting victim complexes. They aired kids' dirty laundry and personal lives out in public in unit group meetings, talking about shit that was none of their business, co-signing, encouraging other kids to do the same. They lectured you about your own life, saying that the kids were there because they had abused their parents. That couldn't have been further from the truth. These kids had been put into care because they had been abused by their caretakers. They'd even sit there and threaten us, saying that we were lucky it was illegal for an adult to hit a child but if their sons and daughters were here, we'd have to watch out.

Ms. Lakia was especially filled with self-pity, sitting there, lecturing kids who had been gang raped, abandoned, beaten nearly to death, that her problems were bigger than theirs because she was a single parent and they did not have to work yet. Nice logic. Not to mention the level of homophobia there. Staff members would call out gay kids during meetings and proceed to tear down into them, asking them what was wrong with them, saying shit like "don't tell me you actually have feelings for each other, that's unnatural, X here has been living in this same unit and she has never had feelings for a girl, so I know you're lying". Some staff members even went as far as to hurl racial slurs at me.

And not to mention how they worked the kids like slaves, making them clean the entire place top to bottom three times a day.s.

I am feeling the urge to go puke. These are the pieces of shit that are running the system. These are the fucks that are "raising" children in need.

They took all of their stress out on poor Danny. While Danny definitely could be annoying at times, she didn't deserve the amount of bullshit they put her through. They blamed her for everything; she was an acceptable target, even to the staff members. She was everyone's stress ball. And though I sometimes told myself to stand up for her, I didn't. One of the worst things you could do was to get involved in something that had nothing to do with you. I had enough drama to deal with on my own.

Mind your own business and don't speak unless spoken to. It kept you out of trouble so that you could be discharged. But if someone starts something with you, you should do everything short of killing them to make them back the fuck off. It kept you from being a victim and kept the others from trying to take advantage of you. If you followed that philosophy, you'd be okay.

Days turned into weeks and weeks into months. It was fight after fight, attack after attack, more drama, more violence, more betrayal, more backstabbing, more destruction. I was a bit attached to my roommate Veronica, who was a teenager but looked and acted like she was seven, right down to playing with Barbie Dolls and keeping her side of the room ridiculously messy. I was also attached to my next roommate, Shaneka, who used to break CDs and chase after people with them, threatening them (hence why Sheppard Pratt took all our CDs away from us.).

During that time, my father started writing letters to me. I never responded to a single one of them. It was fishy that he was doing this like he was trying to get on my good side while his trial was coming up.

Even if he was somehow being earnest, there was something about going back to the father who molested me that made me sick to my stomach and terrified me. My stepmother used to tell me that there was something wrong with me for that.

"I don't understand." she'd say. "It's all in the past. He's not doing it anymore, so what's the problem?"

Even now, just the thought of it makes me want to beat the shit out of her for saying that. It makes me want to fuck up anybody that might imply that kind of thing is okay, even if the person "isn't doing it anymore". The fact that he did it is still there. He's still the same person.

But then we moved across campus, unit C4 turned into unit 1A West, and I got my own room. No more roommates to get attached to. It was a good arrangement. It kept me out of the drama, fuss and fighting that came from having two girls share one room. We had enough of that already, with fifteen girls living in the same unit. And of course, I didn't have to worry about adjusting to the other girl's lifestyle. Or snoring.

An amusing fact-1A West was nicknamed The Wild Wild West because we got into the most trouble (according to the other units.) The other girls' unit, 1A South, was nicknamed The Dirty South because...well, to us, they were unclean. We'd joke that they "even had a sign up that said The DIRTY South".

It was the same old, same old until my seventeenth birthday rolled around.

Previously, I expressed that I felt jealous of the other kids because everyone else got visits, sign-outs and gifts. I was the only one who didn't for I had no contact with any of my relatives. Even if I did, I didn't have much of a relationship with any of them. There weren't any other kids like me, who stayed there during Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Year's because there was nowhere else for them to go.

But that one birthday, it was especially bad.

I tried to ignore it. Ms. Lakia Cox bought me a cake and some refreshments. We threw a party, and I tried to enjoy myself. I really did. I was dancing like crazy, laughing, having fun.

Faking.

Truth was, my mind kept flashing back to my sixteenth birthday the year before, and to finding out about my real mother shortly beforehand. I looked around at the dancing kids and I realized that many of them didn't even know why we were celebrating. They weren't happy for me or anything. They just wanted the free food and fun.

It was like a slap in the face how alone I actually was that day.

Shaking those thoughts out of my mind, I continued to act. I acted like I was happy. Like I didn't know that everything was fake, that no one here actually gave a flying fuck about the people there with them. I knew that Ms. Lakia had put in effort for my birthday, and I wanted to be happy. But I could only keep that up for so long, and by the time Ms. Lakia presented the cake, I realized that the only person who was worth celebrating with was my mother.

I smiled and tried to eat, but as soon as I got some time to myself, I went behind a tree and smashed my slice of cake, stomping on it, taking all of my frustration out on it. I wanted to see my mother. She was dead.

When I came out, Ms. Lakia had gathered the kids. She was stopping the party.

"What's going on?"

"You." I remember her glaring at me, with that bitter air around her. "You're ungrateful. You just smashed your cake, saying that this was the worst birthday you'd ever had."

I didn't. I didn't say a fucking thing when I smashed that cake. Like I said, the staff had victim complexes. She must've seen me somehow and immediately assumed that it HAD to be because I was an ungrateful brat who was going off simply because she wasn't satisfied with the material aspects of the party. No, there was no way on Earth that there was something deeper going on. Of course not!

On our way back, I tried to explain to her what had really happened, but like they always do, she ignored me. Even the kids' clueless asses kept blaming everything on me. No one wanted to give me a chance to talk and explain that goddammit, that's not what fucking happened.

It ate away at me and reaffirmed my belief that the only person who was worth being with was my dead mother. I wanted to see her, to be with her.

I'm not sure what my state of mind was like back then, nor will I try to justify my actions. I'm only gonna tell the truth.

That night, I pretended to be doing my laundry and measured out a cup of bleach. Instead of doing laundry, though, I went in my room and drank it. Immediately I felt like throwing up and went into a coughing fit. My body was telling me to go to the bathroom and throw up whatever it was that I just tried to put inside me, but I wouldn't have it.

I recall seeing the picture of my mother that I'd taped to my wall. My mind was made up; I ignored the pain in my stomach and slipped under the covers of my bed.

Let me tell you, laundry bleach is not meant to ever come in contact with the human digestive system. I couldn't stop coughing. It got so bad that staff came into my room to try to see what was going on, and I just ran out and threw up into the toilet.

There was a pink thing in the toilet. I concluded that the bleach had taken a piece of my insides with it. I was looking at a torn piece of my own stomach.

And then I was put on Suicide Observation. It was so, so cold sleeping there in the quiet room naked. They wouldn't turn the lights off. I had to be extra careful how I moved, for I didn't want the security blanket to slip off of me. There was a camera in there recording my every move.

What got me through those weeks when I was on Suicide Observation was a girl named Raena Goodwill (fitting name, isn't it?). Everyone else ignored me. But she came to me, talked to me, offered me support and let me cry on her shoulder-I had not shed a single tear in two years until then. She gave me a bracelet with a bible verse on it that had belonged to her grandmother. If it wasn't for this one girl, I don't know what I would've done afterwards.

We weren't the best of friends. We'd had our share of arguments before, and continued to have disagreements after this incident occured. But I never forgot what she did for me.

The bracelet that she gave me stayed on my arm 24/7. Even when it was broken, I kept it on my wrist and never took it off. I kept it with me all the time until I finally lost it during a fight.