The Worst of a Bad Situation

"It took several days for me to realize Luke was not coming to my new foster home, which was nowhere near my grandfather's house. I wondered what was so horrible about me and why I had been rejected again. Then there was my perpetual question: What had I done that was so terrible that I had to be taken from my mother? I had no idea why she hadn't been able to get me back. You would think someone would have explained it in words a child could understand. Yet nobody did. I believed they were keeping secrets from me- but supposedly, they thought they were protecting me."
-Ashely Rhodes-Courter, Three Little Words

Foster care is something generally overlooked in America as an issue; most foster care homes are overrun with children and toys that many "parents" cannot remember the names of all the children they are fostering. Or the homes are so unaccustomed to the presence of children and how to deal with them that many foster kids find themselves frightened, unwelcome. Webster's defines it simply as to bring up a child that is not one's own by birth. Yet the true definition of foster care is something to be found in the stories and experiences told about it.

Foster care is traumatizing; it can be all the bad situations that can be found in a middle American low-income home all in one. There are of course, exceptions to this, but in the grand scheme of foster care, those who welcome foster children into their homes may not be the most stable of people or properly equipped to care for children. While the government may check to ensure these things, who can say what goes on behind locked doors, or what foster parents are truly like when they are not being scrutinized by the Federal Government? The negative affects of foster care are many and extreme ones at that. Child abuse is foster homes is increasingly common, and for those who enter foster care at a young age, their nuerodevelopment can be permanently messed up along with serious psychological defects.

Whether or not Ashley Rhodes-Courter experienced any of this mental damage is something we'll never know, although the physical and mental trauma displayed in her book, Three Little Words, knows no bounds. The book opens with some of the most catastrophic scenes of her life; her stepdad Dusty beating her mother, her brother that died after two months and who her mother put in a cardboard box, and, probably the most painful of all, being torn from her mother's arms as her mother got arrested and Ashley and her one surviving brother being forced into foster care. Continuing through this book will be an agonizing experience, for I know that from now on Ashley's foster care situation will worsen, rather than improve, or else there would be no story. But how on earth could this tragic story possibly worsen?

How our Relationships and Bonds Shape Us

The life of a struggling, conflicted writer is one that has been used countless times before; a cliché that we cannot escape. These striving writers are always very deep thinkers, rather scraggly people, who are unorganized due to the clutters and masses of ideas and thoughts contained in their mind. This exact character is portrayed in The World According to Garp, so why was I not so immediately repelled by this book, since I despise clichés and simply cannot stand them? I have concluded that it is the plotline of The World According to Garp that I find so intriguing, and the development of the characters found in this book. Yet when looking further, I realize that the story is just one of a struggling marriage, and how having a feminist mother and the nonexistence of a father shapes a young man's life.

The absence of a father is something I expect to take a large toll on a young man's life; meaning that later in life he will not be capable of playing the role of a father later in life, when he has children.  I expected much the same of Garp whilst reading my book, yet he seems fully capable of loving his kids to the very fullest; making them dinner every night, picking them up from their schools and clubs, worrying about their illnesses and their friends with less than reliable mothers. Garp seems like the perfect father, so how on earth could the nonexistence of one parent not have affected him? I searched the text for evidence of Garp acting as an invalid or fraudulent father, or showcase any actions that may have been better or different had he had a substantial father. But I then found myself stuck with that last thought; how would Garp have acted differently had he had a father? Would he be more levelheaded since he would have had a second parent to act as a counterpart or opposite to his mother's craziness and extreme view of men?

How would our lives be shaped differently had we not met just one single person who has influenced our life in ways that we may not realize. I try and picture my life with an absent father, a predicament such as Garp finds himself in, and I find that I would have been a very different person, one who would have more aspects of my mother's personality, and who would have had a very different sense of humor, if any at all. In the long run, I would not like the person I would be had I not had a father, or more specifically, my father. I believe it is much this way with many of the relationships I hold; had I not had those relationships and the experiences I've had and accumulated over the years, I would be an entirely different person. Which is why it is my belief that we all should value the relationships we have  even if they are awful and have no benefits, for they all teach us something and have something to offer.

Meaning of Siblings

When I was younger and incapable of reading or writing anything other than my name and repetitively singing the alphabet, I would always go along with what my mom and dad suggested for me, or told me to do. This went for whatI should wear, to what vegetables to eat, to which Sesame Street episodes I should watch and when  I should take my nap. This guidance in our earliest childhood years is necessary; how else would we learn to make decisions for ourselves in the future if we don't first see these decisions made for us. It is much the same with the books we read in our early childhood; these books are picked for us by our parents in order to instill important messages and morales that we will use later on in life. And although my parents may have chosen what books they read aloud to me, even among our collection of carefully curated children's picture books, I learned which I loved and wanted read to me over and over again, and which books I thought should have never ben put in our library in the first place. Among those of the former group there was one in particular that always stuck with me, entitled Julius the Baby of the World, by Kevin Henkes.

I always found this particular picture book interesting for many reasons. For one, its pictures are vibrant and colorful and depict the personification of mice, which is found very funny by people ages four and under, for whatever reason. Secondly, the picture book shows the relationship between an older sister and her younger baby brother, and how she learns to love him after rejecting him and hating him for taking her "place" as the one and only loved child in their family. As the story progresses, the protagonist, Lilly, meets her incredibly snobby cousin who agrees with Lilly that her new younger brother, Julius, is disgusting and repugnant, and smells awful. Lilly is suddenly taken aback, and defends her baby brother with all her heart, telling her cousin that he smells of roses and is the most beautiful baby in the world. Whilst reading, we can understand that the author wants children to absorb the meaning of sibling relationships and how important they truly are, and wants us to feel this defensiveness and love Lilly feels towards her baby brother Julius.

I think one of the reasons this book appealed to me so much when I was younger was that it put me in my sister's shoes, so to speak, so I could begin to make sense of our relationship and the different feelings she may have towards me at one point or another. My sister may have felt like she was a perfectly happy only child until I entered the world, and it makes me realize what a difficult transition it must be to have a younger sibling and to adapt to sharing everything with them, to looking out for them and caring for them. To suddenly have a new intrusion in your life that you must play with and love is something that is hard and tumultuous, and this book helped me grow up considering tha my sister doesn't have it all that easy, after all.