Ashley Ensley

Update on my dad’s double lung transplant journey

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1B8zmfxSQ6/?mibextid=wwXIfr

A month after Willard Police Chief Tom McClain was ushered to St. Louis for a double lung transplant, the longtime police officer is speaking to Ozarks First about the surgery, the recovery process, and what's next.

I was a foster parent for ten years and he probably won’t like what I have to say about foster care.

I was a foster parent for 10 years and you probably won’t like what I have to say about foster care…

I did not become a foster mother
because I was strong.

I became one
because I was hopeful.

When I became a foster parent
I thought love could be louder than trauma.
I thought consistency could heal anything.
I thought if enough good people
opened their homes,
we could change the ending
for children the world forgot.

40 girls later,
I do not recognize that version of me anymore.

40 girls.

Some stayed long enough
for me to memorize their laugh.
Some left before I could remember
how they took their cereal.
Some came with trash bags.
Some came with nothing.
Most came already carrying
weight far too heavy for their little shoulders

Sexual abuse.
Bruises hidden under sleeves.
Neglect so deep
they ate food until they got sick
because nobody had ever promised
there would be more tomorrow.

I learned very quickly
that almost every little girl
who walked through my front door
had already been introduced to evil.

Not movie evil.
Not stranger-in-an-alley evil.

The kind that tucks you into bed at night.
The kind that shares your last name.
The kind that teaches children
their bodies are not their own.

And still the system called it
“reunification goals.”

I sat through meeting after meeting
where professionals used words like
“appropriate progress”
while little girls sat beside me
digging their fingernails into their skin
at the thought of going back.

I watched adults celebrate
temporary sobriety
while children carried permanent damage.

I watched judges make decisions
in fifteen minutes
that would shape entire lives.
All while never having laid eyes on
on the child who’s life they control.

I watched caseworkers disappear,
files get lost,
reports ignored.

I watched children beg not to go.
Then try to pretend like it would all be ok
when they were sent back anyway.

You want to know
what broke me?

It was not the trauma.
It was not the behaviors.
It was not the screaming,
the rage,
the lies survival taught them to tell.

It was the helplessness
of loving a child like your own
while standing powerless
as the people meant to protect her
handed her right back to the wolves.

Over and over.

People love to praise foster moms.
They call us angels.

Angels do not become this angry.

Because somewhere along the way,
hope turned into exhaustion.
Exhaustion turned into bitterness.
And bitterness settled into my bones
every time another little girl
looked at me with terrified eyes
and asked,

“Do I have to go back?”

I used to believe
the system was broken.

Now I think it was built this way.

Built to protect adults first.
Built to give endless second chances
to grown people
while children pay the price for every single one.

And the children know it.

They stop unpacking their bags.
They stop trusting kindness.
They learn not to believe promises
because every adult before you
called abandonment a plan.

But two girls stayed.

Two girls stopped being placements
and became daughters.

And maybe that is the cruelest part of all,
because after forty children,
after ten years of watching the system fail them,
after every goodbye that hollowed me out,

I still cannot regret it.

Because somewhere in this house
are girls who were once statistics.
Once case numbers.
Once “high risk.”

And now they call me Mom.

So even now,
with all my anger,
all my grief,
all the parts of me this system hardened…

I still leave the porch light on.

Because experience made me cynical.
But I would do it all over again.

- Ashley Ensley