The Farmers Daughter

Introduction: A look at the past

I should probably give you a backstory on how my life ended up like this, so here it goes.  My name is Dallas Brooks and this is how I ended up as a foster child.
••••••••••
Believe it or not I belonged to a typical all American family. My dads name is Carson Brooks and my mothers name was Carol Brooks; notice how I said was? I'll get to that in a second.
I was the youngest in the Brooks household with two older siblings towering over me. Scott who was eighteen, Nicholas who was sixteen, and then there was me.. seven year old Dallas Brooks. I looked up to Scott while Nicholas was the annoying middle brother who tortured the crap out of me day in and day out. My mom was a nurse and my dad was a police officer and we were all members of the small church in town. I loved Jesus with all my little heart and would tag along with my mom when she would meet up with the other church moms for women's bible study.

But our perfect lives didn't last forever and it all came crashing down when my mom was diagnosed with stage four brain cancer. I vaguely remember what happened after that but some tiny details still stick with me. Dad stopped going to church and then mom stopped as well when she got too sick, Scott and Nicholas weren't big on the whole church thing so they didn't care to stop going. What did I do? Well I would pray for my mom and sing the songs they taught us in Sunday school. I seemed to be the only one who had hope that God would heal my mom and things would go back to normal, that my dad and brothers would be happy again.

My mom lived for seven months after she was diagnosed. Dads life fell apart when he lost his other half so he turned to alcohol, thinking it would fill his gaping hole.

My oldest brother, Scott, was close to mom but not as close as Nicholas and I were so he grieved for a bit then went off to college after graduation. Scott never called or came home on holidays so he kinda became the forgotten child, I think he wanted it that way.

Nicholas shut himself off to us and became angry. I couldn't talk about anything to him without him yelling at me or telling me to go away. My dad told me that he went to stay with grandma when he disappeared one day but when I was fifteen and in foster care I figured out Nicholas committed suicide.

My dad was abusing alcohol as well as drugs. I was the only one at home so I was the only one he could —mentally and physically— hurt. He spoke angrily about God so I started to believe him.. God is bad and He took your mom away from us; that was the lie dad put into my head.

When the abuse got painfully worse I prayed to God to make it stop and it did and nine year old me was grateful. A neighbor just so happened to see my dad hit me across the face with a closed fist and immediately called the police, they discovered the bruises and scars on my body soon after.

My dads position at the police station was taken away and he was put in jail for ten years because of child abuse, an extra two years of rehab was added on because of the alcohol and drug addiction. So this is where I met Gloria, my social worker.

Gloria placed me in my first foster home at age nine and I remember their names as Michael and Maria. Michael and Maria only cared about the check they received and blew me off as if I never existed. My grades went downhill since they never helped me with my homework or made me proper meals so Gloria pulled me out and stuck me with a different family. I lived in a total of six foster homes by the time I reached the age of thirteen.

If other people didn't want to care then I wouldn't either. I fell from the church scene and started smoking at the age of fourteen when I started my freshman year of high school. The 'bad crowd' of seniors took me under their wing and molded me to meet their image, so God became a forgotten thing that no longer belonged in my mind.

The foster parents that were actually wonderful to me couldn't handle me anymore so they sent me back to Gloria because I put stress on them and I was stealing household items. The cycle continued; getting put in a new family, screw something up, get taken out of the home, Gloria finds a new home for me and so on and so on.

Now here I am, seventeen years old now. How shall I describe myself to you? Well I'm sure you'll find out soon enough if you keep reading.