Preface to Another Place Called Home
The Susquehanna Valley Children’s Home where I was deposited at eleven was called an orphanage but we only had one orphan. Stewart was considered the lucky one. The rest of us were consumed by our troubled and broken homes.
To us, this institution was another place called home. Here, our lives centered around the Main Building, a huge ancient stone structure that was scary and reeked of mystery. We lived between the shadow of the homes we left behind and the dread of where we would end up. In town, we heard the whispers, “They’re from the Home.”
I wrote Sue's story in the first person, present tense to bring Sue and her story closer to you, the reader. Her voice, perceptions, and experiences begin with Sue at age eleven and evolve as Sue matures. Her narrative also suggests how chaotic adolescence is when there is no parent. As some research suggests, without a close adult to help reminisce and interpret events, life is especially episodic. In the Home, we were merely what happened to us.
Sue’s story concludes as she reaches eighteen, the moment when foster care ends. It’s called “aging out.” It’s when she must leave the Home. This is an especially rough time for foster kids who have not found a placement with a family. I want you, the reader, to be by her side, to experience the evolution of her life and the finality of that horizon as she did.
Pat Schneider, a well known and highly respected author and founder of Amherst Writers and Artists, shared her experience about writing her story. Like me, Pat was placed in an orphanage at eleven. She kept diaries but, for years, did not refer to them. After she wrote Wake Up Laughing where she mentioned her time in the home, a woman who then ran the orphanage sent along her sixth grade report card. That opened the door for Pat and she finally researched her experience and wrote her story. In Writing Alone and with Others, she tells us that “Until that moment, almost half a century later, I could not look at the gold in the deepest room of my childhood. Now I am writing about it.”
Another Place Called Home: Surviving Foster Care represents the kind of achievement I wish for every child, foster kid or not. We all have the possibility of self-truth; we need to see it, hang on to it, face it, let it guide us even in the dark.