What's a home?
“Toni…Toni… honey, are you listening?”
“Toni your mother is speaking to you.”
Five-year-old Toni finally noticed that her mother and the social worker were talking to her. She looked around the small room that is support to belong to her at her mother’s house; she doesn’t live with her mom, but she sees her once a week. She has something called ‘supervised visitation’, what does that even mean? Toni had been in the foster care system for as long as she could remember. She’s been in four different homes over the years; the only constant thing being her weekly visits with her mother that last four hours. She doesn’t know why she doesn’t live with the woman she has to call ‘mom’. She knows her friends at school all live with their mom and someone called…“daddy?” she thinks. So why doesn’t she live with her mommy? Does she even have a daddy? The whole thing confuses Toni. Why does she have to go back the Mr. and Mrs. Jones’ house if she has a mommy?
“Toni, would you like to go to Disney soon?” her mother asked. Toni looked at her and nodded her head. “Here baby let’s play.” Toni’s mother handed her a doll to play with as she sat down on the floor to join Toni.
“What do you want to call your baby, love?” Toni shrugged her shoulders as her mother suggested names until they decided on the name Penny.
After trying for twenty minutes to get Toni to play with the dolls, her mother gave up and decided to try something else.
The Jones’ have an older kid who is really mean to Toni, Mr. Jones locks the fridge at night, and they yell a lot, at Toni and each other. At least Mr. Jones is nicer than Mr. Rob was; he’d hurt Toni whenever she acted up and sometimes when she didn’t. She never understood why he did, maybe he was just angry or maybe Toni was just a bad kid. Either way she’d rather go with the stranger she calls mom than go back to a house that won’t let her eat. If she had a choice though, she would want to go back to Mrs. Jazmine, she was always nice to Toni. She took care of her, and Toni enjoyed the time she spent there. Even though Mrs. Jazmine was older and couldn’t play with Toni all the time; she taught Toni how to plant things and what a garden was. She taught Toni how to read, count, and how to play basketball. She loved living there and her heart broke when her "caseworker?" showed up to take her to a new home. These adults keep using big words that Toni doesn’t understand. Toni was told that Mrs. Jasmine wasn’t well enough to watch children anymore, so Toni had to go somewhere else. Toni can’t remember much of anything from all the homes she lived in, but she remembers Mrs. Jazmine. She remembers the glasses she wore on a chain on her neck, the smell of cinnamon, the fading name tattoo on her arm. When asked about it she told Toni she lost her husband and young daughter years before she became a foster parent. Damn does Toni miss her some days.
“Toni, would you like to build this puzzle with me?” her mother asked as she dumped a small puzzle on the floor.
“Ok” Toni responded as she reached for a piece. Toni quickly got agitated with the puzzle and started throwing pieces, she has always had problems controlling her anger.
“That’s ok honey, we don’t have to build a puzzle, would you like to read a book together?”
Toni finally calmed down enough to shake her head yes and she went to pick a book from the self. After handing her mother a Clifford book she climbed onto the bed; followed by her mother.
It’s ok though, Toni may live with a mean older boy, a mean man that locks the fridge at night, and two people that fight all day but at least now Toni can go to school. She may have to see a stranger once a week, but school gets her away from all the yelling for a while. Plus, there’s this girl named Martha who Toni thinks is funny. Another named Leah, who doesn’t like to talk, so sometimes she and Toni will just sit together and read. Dorothy, who likes to be called Dot, likes to wrestle with Toni during free play. Even though they sometimes get in trouble for it. There’s another girl named Fatin who shows Toni the “correct” way to build a town out of Legos. There’s Nora and Rachel who look alike and Toni still thinks one of them is a clone. Rachel calls them twins, but Toni doesn’t believe that. Besides the first time Toni said it, Nora laughed really hard, and Toni wants to keep making her laugh. There’s another girl named Shelby, who talks about God sometimes. Toni’s not sure how she feels about someone watching her all the time, but Shelby has really pretty eyes, so Toni listens to her talk about it. The place she has to call home isn’t perfect but she’s as happy as she can be.
“Okay Toni it’s time to say goodbye to your mother.” The social worker said.
This is what finally took Toni out of her daze and realized she was still in her “bedroom”. Looking around Toni notices the whole room in pink and girly and everything she hates. It’s at this moment that Toni truly understood that her mother had no idea who Toni was and what she liked. She’s only seen her mother a handful of times that she can remember but every time her mother only talks about things they will do in the future. She never asks Toni about her interests or what she does all week. She never asks about Toni’s friends or school, and it makes Toni wonder if her mother even cares.
When Toni hopped off the bed to leave her mother pulled her into a tight hug. Toni reluctantly hugged her mother back until the case worker said it was time to go. Her mother told Toni she wished they could go home together which just made Toni wonder once again why she didn’t live with her mother. Why did she have to go home to strangers when her mother, who granted is another stranger, wanted her to stay with her. Toni will be much older when she discovers why her mother did not raise her but until then she will be in strangers’ homes. Homes like the Jones’ with all the yelling, crying, cursing, and fighting a boy twice her size. Toni wishes things would be different; that she was old enough to understand the whole reason behind all of this. To understand why she lived with strangers, why she constantly had to move, and why she couldn’t see Mrs. Jasmine again. Maybe someday she can see Mrs. Jasmine again and thank her for being one of the nice ones. Maybe she can one day thank Mrs. Jasmine for opening her home up to a kid who had nowhere else to go.