Resilience Rising

Excerpt Resilience Rising:

"During the times when my mom would starve us, we would have to find ways to get food of some kind. When she wasn’t feeding us, she wouldn’t let us go to school either, in case someone might figure out that we were being abused. But of course Mary and whoever her boyfriend was at the time would continue to eat. So whenever they’d leave, or go to sleep at night, we would sneak downstairs and dig through the trash cans to see what we could find. Covered with, cigarette ashes, coffee grounds, and other filth, we would dig scraps out of the trash. And we wouldn’t care. We’d try to wipe it off the best way we could, and just eat. We’d divide it between the five of us, as much as we could. It did something to us, though, starving. It made us almost like animals; our animal instincts for survival would kick in. But we would still try to look out for each other like family; we would try to help each other out. But there were limits, debts that came with desperation..."

"Being able to finally have the kind of family that I have right now with all of my brothers and sisters and having both a mother and a father has really showed me that it is possible for people in bad situations to come out of them and turn those situations around. I look forward to giving the kind of love that I have received over these past ten years to a family of my own some day. I believe family is an essential part of life and I feel sorry for those who never get to know how it feels to have people who care about them. That is part of the reason I want to write this book. I hope this gives people the courage needed to help take in a child in need and to love that child and give them everything that they were missing with their previous family."

"People often assume that it’s too hard adopting older kids out of foster care because they are too damaged and they probably can’t be fixed. Well I’m here to tell all who believe that that they are wrong. Yes it is hard to raise foster children especially ones who are older but they are still children and they still need to feel loved. Even though they might have issues that come with them, if they had someone that they knew was going to stick around and help them through it that just might be all they need to turn their lives around. It is the desire of everyone to be loved by somebody no matter how old they are or what they have come from. I hope that there comes a day when I don’ t have to feel that I was one of the lucky ones because I found my forever family even though I was older. I hope that one day every child that goes into foster care will get to find their forever family and a place to start over and be loved."