Survival Was Never the Point
The courtroom smelled of burnt coffee, damp wool, and the particular staleness of a room where important things happen to people who had no power to prevent them. I sat at the defendant’s table with my left hand resting on my stomach, eight months along, feeling my child move against my ribs with the restless energy of someone who had no idea what was happening on the other side. I had been up since four in the morning.
My lower back had been in a conversation with my sciatic nerve that I was not winning. The heat in the room was the dry institutional kind that settles into your clothes and makes it hard to breathe in a full, satisfying way. My attorney was a man I had found through a legal aid referral, competent and overworked, who had told me two weeks ago with genuine regret that the prenuptial agreement was unfortunately airtight and that the odds were not in my favor.
I had spent the previous thirty days understanding what it meant to have no resources and no family and nowhere to go and a baby coming in five weeks into what was shaping up to be November air with twelve dollars in my account. I had survived eighteen years of the foster system and I knew how to walk into a room where the outcome had already been decided for you and hold yourself together until you were somewhere private. I had been doing that my whole life.
I was prepared to do it again. I sat with my hand on my stomach and waited. I was twenty-eight years old and I had been alone for all of them.
The foster system had given me nothing except the education of knowing how to survive in places that were not designed to care about you. I had moved through group homes and temporary placements and the particular impermanence of being a child whose paperwork kept arriving in new buildings with no one who remembered the previous entries. I had learned to read people quickly, to take up minimal space, to ask for nothing and expect the same.
The story doesn’t end here — it continues on the next page.
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