First foster home experience  − 20 January, 1988

My mother, mentally ill and off her medication, diverted from driving me to school one morning, and instead drove to St. Louis, ostensibly to visit my half-sister, who was living there at the time. Since my mom was not thinking coherently, and since I was ten, we did not find my sister; instead, we spent several nights staying in hotels in Missouri and Arkansas, or staying in my mom's 1985 Mazda sedan in the parking lots of convenience stores and restaurants.

Eventually, my mom settled in a hotel somewhere over the border of Arkansas, after leaving her car at the bottom of the Ozark mountains. We had hitched a ride with a trucker up the mountain, and got into this hotel in a small town at the top of a mountain. There we stayed for a number of days until my mom went to a doctor for some unknown reason. The doctor saw that she was clearly not well, and detained her, leaving me with social services. I was taken to a foster home in the area, where I remained for the next month.

In this foster home, I was an urban kid with no social abilities grouped with a number of rural, well-behaved kids. Though the transition was a bit bumpy, I settled in and gained rapport with everyone in the foster family. I attended school in the region, and lived on the farm for what seemed like a long time.

By the end of February, 1988, my mother and I were reunited, and we returned to Des Moines to carry on with our lives. To this day, I do not know or recall the full names of my foster "parents", nor do I know exactly where I was.