by Michael Oher
On weekends, sometimes we would sell newspapers on corners and at stoplights on busy roads, which is a popular thing in Memphis, and other weekends we’d go camping. The Twins would load up all of their foster kids into an old trailer that was parked in Velma’s backyard, and we’d drive out to somewhere just outside of Memphis and enjoy the outdoors. They had some old bikes that we took along and we’d ride those around. Those trips were a fun treat because they gave us a chance to see something other than the city. I think they were a treat for the Twins, too, because we’d always play so hard we’d completely wear ourselves out and be pretty calm for a day or two after getting back.
The rules and discipline that Twin had in her house were important for me to see because I had never lived with that kind of structure before and it definitely took some getting used to. The first few nights I lived with her were very tough because I was so mixed up about how fast my life had been turned upside down. I wasn’t just in a new house and away from most of my family, but I had a whole new way of thinking to get used to, with chores and schedules and discipline and rules even about things like bedtime. I’m glad to say that she told me I never got in much trouble at her house or in school, but I didn’t obey because I was happy about the way she ran her house. I followed the rules because I was afraid that if I didn’t, something terrible would happen. Back in the old neighborhood, I’d seen kids get smacked around and screamed at, so even though my mother took the other extreme of no rules and no real emotional response to anything at all, I knew that physical abuse was real and it was common.
Now I understand, of course, that Twin definitely wasn’t the kind of woman who would beat a child. But back then, she was a stranger to me and I sure didn’t think that she loved me. After all, who could love a bunch of kids they don’t even know who get dumped on their doorstep? That was what I believed at the time, anyway, and I think a lot of kids in my situation feel the same way.
IN MY CASE, I FELT LIKE EVERYONE who was involved with my care was part of a bigger plan to keep me away from my family, and that hurt. It seemed that they didn’t like me—otherwise, why wouldn’t they let me be with the people I loved? I felt betrayed, and I had a hard time trusting people because it seemed like all of the adults, the authority figures, just did what they thought was best without ever asking me what I wanted or what felt right for me. I saw that Twin had two biological children of her own who lived with her all the time, and I didn’t understand why they got to stay with their mom while I didn’t. The difference between the way she looked at them and at us foster kids was tough for me to deal with. I felt like I would always be several notches below in her mind, when all I really wanted was to have an adult love me completely.
Twin did her best to make us feel welcome in her home. She would allow my mother to come over and visit with Carlos and me whenever she felt like it. (My mother went to rehab for a while, and once she got out she moved back to the same neighborhood.) Our old house was only a few blocks away, so the first afternoon we were at Velma’s I ran home to my mom, but she took me right back to Velma’s house. Some of my brothers were staying in foster houses nearby, too, and we’d all meet up on Velma’s driveway to play basketball or just hang out. Apparently, we weren’t supposed to have any contact with family members in between our supervised visits, but Velma told me she couldn’t keep my brothers away, or my mother either. And she could tell by watching us when we were all together outside that we all truly loved one another, so she didn’t see the harm in it, as long as she kept an eye on everyone.
I loved our family time in Velma’s yard, but the real supervised visits could be a challenge for me. Twice a month, we were allowed an official visit with our mother at the DCS office building on North Main Street. I got to know that building well. All of the foster parents of my brothers and sisters would drive us over to the building, where our mother would be waiting with snacks for us. It was like a big family reunion. We had two hours to run around and play together—and with the nine kids who were there at that point, plus a baby our mother may have had around that same time, it was a pretty noisy time.
My mother did a good job of showing up to almost every visit over the couple of years that we were in state custody. Right at the beginning there were one or two that she didn’t make and never gave a reason for, but I think it was probably because she was mad at Ms. Spivey for one reason or another. When our foster families couldn’t take us to the meetings, the department would arrange to pick us up. It took three or four cars to transport all of us to the building and it was really a pretty huge undertaking. I know it caused Ms. Spivey a lot of headaches, and I think my mother knew that, too. After those first few absences, she was almost always there and did her best to make sure that we all had a great two hours together.
As much as I loved those visits, they were hard for me afterward. I would hang back and not say a whole lot as I watched everyone else laughing and running around. I preferred to just watch everyone and lock those images into my mind. In some ways, I think it was harder for me to have just a little bit of family time and then have it jerked away again. It felt like I was getting teased twice a month, being reminded of what had been taken away from me. Every night after one of the visitations, as I lay in bed back at Velma’s, I would cry myself to sleep, trying to understand why we couldn’t just be together like that all the time.
What I didn’t know at the time was that across town, Ms. Spivey would be crying after each visit, too. When I asked her about what she thought of my family, all those years before when we were still kids, she told me that it just broke her heart to see how much we all loved one another and how obvious it was that we wanted to stay together. She said it hurt her so much to think that she couldn’t get through to me, to show me that people truly cared about my best interests and wanted me to feel happy and hopeful about life. I guess she could see on my face how badly I wanted my family back together again.
In the meantime, though, the court system was making certain I would never get my wish. My grandmother was offered custody of all of us, but she said she only wanted Marcus. After about six months, though, she decided that was too much, too, and Marcus was sent to live in a group home until he “aged out” of the system. That meant he would turn eighteen, become a legal adult, and the state would no longer have to worry about him. One by one, the same decision was made about each of my older brothers. It was ruled that the goal would be for each one to age out of the system by staying put in the stable place they’d been placed by the state rather than returning home to live with our mother and the kind of life that they would have there.
Things were different for the girls, though. We learned that there was an effort to make my little sisters eligible for adoption. That meant that the courts had no hope that my mother would even get her act together long enough to make a safe home that they could be returned to, and thought that it would be best if she just gave up her parental rights for the little ones so they could have a chance to find homes with permanent families. There was another baby or two that had come along by then and been taken away by the state, and I know at least one of my little sisters was adopted by a family member on her dad’s side.
With my big brothers aging out and my younger siblings possibly joining other families, I found myself right in the middle of those two groups.
The legal term that everyone kept using was that custody would be “awarded” to one person or another, but as a kid that always struck me as strange. As far as I could tell, there was no “award” involved; it felt more like a punishment than a celebration. And I was stuck wondering what was going to happen to me.
It was a strange place to be, mentally. I wished every night that things would go back to being how they used to be, with my whole family living together. But at the same time, now that I had gotten a chance to see that not everyone lived the way I had thought was normal, I knew that there was something broken about life as I had known it. Pretty soon, I got used to l
iving with strict rules, but even quicker than that, I got used to regular meals and having a bed to sleep in. It may not have been a fancy mattress, but it was better than the floor. I started to feel pride when I would bring my finished schoolwork in to class the next day and when I started earning better grades on assignments and tests. I might never get used to having to go to day care after school, but the rest of the new things in my life were good, and I knew that I wanted a life more like this and less like the one I had known before.
But I also knew that just wanting something was never going to be enough to make it happen. I was tired of letting other people make the decisions for me. I knew what I wanted and I decided to try to get it the only way I knew how.
CHAPTER FIVE
Running Back
And so I became a runner. Runners are kids who leave foster care and head anywhere else—sometimes it’s back home, sometimes it’s to a friend’s house, and sometimes it’s just to the streets. I just wanted to get back to my mother, to try to pretend that the normal life I wanted so much was waiting for me there.
Since her home wasn’t far away and I was already getting close to five feet tall with long legs, it wasn’t a difficult thing to get there. I would just take off from Velma’s yard when no one was looking and head over to my mother’s place. Sometimes she would be there and sometimes she’d be nowhere to be found. It was never too hard to track her down, though. There are no secrets in the projects. Everyone knows everyone else’s business, good, bad, pleasant, or ugly.
A couple of times I just sat by the front door and waited for her to return. It was tough to know how she would react when she found me there. At times she would grab me by the arm and march me right back over to the house I’d just left. When that happened, I think she must have been at a place emotionally where it was a relief to her that we were in someone else’s hands. It seemed like she thought if someone else had us, then we were getting looked after, fed well, and had a roof over our heads. It was more than she could guarantee when we were with her.
But other times, she would give me a big hug and let me inside. We would stay there at her house for as long as we could. I say we, because sometimes Carlos ran with me and one of our other brothers might be there at the house, too. Most of my older brothers had been placed in group homes rather than with families, and I think that might have given them a little more freedom to come and go. Or maybe they ran, too. It didn’t seem like anyone was keeping close tabs on us. Those times, when my brothers would be there, were the ones that made running worth it. Sometimes we would only get to stay a few hours, but a few times we were able to camp out at my mother’s house for several days or weeks without anyone looking for us too hard.
Usually nothing much came out of me running away because the authorities always knew where I headed and could scoop me up pretty easily. But during those times when I had a long stay with my mother, a runaway report would be filed and the police would have to get involved. That happened three times while I was with Velma. The challenge was that my mother learned the rules of the system—that the authorities couldn’t enter her residence without a court order or permit to do so. So whenever they came around looking for us while she was feeling like she could take care of us, we would not be allowed to answer the door. She would be the one to do all the talking and say that she had no idea where we were and that she hadn’t seen us. Meanwhile, I remember peeping through the curtains to watch, and even though I thought I was being sneaky, I’m sure they could see me. But the law was on her side and my mother understood that, so she used it to her advantage.
Ms. Spivey ended up getting a guy named Eric to help her with our case. He was a short guy with curly hair; her hope was that maybe if there was a man working on our case, too, we’d respond better to him and look at him as kind of a role model. It was a great thought, but it didn’t really work. It still felt to me like it was us versus them, and he was just another “them” who wanted to keep my family apart.
Eventually, though, I always got caught. Ms. Spivey was not going to give up easily. When I asked her about it recently, she laughed and told me it was always her goal to find us because she didn’t want us thinking we were smarter than she was. Usually it was at school (when I would go) that the authorities would end up getting ahold of us. They would pull me out of class like they did the first time they took me away, and I would end up right back at Velma’s house until the next time I ran. I think it even got to the point that they could predict my escapes. They almost always came right after one of our supervised family visits. My heart would hurt so badly after seeing us all together—one or two times my mother was even able to cook us dinner to eat together while we were there—and I couldn’t stop thinking about how much I wanted a nice family life. The only thing I could do, as an eight- or nine-year-old, was to run, so it seemed to me like it was better than doing nothing.
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PUBLISHED a study a few years ago about adolescents who run away more than once from foster homes. 1 According to the report the authors wrote on the study, children who run away from care more than once: “May be experiencing harm in their placements, missing family, receiving inadequate attention to their mental health needs, or lacking access to normative youth experiences such as sports.”
I realize now that I was not alone in running away. The number one reason for why kids run was to get back to their biological family, even if they know that life at home was not a good situation. The study says, “Many youth equated being around a biological family with being ‘normal,’ and their desire for a ‘real home’ (which foster care was not, in their minds).” That was definitely my mind-set.
My situation was actually pretty close to what the researchers recommend to help cut down on kids leaving care on their own. I was placed with a sibling, Carlos, and I got to visit with my family regularly. But I still had that desire to run, partly because it felt like I was getting a say in my own life when I did that. That is also a common reason for why other kids leave.
I think it is important for any adult to understand that a child’s reasons for wanting to get away from foster care might be a lot more complex—or a lot simpler—than they imagine. My social workers always seemed a little confused that I would want to leave a house where I had regular meals and was making good progress in school. What I couldn’t make them understand was that I knew where I was living was just a temporary situation. As I said before, I didn’t believe that anyone other than my family could love me and I would rather be hungry and sleeping on the floor so long as I knew that the people I was with would always be looking out for me. As much as Velma cared for me, I never could believe that she loved me.
Even though we never talked about love in my family, I felt it. Love is important in every little kid’s life. The teachers at school often seemed frustrated by me, and Velma was a strict task master. Whereas at home no one got mad at me, no one cared if I struggled with reading. All my brothers cared about was that I was with them. That was all I wanted—to feel like I belonged, instead of feeling like a burden. Running wasn’t a way of acting out, it was a way of coping with the way that my life had been turned inside out. The study talks about that, too, explaining that running is a coping method for a lot of kids.
What is scary, though, is realizing how many kids who are habitual runners end up in terrible situations. If they don’t head home, a lot of them end up as victims of abuse or hooked on drugs. It’s incredibly dangerous to set off on your own as a kid, going into the neighborhoods where a lot of runaways go.
I don’t talk about my running to glamorize what I did. I was really lucky that nothing worse happened to me while I was out by myself—just about eight or nine years old—looking for my mother. It’s actually pretty amazing that I ended up okay.
AFTER ABOUT TWO YEARS in Velma’s care, the state finally moved us to another home. It was too bad that we had to leave her home because Velma had invested a lot of work in both Carlos and me. She h
ad a basketball hoop back behind her house and would let us play for hours. She also took us to neighborhood games of football sometimes, and always said the two of us would be going pro someday. She fought for me in school, too. When I had a 17 percent average in school and they said I wasn’t going to get moved up to the next grade because I hadn’t been showing up, she worked with me and met with the teacher and principal. Within a couple of months, my average had jumped to 62 percent and I was promoted at the end of the year.
She wasn’t perfect, of course, but Velma worked hard to be a good foster parent. With as much as I was running, though, I guess it was decided that I would be better off farther away from my mother’s home so that I couldn’t get there as easily. Carlos and I ended up getting bounced around to three or four other homes over the next year. That was when I learned firsthand that there are two very different sides to foster care.
There are people who become foster care parents because they want to make a difference in the lives of children who have been taken from bad situations. There are other people who become foster care parents because of the monthly check they get from the state. That’s the part that people don’t want to talk about, but, unfortunately, it’s very real. There are some terrible people who slip through the cracks when the state is screening applicants to the system. Their care can be as neglectful, abusive, and dangerous as the situation the child was taken from—or even worse.