DCFYI

“Those poor kids don’t stand a chance.”

The words – spoken between two police officers – weren’t intended for my 10-year-old ears. But I heard them anyway.

As I sat in the front seat of a police car, I glanced into the backseat at my sobbing younger sisters, thinking about his words. My memories of childhood are hazy, perhaps my brain’s way of protecting me from things I’m better off forgetting, but a few memories stand out clearly.

Sitting in the backseat of my parent’s car while they heated heroin in a spoon and injected in the front seat.

Diamond recently aged out of foster care and now realizes that even though she is legally an adult she really wants to be adopted.

In her own words, Diamond is "very outgoing, open minded, lovable, and has strong opinions." She loves music, animals, and young children and hopes to find a job in a daycare center.

An attempted coup d’état in the Philippines which had the violence raging close enough that we could hear the exchange of gunfire with the naked ear followed months later with the first Gulf War was my first experience of violence that affected a society and inspired, within me, a need to make sense of what was going on.  In a vacuum that was television at the time, without the assistance of social media and 24 hour news networks, these conflicts were not as visceral, graphic, or real time as they would be today.