Free I Beat the Odds by Michael Oher Page B

every bit as unhappy and unsettled as I had been when they first collected me almost three years before. I made up my mind that I was finished with them and their “fixes” for my life. If anything was going to get better, it was going to be up to me to make it happen.
    As an adult, I now understand more about what was going on within the system at that time, and how broken it really was. The caseworkers were really overloaded, there was almost no accountability, and there were a lot of out-of-date rules kept in place by out-of-touch people that benefited no one—especially not the kids whose lives were being steered by them. Not to mention that there was a terrible breakdown in record-keeping, which is clear from the fact that almost all my files have just disappeared. All of Tennessee was in bad shape, but Shelby County, where Memphis is located, seems to have been the worst place by far.
    I don’t want to sound as if I am ripping on everyone who was involved with my custody. Obviously there were a lot of people who genuinely cared and wanted to make a difference. The problem is that there always seem to be more children who need help than people who are able and willing to help them. Even with the huge improvements that Tennessee’s Department of Children’s Services has put into place by totally rebuilding itself, life in the slums hasn’t improved much. Just the fact that a state has to have a department dedicated to the welfare of its children—the fact that something like that has to exist at all—means that the problems are still there and kids are still suffering in foster care, even good foster care. That’s the worst part of it to me. As long as the cycle of poverty continues, there are always going to be kids who think there is no way out and just get trapped in their parents’ way of thinking and living.
    Parents who have spent time in foster care have almost twice as high a rate of having their own children taken away and placed in foster care, or see their children become homeless, than parents who didn’t spend time in the system. The sad truth is that even though children are being removed from bad situations, they are sometimes placed into situations that aren’t much better. Or, if they are fostered with a loving and supportive family, their stay often isn’t long enough to make a lasting impression that will help them learn how to make better choices with their own futures.
    What happens is that the kids learn to imitate the behavior they see as normal, and as a result, they end up making the same mistakes their parents did. You would think that someone who was abused as a child would know how much it hurts and do everything they could to not do that to someone else. But instead, when they get angry as an adult they react the only way that they know how, in the way that has become natural to them. With neglect, sexual abuse, substance abuse, gang membership, with all of the ugly things that exist in the world, kids tend to go back to what they know. It’s certainly not something unique to the projects, of course, but it sure is common there. That’s why I ran away from St. Joseph’s, just like I’d run away from Velma’s—I wanted to get back to what was familiar, what I knew.
    For the kids who are assigned to caring, helpful families for longer than just a few months, their lives can be completely turned around. They get a chance to see what responsible adults look like. They understand what it is like to live with rules and discipline. They learn that there is a different way of living from what gets you trapped in the ghetto. They find out that you can trust and love people who are trying to help you become whatever you want to be. It can be a long road to break down the walls of distrust, anger, or sadness that a lot of children have put up as a survival mechanism, the only way they know to protect themselves from the hurt. Loving homes that offer support and encouragement are so