Do you ever wake up wondering what’s going to happen next in your life? I do, all the time.
Everything for me has been a mystery. I can’t show you, but I can tell you.

August 28, 2005,
The first day of school, I wake up to the sound of a shower. “It must be my mom,” I thought. So I rushed to get dressed. Once I hopped out of bed I ran to the closet. I turned around, and there she was, my mother. The shower was still going so it must have been my brother all along. I knew that I was going to dread the next hour. “Go get my switch!” My mother shrilled. With every step, I took a deep breath.

I finally reached the closet of where my mother’s switch was. I slowly grabbed the switch and headed toward my room. I arrived back into my room, and handed her the weapon. I was terrified! “Now get ready for school!” Mom yelled. I thought I was off the hook, but I was completely wrong. I bent down to get my shoes, and she took a hard hit to my back. I tried to hold back the tears, but every hit was like a chainsaw shoved in your back. There was nothing I could do, so I tried my best to get ready.

Mentally I was strong, but emotionally and physically weak. In my mind I thought I was big and bad, but turns out I wasn’t. Every time I tried to get up I would fall back down. When my mom was finally done, and I even think she was tired, she told me that I was to lie and say that I fell off my bike and fell into the sticker bushes. I was only in first grade and I didn’t have the common sense to tell my teacher what really happened, but I think she already knew.

My life was miserable, and also for both of my brothers. At any moment in that house I felt like I had no one to be there for me, but I knew that there was. There was a reason why this was happening. I don’t know how I knew, but I felt it.

As life got worse my mom got worse. She did drugs and she never stopped. This caused her to be away from home, and these were the happiest moments of my life, but when she was it was H-E-double hockey stick all over again. She threatened to drown me in the bathtub if I didn’t stop crying. I knew she wouldn’t....she couldn’t, she had to take her anger out on someone, and that was her children.

Agonizing days go on, but on that day of September fourth (my birthday) she didn’t come home. The doorbell rang just a few minutes later, and I knew it was her, but it was my grandma. I found out later that my mother was in jail for drug reasons. So my grandma would be taking care of us, until she gradually came to have breast cancer. Then we took care of her. The thing I remember most about her was that she loved toast with butter and sugar.

I missed making it for her when she passed, and when I was put in foster care the day after. She had a funeral ceremony a week later. I wasn’t allowed to go to her funeral, and I was sick, and the only thing I got to remember her by was a piece of paper with her picture on it. Everywhere I went I looked to the sky, and hoped she was my guardian angel, and that she watched over me at night.

15 foster homes passed in one year, it wasn’t that I was a bad kid, it’s because they didn’t want three kids for a long period of time. Until I got to the last home on January 14th. I felt comfortable with her even though she is the opposite race, but I learned that color doesn’t matter.

I have been in this home for 6 ½ years, going to church and still trying to understand morals in life, but despite being in one grade level fifteen times, being beaten in my original home, and sometimes foster homes, I have learned many things about life, and I thank God that he has put me in this place where I know I’m safe. Now I know part of God’s purpose and why those terrible things happened.

There is always a better life, you just have to choose it, and open to open your heart up to it.