Foster parent

I was a parent, a foster parent.
I thought I would do something good, something good for a child in need. I had many children and they all stayed longer as expected.

Here you can only be a foster parent if you did some course, passed it and if the organisation for foster parents agrees. If they don't like you you can forget about it. If you are white the rules are way stricter as when you are black.
I was a foster parent and I did the job alone. I was young, had a job and was single and been accepted.

I choose the crisises.

Crisis means they drop a child or more on your doorstep and you can deal with it for the next hours or days, till the moment they found a (better) home or the child goes back home. I guess the better home was never found because mine stayed way longer. Might be this organization simply fooled the foster parent(s) and thought once you have it you will keep it.

Being a foster parent drains you.

It's not the child that does but all those extra things they expect you to do. Weekly social work stops by to inform how or what. They talk with you. The child has a social worker too which you need to let in. Parents show up, so do friends of the child. The child is frequently dragged out of the house or school by CPS and knows nothing, is dumped at a stranger's house with nothing else as the clothes they wear.

For a foster child, you do not receive child support.

Child support goes to the mother.
The organization pays you a but for what is called "breath - bath - bed". You can buy food, wash the clothes but not pay school fees, buy a bike, clothes, shoes, glasses, etc. You have to pay this as a foster parent yourself. You cannot live from what they pay which means you need a job to provide in yourself and the kid of someone else. A kid that you need to live according to their standards.
A room if it's own for example. Foster children are not allowed to share rooms with you or other children. They say it's for your own safety too.

My first child is a daughter.

A good, smart, introvert girl. She was taken out of the classroom and dumped on my doorstep. They told me she tried to commit suicide and gave me her pills. She was 16 and drugged and no one knew why she tried to kill herself.
I kept the pills and didn't know what to do. How awkward she must have felt.

"They say you need to take these pills because you tried to cut your wrists. Are you? If not we throw these pills away."

"I won't."

She went to her room, we got ready for the night and believe me I slept with my ears wide open.
She didn't kill herself, was the sweetest girl I ever met, and her grades at school increased.
It wasn't hard to have her around and if someone would have listened to her he/she would have known what was killing her for real. I should say who was killing her.

No one listened, what she said was not believed.

They ignored me because foster parents do not count, their opinion does not. It wasn't her dead who wasn't the kindest person around but mom's new boyfriend. It was the old preacher who turned out to be more than a church and community leader he was a dirty old man as well.

No one heard her screaming. She was raped, locked in a mental institution, had to stay in a hole alone. No one cared about the girl who could easily go to university and played violin.

And what about me? I cared but I was no longer allowed to see my daughter. They said I was a threat to her.