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?