My name is Claire. I’m twenty-eight years old, and I grew up in the American foster care system—a fact that shapes absolutely everything about who I am today, whether I want it to or not.
By the time I turned eight years old, I’d already been shuffled through more foster homes than I’d celebrated birthdays. Some placements lasted a few months, some barely made it past a few weeks before something went wrong—a family emergency, budget issues, behavioral problems they attributed to me, or sometimes just the simple realization that the foster parents had bitten off more than they could chew.
Ezoic
People who’ve never been in the system like to use words like “resilient” when they talk about foster kids. They say it like it’s a compliment, like we’re some special breed of superhero children who bounce back from trauma with a smile. But the truth is a lot less inspiring than that. We’re not resilient—we’re just trained. Trained to pack our belongings into trash bags at a moment’s notice. Trained not to get too comfortable in any bedroom because it’s probably temporary. Trained to stop asking questions about where we’re going next or why we can’t stay where we are.
By the time the social workers dropped me off at the children’s home that would become my longest placement, I had developed one unbreakable rule for myself: don’t get attached to anyone or anything. Don’t make friends who will disappear. Don’t think of any place as home. Don’t hope for anything permanent because permanent doesn’t exist for kids like us.
I was determined to protect myself from any more disappointment. And then I met Noah, and that entire carefully constructed wall started developing cracks from day one.
The Boy By the Window Who Changed Everything
Noah was nine years old when I first encountered him at the children’s home—a year older than me, thin in that way that made adults exchange concerned glances, with perpetually messy dark hair that stuck up in the back no matter how much he tried to smooth it down. He used a wheelchair to get around, which seemed to make all the adults in his life treat him with this weird combination of pity and excessive helpfulness that clearly drove him crazy.
The other kids at the home weren’t cruel to Noah, exactly. They just didn’t know what to do with him. They’d shout “hey, Noah!” from across the recreation room in that overly cheerful way people use when they’re trying too hard, and then they’d run off to play tag in the backyard where wheelchairs couldn’t follow. They’d organize games and activities that inadvertently excluded him without anyone seeming to realize what they were doing.
The staff were even worse in their own way. They’d talk about Noah right in front of him like he wasn’t there, using phrases like “make sure you help Noah with that” and “Noah needs assistance” as if he was a task on their daily checklist rather than an actual person with feelings and opinions.
One afternoon during what the staff optimistically called “free time”—which really just meant unsupervised chaos in the common room—I grabbed my library book and dropped onto the floor near Noah’s wheelchair. He was parked by the window like he often was, staring out at the street with an expression I’d later learn was his thinking face.
