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.

The Humiliation of Love

I haven't experienced the devastation one feels when they love someone, yet these feeling are not reciprocated. After all, I am only thirteen. Yet in the book Girl With a Pearl Earring, the character Greitel, who is only fourteen at the beginning of the story, most definitely has experienced this feeling. Greitel is sold as a house maid to the house of the famous Dutch painter Vermeer, and as she begins to clean and tidy up the house of this famous painter and his wife and children, her curiosity blooms. She begins to wonder what mysteries lay in his studio, and she soon finds herself exploring its nooks and crannies, even though anyone other than Vermeer is forbidden to enter it. The painter Vermeer soon gives Greitel the task of his studio cleaner, although even Vermeer's wife is prohibited to enter it. Once Greitel begins to work alongside the magnificent painter Vermeer, and help to clean his tools, mix his paints, and finally, model for one of his paintings, Greitel has found  herself fallen in love with the Dutch painter. No sooner does Greitel admit to herself that she is infatuated with Vermeer than do Vermeer's wife and the other housemaids assume they had an affair, and Greitel must suffer the devastating humiliation of being kicked out of Vermeer's house for supposed adultery, although no such act was conducted.

I myself have never been in this situation, so how can I relate? Greitel and I may only be one or two years apart, but the centuries that separate us make her harmless act look incredibly guilty if I were to conduct the same thing. I cannot feel the shattering and suffocating feeling of love gone wrong. But who ever said that I cannot relate?

Greitel's sadness and humiliation in the concluding chapters of this book are much like my feelings with my grades. I don't love my grades, and my grades are not able to reciprocate whatever feeling I feel for them because they are numbers on paper, they do not show emotion. Yet a bad grade is cold and hard, and reprimands me for not having studied harder, for not getting enough sleep the night before. It mocks me and demeans me, telling me I do not have the potential to go places and to be intelligent. It tells me that I am not trying enough, I am never trying enough. A good grade, in contrast, embraces me in its grip and tells me that this once, I really did do good enough, and that I have a reason to be happy instead of feeling guilt for my happiness. A bad grade casts me out, and society laughs at me, but a good grade embraces me in its arms and ensures my safety.

A Modern Prophet

My relationship with Science Fiction; whether it be books, movies, magazine articles, et cetera, is one that is fraught with dislike and mixed feelings. Ever since I was little, I was disturbed by science fiction, and the images it left frozen in my mind. However, I recently began reading Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. Perhaps it's that Kurt Vonnegut's version of science fiction is rather quirky, or that elements of the book are more like historical fiction, or even that the deeper philosophical meaning found in the book is one that I profoundly admire; whatever the reason, I find myself truly loving and enjoying this work of science fiction.

The premise of the story is that a rather ordinary man, who is in no way special and is almost an outcast; in society, among his friends, and among his peers, is given the ability to time travel. This man's name is Billy Pilgrim, and the one component of Billy Pilgrim that makes him such an intriguing character is that Billy Pilgrim is "unstuck" in time. His time travel takes place within his own life, and he therefore repeatedly travels to events that have taken place in his life; to the future where he learns of his death, to the planet of Tralfmadore, where Billy encounters the Tralfmadorians who no believes exist except for Billy, and, most importantly, to the horrors that Billy experienced while fighting in World War II. Yet the part of the book I find most engaging are Billy's visits with the Tralfmadorians, for they teach Billy to view his ordinary, depressing life in a whole new and different perspective. Instead of focusing on each event in life as an individual  occurrence, they look at life as a whole and look at its beauty rather than its faults. They describe humans as having one long tube to look through, and that tube can only focus on one thing at a time rather than focusing on the huge, glorious picture that life is made up of.

Whilst reading, I began to wonder, why was this power of time travel, or rather, being "unstuck" in time, given to a man of such ordinary stature and being. Why Billy Pilgrim? This nobody, who is perfectly ordinary, is given the extraordinary power of being unstuck in time, and experiencing the world of the Tralfamadorians. After Billy's encounters with the Tralfamadorians, he is sent back to earth to spread the word, to explain the people this whole new perspective on life that forces people to look at the bigger picture, at how beautiful their life indeed was. In a way, Billy Pilgrim is almost like a prophet, for he is simply an ordinary man, yet he is then given this power and therefore begins to tell people to look at their lives in a different way, to interpret events as thy've never thought of them before. Life is not a journey, but rather one wonderful moment in the continuation of Time. Life possesses no beginning and no end, and when someone dies it is not sad for you still have memories, pieces of them that you are able to hold on to forever, and those memories are really what truly made up the person and your relationship with that person. And so, perhaps the reason I enjoy this book is that it's a mixture of science fiction, historical fiction, and the introduction of a modern-day prophet. Whatever the reason, I am excited to learn what deeper meaning lies within this book, and I am intrigued as to how this book will conclude itself.

Confinement

We have all felt inclosed, at one point or another, felt as if we are trapped with no escape. It's a common feeling in human beings; to feel as if you are confined in a space, mental or physical, with no escape. I know that before any big test, I begin to feel trapped in my mind as I continuously review subjects and become increasingly stressed out. There's no escape- I must sit in my pool of nerves and stress until that climax of stress, when it all combines to form a tumult of unease and disquietude. This is usually when I finish my test, hand it in, and finally feel the shroud of apprehension lift from my body. But what if there was no flight from the "box" you're encased in, what if it is not mental but physical, tangible? And what if this box you are in is not a box at all, but a real, palpable room in which you have spent your whole life?

In the book Room by Emma Donoghue, Jack has spent the first five years of his adolescence trapped, literally, in a room with his mother. I have only just begun the book, but I begin to see what is terribly wrong with this situation. The book is told from the perspective Jack, and though his description of the world may not be extremely graphic, we still understand that Jack and his mother are trapped in a room where they have lived for all of Jack's five years. A mysterious man named "Old Nick" comes every night and Jack must go in what he refers to as "wardrobe", where he sleeps and hides from Old Nick. It was my first conclusion that Jack and his mother were imprisoned in a jail, yet they seem to be the only ones there, besides Old Nick who only runs their errands and comes every night to Jack's mother, who loathes him. It is now my deduction that Jack and his mother are kept in this room by Old Nick, for whatever reason, and Jack's mother and Old Nick have a sexual relationship of some sort. Whatever the reason may be, something is terribly amiss if Jack has spent the first half-decade of his life trapped in a room, without seeing anything that may be outside of the room. For a room to be the only room he knows, and for his friends to be what he refers to as "Chair" and "Rug." If the only world a five-year old knows is a 121 square-foot space, I say there is something seriously flawed in his life.

In much the same way, a child's adolescence should not consist of wartime regimes, guns, and deaths. After researching child soldiers and making observations on their lives for the past few days, I can relate both Jack's life to the lives of the child soldiers worldwide. In fact, it is my belief that the lives of child soldiers and the life of Jack are on two ends of the "trapped in a box" spectrum. Whereas child soldiers are trapped in a world of battles, the witnessing of killings, and exposure to things way beyond their years, Jack is exposed to a universe of boring nothingness, and hasn't experienced enough of the world for his age. Both child soldiers and Jack will never truly escape their box; Jack will forever be scarred by his first childhood years in the room and will have difficulties adjusting to the outside world, and child soldiers will be forever on the battlefield, their development disrupted and their nervous systems maimed. To contain a child in any sort of box; be it mental, physical, metaphorical, is abuse. Children should not be left to roam free in the streets, without any parent to love them or any sort of guidance through life, yet they should also not be so restrained that they are mentally damaged. As with most things in life, I believe the key is balance and moderation. Although from time to time, we all find ourselves in a box.

The Final Stage of Maturity

It is a struggle to accept your parents for all that they are, and for all that they have been in the past. It is even more of a difficult task to endure your mother and father if they are insane, or possess some quality that is "off", that you can't quite put a finger on. If your parents have mental obstacles or issues of some sort, or are moderately passive aggressive, or simply had some major flaw, it is strenuous for us, their children, to recognize these qualities whilst living in their households and adhering to their rules. A child looks up to their parents, from day one, for they are the ones to raise you care for you, and love you passionately. If you are rejected in some other social form, you always have your parents to fall back on. We do not acknowledge, or are not aware, of how psychotic and deranged our parents truly are; we find them to be perfectly normal. But even when we do begin to discern this possible insanity or flaw within our parents, in our adolescent and teenage years, our perception of what are parents truly our is marred by a veil of hormones and self-obsessment.

I will not say that my parents possess some major flaw that everyone needs to be aware of; it is my opinion that my parents are relatively normal and are not verging on insanity, or any major defect in their character that I am aware of. But as I said before, while we are children, or what the law defines as children, it is a great hindrance to identify our parents' true imperfections and see them as the rest of the world sees them. My parents get on my nerves, sure, so do everyone else's. And maybe my mother can be a little overdramatic at times and my dad tyrannical. But these things are minuscule, and have done nothing to really prevent me from growing up in a stable environment, from my understanding. I've turned out reasonably normal, and therefore my parents had done their job accurately. Yet can the same be said for all people, especially those who have grown up in situations that are precarious?

I recently begun the book A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner, one of my favorite books. Mariam, the protagonist, lives with her mother on the outskirts of Herat, a city in Afghanistan. She was borne to a rich father, who lives in the heart of Herat and has three wives and nine other children. Her mother was poor, worked as a servant for her father's family, and Mariam only exists because of an accident, which her mother constantly reminds her of. She calls her harmani, meaning bastard, and pelts rocks at Mariam's half-brothers, who bring Mariam and her mother rice and sugar and flour every month as "penance" for what Jalil, Mariam's father, put Nana, Mariam's mother, through. He made her live far away, on the outskirts of his city, made her stay away from his true wives and children. He comes to visit Mariam every thursday, bearing gifts at times, and stories, yet is reluctant to tell her of his life in the city and the rich lives he experiences with his wives and sons. When Mariam escapes to the city, to attempt at spending time with her father, he acts as if he is not at home, and tells his servants to send her away, and Mariam refuses and eventually ends up sleeping on the street in front of her father's house. Her father lets her spend the night on the street in front of his house, and does not offer her lodging nor does her acknowledge her presence on the street. When Mariam goes back to her desolate house, sobbing, "Mariam saw. A gust of wind blew and parted  the drooping branches of the weeping willow like a curtain, and Mariam caught a glimpse of what was beneath the tree: The straight -backed chair, overturned. The rope dropping from a high branch. Nana hanging at the end of it."

This moment in the book is incredibly symbolic. Firstly, we see the defects that both Mariam's father and her mother possess, her mother possessing ones that are incredibly interesting, that will shape Mariam in the future and will probably flaw her deeply as well. Mariam's mother longs for Mariam's love and attention, and in turn loves her as well, yet masks this through hateful words for Mariam's father and a constant mention of Mariam's faults and what an awful child she is. Mariam's mother, Nana, hates herself for these spiteful words she throws at Mariam, for Mariam is the one person in the world who loves her. Mariam also despises her mother for being spiteful towards Jalil, Mariam's father, who Mariam loves desperately, and looks up to and models herself after. Mariam is so blinded by her love of Jalil that she does not see that his love for her is marred by his love for his ego, his image in the town of Herat. He will not allow Mariam to sleep under his roof, or give her shelter of any sort, and allows her to sleep on the street. Once Mariam sees that she truly is a burden to her father, she clearly sees that she is scum in her father's eyes, she now understands his flaws and, in a way, has grown up. When Mariam goes back to her home, she sees that her mother has committed suicide after Mariam chose to go see her father. Mariam here sees what her mother truly is; a mentally deranged woman who has been deeply traumatized in her past. Mariam grows here, too. It is my belief that when we see our parents for what they truly our, as the rest of the world sees them, we have grown up.

So whether growing up comes at the age of fifteen, as it did for Mariam, or when you're 50 and you finally realize that your mother has no friends for a reason, I believe that this is the juncture when we transition from child to adult.