Hi there - my experience (long-winded)

I'm Mike from Maine. I'm currently 33 (34 in a couple weeks). I'm married and have a child on the way in August. Just wanted to chime in to tell you of my experience in foster care. September 26th, 1985: I was eating lunch at Lyman Moore Middle School in Portland and someone came into the cafeteria and told me that we need to go to the office. Off we went. There, I met a fellow from the Department of Human Services who told me they were taking me to DHS for something. I hung out there for a while - something like 3 hours just kinda getting into mischief and wandering about. From there, a fellow named Bob took me to a group home near Skowhegan, Maine called Halcyon House. I stayed there for about 3 weeks (the facility closed and they needed to find us places to live). There, I was physically attacked by one of the staff members. I don't remember his name but he was a big guy. I don't know what it was with me back then but I had this rubber finger puppet that I used to try amusing people. I did it a little at him and he grabbed me and said, "If you don't stop %#&*ing around...something, something." They wouldn't tell me what happened that I can't go home and they wouldn't let me write or call my mother. Finally I learned that she was admitted to the psych ward at a local hospital. From there, I went to my first real foster home. Then to another, then to another group home, more foster homes...you get the idea. Anyway, there was this one foster home, the Dukes of Lyman, Maine. Bill was pretty emotionally abusive when he got drunk calling me a reject and so on. If that wasn't bad enough, my grandfather frequently called me a nut and a freak. Whenever we'd be on 295-North between Portland and South Portland, he used to point up on a hill just before the airport and state that one of these days, I'm going to wind up there. It was a juvenile correction facility. More foster homes, group homes and a hospitalization later, I went to live with the Freemans in Windham, Maine. They were good people except when their natural grandchildren did something wrong, they'd forgive and forget but when one of us state kids did something wrong, we got asked to leave. I was there three times. I graduated high school while there and went off to college. Since then, I grew very angry toward my mother who put me in "care" in the first place believing that if you're not sane enough to have and handle kids, don't have them and if you bring home your two daughters out of "care" who fight all the time and leave your son in "care", she was a bad mother and I'm very angry with her even 13 years after her death. (I just realized that I've gone longer without her than I did with her). I hold no malice toward my father because he made every effort to come see me and my sisters in our respective "homes". He once rode his bicycle I don't know how many miles to see my sisters only to be turned away by the foster parents. He couldn't take us in when we first went into "care" because of the recent divorce he went through with my mother. She got custody, the apartment and whatnot. He got to live at the YMCA. I'm curious, why do foster parents treat their foster children differently than their own flesh-and-blood kids and grandkids? I mean, as a foster kid, I've already been given the boot at home which isn't tragic enough, the foster parents often have a zero-tolerance policy for their charges and not their natural kids. It's not right, I say. I never got any of the lessons I feel I could have used being in several "homes" like; "what do I do when I get out of "care"? "What's college like?" "How do I make friends?" "Can you teach me how to shave?" "What should I do if a woman breaks my heart?" and so on. No one ever put my report card up on their fridge or taught me how to volunteer to chaperone a field trip. Now I'm going to be a father and I'm scared to death. I think I'd be a great dad - not only that but a pal to my children but will the examples I've learned from in "care" come through?