“I Heard About His Murder from a Friend. Not My Stephen, I Prayed”: Mom Grieves the Loss of the ‘Boy She Didn’t Adopt’

“It was something about the phrasing that got to me. Something about the cadence of his words, the staccato of his speech.

‘Nobody loves me. Not even my mother who gave birth to me.’

It is an odd turn of phrase, isn’t it?

Not even my mother who gave birth to me.

He was buckled into the backseat of my Toyota, still too little to sit up front. At seven, he had already moved more times than the total number of years he had been on the earth. And this time, like the times before it, he moved with his belongings in a trash bag.

A suitcase, at least, would have added a small degree of dignity to the whole affair – to being ‘placed’ in another and another and yet another foster home before reaching the 3rd grade.

Trash bags break, you know. Trash bags can’t possibly support the contents of any life, and certainly not a life as fragile as this.

They break from the strain, eventually.

This move was harder for Stephen than most. It was a home he thought he would stay in, at least for awhile. He had felt affection there. When I went to pick him up, after his foster mother gave notice that he could no longer stay, he came easily with me; head down, no reaction on the surface of it. It was only when he got into my car that he began to sob the kind of aching sound that leaves you limp in its wake.

He could barely get out the words: “Nobody loves me. Not even my mother who gave birth to me.”

Months later, in a repeat scene (another foster mother, another removal), he would put up a fight. He would run around the living room, ducking behind furniture, refusing to leave. But on this night, he had no fight in him.

That was Stephen at seven.

Nine-year-old Stephen grips his report card in sweaty hands. We’re headed to an adoption event, where we will meet families who want to adopt an older child; families who do not automatically rule out a boy like Stephen with all of his long ‘history.’ And he wants to impress them, these strangers. He wants to win them over, and so he brings his good report card along as tangible proof that he is a child worth loving.

A child should never have to prove that he is worth loving.