(ThyBlackMan.com) Every year many children are pushed through the Foster Care system, group homes, and psychiatric hospitals; they are left to be broken in these spaces. No child should come into this world feeling unloved and unwanted. No child should be expected to give the understanding of consequence, response, logic, and reasoning of an adult that understands what it means to be a functioning citizen. Children require love, protection, and an environment that teaches them while molding them to be their best person. Children must be groomed for adulthood. Maybe this is lost in translation as foster care protects no one. It has unrealistic expectations of children. Between toxic abusive families and a system that destroys the soul of a child…many children don’t make it to adulthood, or they are forced to live in mental and physical terror in a world whereby they don’t believe rejection will ever end.
In the book “Someone Has Led This Child to Believe”, the follow-up to the 2008 Memoir “Somebody’s Someone”, by Regina Louise she gives voice to the children that have lived through such a broken and violently abusive system. In this memoir, Regina Louise tells her story candidly and shares how said abuse affected her as an adult. Generational cycles of abuse are addressed in a manner that is painstaking, but necessary if we are to deal with this system, and our community that breaks children with no regard.
“I’d shell out $120 for fifty minutes of talk therapy; I frantically chewed up out time together hoping to save, retrieve, or gather up what was left of my raggedy sense of self. Nearly, two decades after emancipation from foster care, I was still confounded by the weight I carried, the baggage of feeling unwanted, unavailable—to myself.”
Regina Louise used her life to tell the story of a generational cycle of pain, abuse, and rejection that eventually left her broken looking for validation. Within this story the reader is also exposed to the truth of a system that does not advocate for children. The foster care did everything to a child, except allow them to be adopted into a loving home. That defies logic and leaves one reading to feel there is real evil in the system. The criminals are not the children, but those within the system that allow them to be abused.
“I’ve learned that who I am today is a direct result of the ordeals I have endured: rejection, loss, abandonment; being born a bastard. None of these facts were ever intended for me, or directed at me as though they were ever deliberate, or personal. I’ve come to understand that my mother’s abandonment was a tributary that flowed out of her mother’s leaving, which flowed out of her mother’s mother’s disappearing, and all the streams lead back to the river of those women’s refutations: being born black, blisteringly poor, and invisible. The trauma of belonging to trauma is congenital.”
Regina Louise speaks about a worker that helped to make her life difficult; what’s sad is she was a black woman. This book is a great point of discussion to address what we have to stop doing to our own people. It’s bad enough our children will face oppression in this work, but it is doubly worse when the abuse comes from another black person that is questioning your blackness. This woman was apart of the trauma. Community abuse is something that can be addressed in book clubs, and community activism regarding children. This book gives the reader a gut-wrenching story of pain, suffering, survival, and overcoming. This is a great read for a young adult that has been in the system; they will be able to relate and just might be able to work through their trauma with the help of Regina Louise’s story.
“Someone Has Led This Child to Believe” by Regina Louise can be found at your local bookstore, Amazon, and anywhere books are sold.
Staff Writer; Christian Starr
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