I keep seeing videos of kids getting holiday presents that are letters from their foster families telling them they want to adopt them and make them part of their family. It reminds me of the houseparents from the children’s home I was in from age 5 to 11; they gave me a letter in 2008 of this nature over a holiday dinner at their house.
I was so happy and was ready to agree as soon as I finished reading it. But they told me they wanted to wait until they figured out how to do this without compromising their will; they wanted to make sure that I wouldn’t become a beneficiary when they passed.
It never happened. In 2012, the husband was killed in a head-on collision. In 2015, the wife told me as I was driving her to Yelm, WA to see her cousins that she had never wanted to be at the children’s home and had only done it to make her husband happy.
I never told her that her husband had repeatedly molested me. I never told her how almost every one of the boys in the cottage did, too. And a few of the girls. And the piano teacher. And the dentist. And the psychiatrist. I held all those secrets all these years; even as I wrote a eulogy for her husband that she had framed and sent to me ‘for remembrance’. (I put it in a box and eventually, discarded it.)
I never talked about it because she was the only mother I’d ever known and I knew I’d lose her if I did. Yeah, dysfunctional, desperate, would-be daughter, me. Delusional, too, as it turns out.
I stopped reaching out after that visit in 2015. Another kid from the children’s home told her all about the abuses in 2022. She called my daughter (!!) and who knows what they talked about. My daughter called me to ask if it was true. I told her yes, but I didn’t want to get into the details. The wife never called me, never emailed me, never spoke to me again.
The one attempt I made to reach out by email was ignored. I took that to mean she meant it when she said she’d never wanted to be ‘mom’ to ‘all those kids’, including me. She probably doesn’t believe the abuse happened, or maybe she’s ashamed. Who knows? I know I don’t. All I know is that she cut me out just like so many others have done, most of them when faced with realizing things happened that shouldn’t have, and not being willing to see and understand that it was not my doing, not my fault.
I think about the whole ‘never had family’ thing a lot; it’s always been an abyss in my being and I don’t think I’ll ever get past it. I miss what I’ve never had, and I feel the outline of it in the negative space of my life. Always have, likely always will.
Thing is, I’ve never defined it as blood relations only; to me, ‘family’ is humans who choose to be there for one another, no matter what, and who are willing to do the hard work of taking care of one another alongside taking care of themselves.
The way I feel when I see another one of those videos is a combination of ‘happy for their happy’, ‘imagining how it would feel’, ‘empathy of the relief’ they often express in tears… gratitude and belonging, at last.
I’ve never had this. I’ve always wanted it. I realize I will never have it. It hurts because it seems I’m always the one losing out for being targeted by predators and that has never been fair, just, or right. I did nothing wrong. It was not my fault. I am a good human who deserves better and more than this par over the course of my life.