“After about three years in foster care, homelessness, joining the military, and moving around the country, this piece of paper has somehow survived. There is not another single physical remnant of my childhood.”
I’m child three of six kids. We all have different fathers and are varying mixes of Black, Native American and White. We’d always struggled financially and my mother struggled with drugs and alcohol since her teens. I’ve gone to a total of 17 schools -- six elementary, three middle, and eight high schools -- between San Bernardino and Riverside counties. Coupled with having same-sex parents, growing up was not easy for me.
When Amelia was about 14 years old, she wrote out her hopes and dreams for the future on an ordinary sheet of notebook paper, pictured above.
I don’t remember the date or reason I decided to write it, but I felt like I needed to know what I was going to do and didn’t want to get trapped in the same cycle much of my family has been shackled to. It was me making sense of the summation of all the challenges I knew were stacked against me, of every brick in the proverbial wall standing in my way. And this paper felt like my way over the wall.
She remembers Mrs. Michaela Bent, a seventh grade teacher who recognized that she was struggling, and who offered a simple gesture of encouragement.
I really struggled in the beginning of 7th grade. I came into class one day and Mrs. Bent sat a folded piece of paper on the corner of my desk. I opened it and she’d written me a note telling me that I was so smart and beautiful in my own unique way, that she didn’t understand the challenges I might be having, but I can work through them and overcome them. It was the first time any teacher had acknowledged that I was actually struggling with so many things stacked against me.
Amelia makes it a point to support and mentor others who are struggling in adolescence. She has a particularly close bond with one of her nieces.
She is struggling with a lot of the same challenges I had and she has additional challenges that I did not (drug use, alcohol, etc.). Right now, she’s not going to school and is listed as a runaway. It’s so incredibly important to me that she knows that she is loved and that her dreams and goal matter. She matters, her experiences matter, and the life she’s living matters. it’s important to me that my nieces and nephews see that there is a way out.
She reflects on her current life choices:
Today, I am not a statistic. I am a college student. I am a military veteran. I am a former foster kid. I want to be a teacher. I want to run the School Board. I want to run for mayor. I want to run the California Department of Education. I want to look into the faces of all the kids like me and tell them that they’ll be okay — they’ll survive. It makes me hopeful, knowing that I’m still working towards many of the goals on that paper, that they haven’t changed much, and that I am breaking the unfortunate cycle that my family’s been stuck in.
After her military service, she could have settled anywhere. She chose to come home.
I came back to San Bernardino because we need people who care here. There are a lot of people who care, but there are also a lot of caring people who are leaving. I live here. I work here. I go to school here. When I leave, every time I come back is like coming home, flaws and all.