Before getting adopted, I felt alone. In kindergarten, all the other students would show up to school with their dads for Dads and Donuts and I was the only one who didn’t get anything. I didn’t get anything for Moms and Muffins, either. But the event that made me feel the most alone was Bring Your Parent To School Day. I remember seeing the other kids and their parents streaming into the cafeteria. There was a staff member in the doorway who told me that I couldn’t go into the cafeteria without my parents so I needed to go back to the classroom until either my parents showed up or until the event was over. The first couple of times these events happened, I was the only one left in the classroom. Over time, I became numb towards the pain I previously felt.

I was put in a foster home when I was four and my sister was three. We went to three different foster homes, each for less than a year, and we had to relearn a new set of parents each time we moved. When we got in trouble, our foster parents would stick our hands in hot water. Once, they put my sister’s hand in the water for so long that it burnt her skin and she had to spend a couple weeks in the hospital.

That’s where we met my mom. She worked at the hospital. She said she immediately knew she wanted us to be her kids. From the first time I met her, I felt happy. In the three months before she adopted us, she spoke to us as if she knew us her whole life – made us feel warm and normal.

Closer to the adoption date, the court system would let us spend weekends with my mom. Being in her house was amazing. They had a dog – a pitbull-boxer mix named Picasso. He was a comforting kind of dog – he seemed to know that we went through a lot.

The day my adoption was finalized, we were at a courthouse. I wore formal clothes – I wore a black suit and my sister had a black dress. My grandmother joined my mother, sister and me during the court trial and stood right by our side during the whole thing, just as she did from the moment she first met us along with my mom. After all was said and done we went to Red Lobster. We were told that we could get anything we wanted. I don’t remember what we ate for dinner, but for dessert I had a chocolate lava cake.

I’ve had love-hate relationships to mother figures. For the longest time, I was upset with my biological mother. I felt that if she had kept us, my sister and me, then we wouldn’t have gone through everything we did in our foster homes. We wouldn’t have been looked at that way at school. She could have saved us a lot of heartbreak. And in each foster home, the mother figures were the ones that treated us the worst.

So I was iffy before jumping out there with a relationship with my mom. I had a tendency to make dumb decisions or not exactly respect my mom because I didn’t want to put my heart out there to get hurt. After they put me in therapy sessions, we talked about how I could make things better- how to let things go.

After getting adopted, I would come home from school – to a place I could actually call my home, not a place where people just looked out for me for the time being. On “Bring Your Parent to School Day’, my mom came with me to talk about her job at the hospital.

In the United States, 150,000 children get adopted each year. Fifty-six percent of kids are put in the position of adoption due to child welfare. Children are usually placed in foster care due to the fact that their parents are not in a position to take care of them. There are cases where parents with addictions to drugs are forced to give up the rights to their children. This is what happened to my sister and me. In this scenario, the children are placed in foster care until the parents have gone through rehabilitation and have been tested over different periods of time to see if they are still using the drugs or not. If the parents pass the drug test, then they will be granted access to their children again.

I didn’t know so many kids were getting adopted each year. It opened my mind knowing that my sister and I weren’t the only ones going through this. Usually, when people go through certain things, they feel like they’re the only ones. But if you go out and talk to other people, you’ll find someone who has a relatable experience. You’ll find empathy.
Now, I have three younger siblings. It’s heartwarming because I know they’re with parents who have their best interests at heart. I know I have to set an example for them. I want them (and everyone) to know that people that are close to you are the ones that you should always keep around.