Mentals: The Memoirs of a Teenage Writer

Family

Seven years old and shy but eager, a brown-haired girl sits cross-legged on the floor. The baby - not her mother's baby, but some strange child who has come to stay with them for awhile - cries. The girl does not like to see the baby cry, so she brings her in close to her body and rocks back and forth, singing quietly. It is a warm Sunday morning and around her, her family hurries around, getting ready for church, but the girl does not hurry. The girl sits on the floor with the crying baby and sings. It is her first memory with a foster child and it will stay with her forever.

Two weeks and the baby is gone. It is months before the brown-haired girl sees another foster child. This one is even younger than the last: a premature boy came straight from the NICU. His parents, she is told, cannot take care of him. The girl is sad for the boy who has no parents. When the baby came, she was too young to understand what foster care was, but now she is older and wiser. Now she knows that this boy will never have parents like she does. He will travel from house to house, never able to call one his home. But the boy does not move on to another house like the last baby did. The boy stays as weeks pass by, then months, then years, and the girl knows that if the boy does move on she will have lost a child so precious to her he might as well have been her brother.

The girl is nine now and the officials start talking about taking the baby who is no longer a baby away. They say the aunt might be able to take him in, but the girl does not want the aunt to take him in. The girl wants him to stay. The girl's parents want him to stay too, so they tell the officials they want to adopt him, but the biological family of the boy is more important than the links he has formed here. If the aunt will take him, that is where he will go. The aunt does not want him, so the boy stays. He is theirs, but the court system will take another year to make this official. On October 11th, 2011, the boy with parents who can't have him and an aunt who doesn't want him is given a family who loves him and the girl is given a brother to love.

Seven years later, the brown-haired girl is sitting at a table applying to colleges. She is so much more than that singing child nearly a decade ago, but still the memory stays. The boy is nine now and he and his sister share a bond closer than any biological siblings ever could. The girl thinks it is because she knows that she could have lost him. The girl has seen other foster kids over the years, but it is the first two - the crying baby and the boy from the NICU - who stay with her.

Throughout high school she has worked to help children like these. She spends years raising awareness every chance she gets. She goes to seminars with her parents to encourage future foster parents, does school projects on child abuse and neglect, and even completes her Silver Award for Girl Scouts working with the local foster care agency. The girl knows she can never solve foster care entirely, but she strives to make a difference anyway, so when her college application asks her about a problem she strives to solve, she knows the answer immediately. "The problem I want to solve," she types in her computer, "is the overwhelming need for good families for neglected and abused kids."