Last time, I told you about how my parents became foster parents and how mad I was about them. Per usual, they didn’t really have conversations with me about it, so I was left to just pretend like everything was okay on the outside while internalizing all of my real emotions. I left off with William, our family’s first foster child, being brought to our home for the first time. He was a newborn at the time.
Life continued on. I kept being secretly mad at my parents. I kept drowning myself in school work and good grades and extracurricular activities. My sister continued struggling with school, so any free time my parents had outside of dealing with a newborn was spent helping her not fail out of school. I started high school and was in all honors or AP classes. The workload was a hard transition, and I remember crying in my room because I was so overwhelmed with all of the homework I had.
Shortly after William came to live with us, DSS asked if my parents could also take his two-year-old brother, Christian. My parents, without consulting me, agreed, and we very quickly had two young children living at our house. Christian was, for lack of a better word…crazy. He was crazy, crazy, crazy. I’m talking so crazy that one day he was in timeout in his room, and he somehow managed to take his door off the hinges so he could escape. Things at our house were complete chaos. Everyone was screaming all the time. Everyone was exhausted. Everyone was stressed out. The house was a total mess. I hated it. I hated the boys. I hated my parents. I hated everything. My friends were all off going shopping with their moms and getting their nails done with their moms and going out to eat at nice restaurants with their families. I was doing none of that. I felt completely alone in my family, and I felt like my friends wouldn’t understand.
Freshman year came and went. I kept getting straight A’s while my sister was just trying not to get held back a grade. My parents kept devoting all of their attention to their other three children, and I kept feeling more and more alone. I spent as much time as I could with friends. They never came over to my house. I always went to their house. My house was too messy, too loud, too broken. I felt like I fit in with the “popular” crowd at school, which was of course a top priority at that age. I started dating a guy who was a year older than me and also “popular.” My friends started calling me Grace the Great because of my straight A’s and type-A personality. It was meant to make fun of me, but I took it as a badge of honor. Afterall, grades had become my identity. I needed to be perfect in school, and really, perfect in life. I needed to be the best of the best and prove to myself and my parents that I didn’t need their help. If they weren’t going to be there for me, fine. I didn’t need them. I could do it all on my own. I didn’t realize at the time how detrimental this mindset would be for me later on.
I want to take a moment here to go off on a tangent about grades. I have talked to so many people over the years who say that good grades were so important to them and really shaped their younger years. Some of the people I’ve talked to said that it was their parents who put all of the pressure on them, but others said it was a self-imposed pressure. I just wish I had known then what I know now. For anyone out there still in school, let me just tell you that, while you should definitely try your best in school, grades are not the end-all-be-all. It is SO SO SO much more important to make good connections. The saying it’s not what you know but who you know is ABSOLUTELY true and has so much more to do with your success. Work on building professional relationships and creating a good reputation. It will serve you so much better than getting straight A’s. For the amount of blood, sweat, and tears I poured into my grades and honor roll achievements, I never once put my GPA on a resume, and I was never once asked in an interview about what my grades were or how much knowledge I had amassed over the years. Anyways, back to my story.
As a whole, I surprisingly felt pretty good about my life. I had good grades, and I was popular. Put another way, I was going to be successful, and people liked me. What more could anyone want? Money and friends. Sounds good to me!
Margaret went away to college, and I started my junior year. Christian became way too much to handle, so he ended up going to a different foster home. William was still with us, and we soon took in another newborn, Michael. I didn’t know anything about it beforehand. I just came home from school one day, and there was another baby in our house. I don’t think I even looked at him. I hated him. I hated his existence in our house. Why did my parents keep caring for these random kids and ignoring me? Was I not good enough? Did they not like me? Did they even realize how upset I was? Honestly, I don’t think they did realize it. I think they just assumed that I was in that stage where I didn’t want to talk to my parents, so I just locked myself in my room 24/7, and they were trying to be nice and give me my space. I think they assumed that since I didn’t show any sort of anger or sadness on the outside, everything was fine on the inside. Plus, I was a straight-A student and had lots of friends, so surely I was fine, right?
I’m going to end there for now. I’m getting close to my college years and the rest of my twenties, which is where things really start…happening. Stay tuned!
To God be ALL the Glory!
Love, Grace