The Barrow

So, yesterday was 18 years since my sister and I were originally put in foster care after my family fell apart. That's wild to think about. It (and the events that lead to it) was the defining event of my adolescence and an axis around which I rotated for a long time. I celebrated my eighteenth birthday mostly because the foster care agency could no longer dictate any part of my life. It's a big reason why I stayed pretty straight-laced as a teenager. Now, it's been longer since then, than my entire lifetime was leading up to it.

These past few days I've been thinking a lot about my adolescence and the myriad ways in which it fucked me up. I am motivated to do better as a parent than my parents did. I want my children to have a normal upbringing.

Sometimes I hate myself and the ways in which I have coped with it, ranging from the innocuous to the very unhealthy.

I'm trying to pull myself together for my own family and be someone new. I want the person I was even as recently as a few years ago to be unrecognizable.

It might be too late for me to be normal, really, but my own children deserve that chance.