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have to go through foster care all over again. I can’t stand that shit!”
    â€œWatch your mouth, girl!” Sparkle snapped. “You’re tough. You can handle it.”
    â€œI don’t mean to whine, but you just don’t know what it’s like to be in and out of foster care.”
    â€œI don’t know about foster care? Let me tell you something, Missy...”
    SPARKLE’S STORY:
    I was born in Saginaw, Michigan, the eighth child of a young mother of twenty-eight. She had my oldest sister, Tiffanie, her first child, when she was fifteen years old. She dated an older man who made her addicted to drugs and him. She pretty much stopped taking care of us. My sister Tiffanie fed me; cleaned me and dressed me so many times I had started to call her mama.
    Eventually the state took us away from my mother and split us up. In the state of Michigan, they had three different forms of custody for the children of the state, Relative Care, Child Receiving Home, and Foster Care.
    Relative Care was when a relative or close family friend assumed responsibility or guardianship of a child. I never had anyone close enough who wanted to take in my siblings, or myself. But I frequented the other two processes.
    Child Receiving Home was a place they took children when they had nowhere else to go. I was there often and it was rough. But it still beat living on them damn streets. They gave us three meals a day and even though they bathed us two children at a time, we still got the chance to wash our asses. We slept two to a twin bed, which was quite uncomfortable, but again, it beat sleeping on the ground with a box as a blanket.
    When we were in foster care, they would drop us off and pick us up early so that the other kids would not know that we were living at the Child Receiving Home. You know how children are; they were trying to prevent us from public humiliation.
    They would closely monitor us during school hours to make sure we did not run away. They would also privately interview us about our mother’s past situation and our current foster care situation.
    On those rare occasions when my mother was allowed to see us, we would have to go to the Department of Human Services, or DHS for short. Those were the only times I saw my mother and my siblings. We would gather in this small room where the DHS staff would watch us through a glass window and they recorded our every move. I was happy to see my mother but it felt strange meeting in such a peculiar manner. At the age of eight, the visits stopped and I have not seen or heard from my mother or my siblings since.
    At nine, they gave me the responsibility of caring for three of the younger children in the home. I had to dress them, feed them and make sure they did not get into any danger as if they were my own children. If I did not handle my responsibility of taking care of the babies properly, I was severely disciplined. It is odd because as much as I hated taking care of those kids, I think I craved the attention and love they were giving me.
    I was twelve when I had my first menstrual cycle. I did not feel comfortable telling my foster mom, so I told a friend who had just started her first cycle as well. She took me to one of our teachers, Mrs. Glenn, who showed me how to use a pad. Mrs. Glenn was concerned and called my foster mom and told her about the situation. My foster mom was mad as hell because she felt I was telling our family business. When I got home, she whooped my ass. I ran away, and never went back. I ended up staying with a nice family for a while, but then they moved out West, and I ended up back in the Child Receiving Home.
    Around fourteen, I went to a foster home with a family who had three daughters and a boy. The girls were my age and younger, but the son was three years older than me. He was cute and I had a little crush on him. We would wrestle when there was no one else around and always end up with him grinding between my legs.