lessons from foster care and aging out
We had a youth (we’ll call him Jay), who aged out of an inner city foster care system, live with us for the better part of the last year. When we started this journey (even after taking in three older children through adoption), we didn’t even know what we didn’t know. Because this also happened during a season of intense crisis for our family, it’s taken me a while to process our time and all the lessons learned let alone get to the blog about them. I was going to make it one post but decided it was better taken in small bites.
If you ever want to challenge your paradigm, try inviting someone completely outside of your “normal” to live with your family.
Lesson #2: Never Underestimate Loyalty
The sense of loyalty to both family and culture is strong.
Remember that scene in The Blind Side where Michael goes looking for his mother? When you contrast what his mother offered materialistically versus what the Tuohy family had, this may seem counterintuitive. Michael’s mom talks about it in this scene.
But one thing Jay taught our family is not to underestimate the culture of loyalty that is a strong part of inner city, Black culture. This may seem like a minor lesson until you contemplate how an individual would be viewed or feel for “rising above.” Jay had almost endless opportunities, presented in a dozen different paths, with unlikely 5th, 6th, 7th…30th…129th chances, but the pull back to his ‘hood (even when he’d tell you he didn’t really have anyone or anything there) was strong.
(We’ll save how the effects of trauma played in for another lesson).
While we never discussed it directly, we got the feeling from different peeks into his world that there was a sense of abandonment and guilt associated with being the guy who got a break to rise above the expectations that dealing was an acceptable income and one was lucky to be alive past 20.
I’m struggling with survivor’s guilt about the season of life we’re in, so I get it. Those emotions are strong and can really cloud your better judgment and distort reality.
We also saw the destructive power of deep-seeded family loyalty when it’s broken. According to Jay, loyalty is supposed to trump everything—even laws and legalities. And when it doesn’t, the trauma it leaves in its wake is palpable. Never underestimate the emotions of a hurt person who feels like he’s lived through the cruelest betrayal possible.
When I consider this power that loyalty has, it helps be better understand how youth like Jay seem to stuck.
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