Dandelion Child: Based on a true story - 9685

This is the place where I’m supposed to convince you to buy this book. This is supposed to be catchy and hook you in. I’m not going to do that. Instead, I’m just going to stick to what I did in the book; just say it honestly. I carry a darkness inside me, everywhere I go. It’s not my darkness, but I will forever carry it inside me like a black viper that rises in the darkness of the night to poison my soul. It’s cool if you buy the book (a girl’s gotta eat, after all), but what I really want is for you to get the takeaway from it. I’m going to give you that for free. Right now, out there in the world, there are children suffering because our law enforcement is disinterested, our social systems are overburdened, and because people forget us. We’re like dandelions indeed; ignored, unwanted, forgotten—unless we get into someone’s lawn. Despised. Ugly. Intrusive. Invasive. We’re the dirty secret society tries to hide. Foster children. An epithet akin to bum, addict, hooker, deviant, delinquent. When you’re a foster kid, you know that people say it like it’s a swear word. A dirty, bad, ugly word that makes people immediately think you’re garbage by default. “Don’t play the victim,” we’re told after we’re ‘rescued’. It’s as if being a victim is something dirty, some moral failing on our part. People don’t want to know that we don’t just magically stop being victims when the headlines forget us. People don’t want to be reminded that we need ongoing help and support. People don’t like it when we point out that we’re often put right into another horrific situation by the people who ‘rescued’ us, as often as not. I watched as my mother was slaughtered. Butchered like an animal, literally. Why? Because she, and I, were disposable people. Dregs. Trash. “Those people.” Here’s what I’m really asking you, and it’s not to buy this book. It’s a horrible book filled with my suffering and with the malice of the sadists who tortured me. No. I’m asking you to remember us. I’m asking you to stop telling us not to play the victim. We are victims, there’s no playing needed. Please don’t punish us. We’re foster kids, but that doesn’t make us evil. My mother was a prostitute, but she was a suffering, abused human being. We need help. We need society to do better. If you read the book, I hope it will humanize us. If you read the book, maybe you will really see us. Maybe you will remember that the darkness was put there without our consent, against our wills, and while ‘authorities’ and neighbors and family members looked on but refused to really see. Maybe you will understand why “don’t play the victim” isn’t enough to heal that darkness. Maybe you’ll speak up about the Turpin children, who were ‘rescued’ and then put into abusive situations. They were ‘rescued’ and now the money sent for them is mishandled, misappropriated, and they are living in desperate conditions. Because people forgot. The headlines went away, and people stopped watching and demanding that the ‘authorities’ do their jobs. They are forgotten, as I was forgotten. Child after child, forgotten. Growing in gutters because the only ‘help’ we’re given is to be paraded before the world as ‘rescued’. The good people of society return to their homes, happy in the belief that ‘happily ever after’ has been achieved while we are forgotten. This is me, standing on your lawn and asking you to have mercy on the desperate children of the world. To speak up, to persevere, to save them. I am not the hero of the book because a child cannot save themselves. Someone else must do it. So whether you buy the book or not, have mercy. I beg of you, remember, speak up… and have mercy, lest the darkness forced upon them be their lifetime burden, as well. Assuming that they even survive, and I don't know which is the greater mercy. Do you?
ASIN: B0BMDM79V1
VSKU: BVV.B0BMDM79V1.VG
Condition: Very Good
Author/Artist:Taranto, Sandi
Binding: Paperback