LOTF: Before and After

Jeffery Langley

There was never a time in his life when Jeffery Langley had been unfamiliar with assumption. It was all around him, his whole damn life, both when he was on top of the world and when he lived on the bottom of the barrel.

In Jeffery's experience, people tended to make assumptions before the thought of being weary of bias came to mind. He couldn't remember a time in his life when people didn't make their minds up about him based on some illegible notes written in some outdated file swimming around the American foster care system.

At the ripe age of eleven, after spending years in that system that defined him by a series of assumptions, Jeffery Langley concluded that this was all that life had to offer. At least, that's all it had to offer him.

He went into the system at four months old. When asked about his parents, he tended to shrug off the question because he didn't have anything to say about them. Unlike a lot of the other kids he shared bedrooms and homes with during his time in foster care, Jeffery hadn't a single memory of his birth family. He heard firsthand the horrific stories that some of the other kids told about how they ended up here: alcoholism, child abuse, sudden death, terminal illness, car accidents, drug addiction and overdoses, domestic violence, neglect, unfit parenting, and so much more. He listened as his roommates cried through the night after being separated from a sibling, losing their father to cancer, having just watched their mother get shot in a disagreement gone horribly wrong.

Jeffery couldn't relate to any of those kids; nor to most of those he grew up around as he was tossed from house to house throughout his childhood. Unlike them, he simply shrugged when asked about family trauma, about his parents, about what brought him to foster care. He didn't feel that he had the same sad stories as the rest of them. He felt lost, like he'd been mistakenly handed a fate that was meant for somebody else.

But while Jeffery might not have been put into foster care as a result of child abuse, that didn't stop his foster parents from inflicting some of their own. Some of the homes Jeffery was put in were violent, unusually cruel, and neglectful. Often times, he and the other kids in the houses would be scolded for not completing chores on time or for accidentally leaving a crumb on the dinner table. Some foster parents were violent and didn't hesitate to strike a child no matter how small or innocent. Others warranted punishment in the form of neglect. Sometimes, Jeffery would be refused food for days at a time. Others, he'd be locked in a small room or a basement for the same, dreadful amount of time.

As he entered his pre-pubescent and teen years, Jeffery started to build up the courage to stand up for himself, and even report his foster parents for whatever it was they were doing. He soon came to realize that standing up got him written up; another nasty note in his file that'd push him further and further away from the prospect of adoption. He found that running away or trying to help the younger kids he was in care with resulted in the same, unjust consequences.

By the time he hit fourteen, Jeffrey had been moved into a group home for boys. He knew that being placed in a group home was a life sentence; a promise that he'd never be adopted. Kids who were placed in these homes rarely, if ever, were adopted before aging out of the foster care system. The group home was different from the foster homes in that it was the other kids doing the abusing instead of the adults. He was horrified by the way the boys treated each other. They shoved each other's heads into toilets, stole each other's personal items from homes they missed, ripped up family photos, purposefully spilled each other's food, beat each other, called each other horrible names when they were angry.

For the most part, Jeffery did his best to stay out of all the group home drama when he could. At heart, Jeffery knew that he would've been a better person had he been given a shot at a normal life. He knew right from wrong without having ever really been taught it. He resorted to delinquent behavior only in times of desperation; like running away to escape an abusive home, or skipping school to avoid bullies who liked to beat up the new kids, or threatening his foster parents to stop hurting the younger kids in their care. These were all things that got Jeffery branded as a bad kid, things that were put into a file that defined him, things that kept prospective families from wanting to foster and adopt him.