Reading to help my writing

As I was writing my memoir, I tried hard to read other writer’s books on the same topic. 

Here are two that impacted me profoundly.

One of the books is Etched in Sand, by Regina Calcaterra (HarperCollins, 2013). This emotionally powerful memoir reveals how Regina endured a series of foster homes and intermittent homelessness in the shadow of the Hamptons and how she rose above her past while fighting to keep her brother and three sisters together. Social services turned a blind eye many times to Regina and her brother and sisters. 

Regina recounts numerous times when social workers were called to check on the children, only to be fooled by the conniving ways of the mother who would turn on her charm and convince the social workers that the children were at fault or lying. Librarians and teachers suspected things were bad at home for Regina. They saw her potential and encouraged her to do well in school, despite the challenges at home. Her education would be the key to her future success. No one could take that from her. 

It was not until she was a teenager that social workers realized and believed her when she spoke of the horrors of her childhood at the hands of an alcoholic and mentally ill mother. The scars from beatings and abuse ran deep for both Regina and her younger sister. Today, Regina is a successful attorney. She studied law and used it to prove paternity of her father. Through her research, she discovered laws that need to be changed to protect children’s rights. 

With my memoir, The Glider, it is my goal to bring to light laws that are still on the books preventing foster children from locating their case files. These files may show what happened to children in custody of the Department of Public Welfare or other agencies. Current laws and regulations make it difficult for foster parents to obtain the history on children that come into their care. Many times even today, children are brought into emergency care and it takes weeks before their foster parents are able to know the medical history on those children. 

Another book, Girl Unbroken, also had a profound impact on me. Author by Regina Calcaterra and her sister, Rosey Maloney, Girl Unbroken is a companion to Etched in Sand. When Regina disclosed the truth about her abusive mother to her social workers, she was separated from her younger siblings, Norm and Rosie. As Rosie discovered after her mother, Cookie, kidnapped her from foster care, the one thing worse than being abandoned by her mother was living in her presence. Beaten physically, abused emotionally, and forced to labor at the farm where Cookie settled in Idaho, Rosie refused to give in. Like her sister Regina, Rosie had an unfathomable strength in the face of unimaginable hardship—enough to propel her out of Idaho and out of a nightmare. 

Similarly, in my book The Glider, I share the story of my sister, Martha. Martha shared with me the nightmares she lived through at the hands of uncles, her father, and those in abusive foster homes. The system failed her when they did not remove her from her father’s reach by allowing him to maintain his parental rights. Like Regina and Rosie, there was more than enough proof and evidence of physical and emotional abuse shown to social services to terminate parental rights, yet they did nothing. Instead, they returned Martha to her father’s custody where she was physically abused. Martha finally refused to return to our father and begged to be sent back into foster care. 

It’s still happening. These stories are important and necessary.