A message to new Foster Parents

I wrote the following story a few years back. I want all foster parents to realize that their "good deeds" may not pay off for many years. Author, Roger Dean Kiser Chicken Soup for the Soul Books MRS. USHER I was locked up in the juvenile hall for months after I had been released from the Florida School for Boys at Marianna (reform school). I refused to ever return to the Children's Home Society (orphanage). I was not going to return to that orphanage even if I had to spend the rest of my life locked up in a small cage. I had been at the juvenile hall for several months and I had flatly refused to even walk out of the front door in order help them clean up the streets for fear that they would take me back to that awful orphanage. It was a Wednesday morning and a man named Burt who worked for the court came into my caged cell and asked me if I wanted to go somewhere special for Thanksgiving dinner. I told him that I did not want to go outside of the juvenile shelter. I liked Bert because he was a nice man. Burt's brother had made a song which they played on the radio called "The Lion Sleeps Tonight". Burt kept on and on about that Thanksgiving dinner and how a kid should not be locked up on Thanksgiving. So I finally told him that I would go. Later on that afternoon an older woman came to the shelter. She talked with me for about ten minutes. She told me that she wanted to take me to her house for Thanksgiving. She also said that no child should be locked up in a cage. Before we left I made her promise me that she would bring me back the very next day. She and I walked out of the juvenile hall together and got into her car and drove to her house. As we walked into the house and I was really surprised at what I saw. It was really small inside. Not like the big dormitory house that I had lived in at the orphanage. You could sleep thirty or forty people in our house at the orphanage. I was really surprised when I went to their bathroom. I saw right away that they were not rich at all. They only had one toilet and one sink in their bathroom! They were really poor and they did not even know it. Of course, I had never been in a regular house before and I did not know that regular people only had one toilet and one sink in their bathrooms. That is one of the hazards of being raised in a orphanage. You never get see what life is really like in the "real world." Then one day the orphanage shoves you out and everyone treats you like you are an idiot. They think that you are stupid because you do not know anything about real life outside the orphanage. Wednesday afternoon, and evening was very difficult on me. I wanted so badly just to get out of there and be back in my cage at the juvenile hall. There must have been fifty people going in and out of that house. Each doing this and that. All getting ready for that big Thanksgiving Day dinner the next day. I was really scared too. I didn't like people very much. Especially grown people. They can do some really bad things to you when you are a kid. I hardly moved an inch because I was so scared. I never moved out of that chair, nor did I move in any direction until almost all those people were gone late that afternoon. The lady, Mrs. Usher, who brought me to her house, came in to the living room and asked me if I wanted to have a Coke in the small bottle. I told her "thank you" but that I did not care for anything. I really wanted that Coke real, real bad too. But I was just to scared to take it. I thought about that Coke all day long and how good it would have tasted. Late that night, when everyone was asleep, I snuck into the kitchen, real slow and quiet like, and I took a cold Coca Cola out of the refrigerator. I drank the Coke real fast, in about five seconds, and then hid the bottle cap behind the refrigerator. After that I warmed the cold bottle against my stomach so that it would be warm like the other bottles. Then put it in the bottle carton so that no one would ever know that I drank it. Even after fifty years no one ever found out that I drank that coke. The next day was almost as unbearable for me as the first day. All because of all the strange people coming for the big dinner. I would have rather died than to have ever gone through such a horrible experience as was that dinner. All those big strange people laughing and joking and making all kinds of noise. I have never been so embarrassed and so scared in all my life and that is the God's truth. Not scared like being scared of the dark---scared in a different kind of way. I can not explain it, not even to myself. I hardly ate anything that day, even though I had never seen so much food in all my life. I sure was glad when it was finally over. Later that night after everyone else had gone to bed, Mrs. Usher took me out onto her front porch and we talked for hours and hours. She was a real nice lady. I think I was about twelve years old at that time. I had never once just sat and talked with anyone before in my whole life. It was my first "nice and slow time" and I really liked it. I will never forget her kindness and her warm smile. But what I could not understand was why was she doing all of this for me? It was very difficult for me to understand why anyone would be kind to me. So I always kept one eye open on her all the time. Mrs. Usher got up from her chair and she went into the kitchen. When she returned she had each of us a small Coke in the bottle. She smiled and she handed one to me. I will never forget that either. That was the best Coke that I ever drank in my whole entire life. The next morning she and I ate some breakfast together. Then she told me to go into the bedroom and get my things together so that she could take me back to the juvenile hall, like she promised. When I was in the bedroom, getting my things together, I heard her in the hallway talking on the telephone to the authorities. She asked them why I was being sent back to the reform school. She wanted to know what it was that I had done that was so bad that I had to be sent back there. They told her that I had done nothing wrong but that they had nowhere else to put me. I heard her get very mad at them and tell them that she was not going to bring me back to the juvenile hall to be locked up again like an animal. GOD KNOWS THAT I LOVE THAT WOMAN FOR SAYING THAT! That is the most wonderful thing that anyone ever did for me as a child. That, of all the things in my life, is the one thing that made me want to become somebody someday. I thank you so very much; you loving, kind and wonderful woman. That one little sentence that came out of her mouth was the small and only light that guided my life for the next forty-five years of my life. I stayed there for several weeks and then I left to go out on my own at the age of thirteen. I continued to see the Usher family on and off for the next twenty or thirty years until their deaths. I know that they would have adopted me. But when it was discussed I told Mrs. Usher that it was too late for me. She placed her hands over her face and she cried. I told her "that I had to make it on my own now, 'cause I was a man." I just wish that I could have shown her how much I really loved her before she died. But I did not know how to show love. I didn't even know what love meant or what it felt like. Mom, now that you are in heaven I hope that you know how much I love and respect you. I hope that you know how much you added to the life of one lonely little boy that nobody else in the world wanted. I LOVE YOU MOM Roger