Cynthia (who guys by Cyn) explains that this topic was a traumatic moment for her but it garners people’s attention. Her favorite thing to do is go on outings with her dog to the park. She also enjoys working and in the future, she wants to go into airspace engineering.  If that fails, she wants to become a pilot. Cyn loves to argue and is head of the newly formed Debate club, something she is proud to call her own.

Louisa Alcott once said, “It’s hard to trust others when all you have from the past is evidence of why you shouldn’t.” From my experience, putting your trust in others commonly leads to despair and emotional suffering, which is why trust is a safety hazard. I have seen my mother open her arms and family to a man who physically and mentally broke her. He would lock her in a bathroom for over 6 hours while her children wondered if she would still be breathing by the time the handle turned.  Every single time he would leave, she promised us that we would never have to see him again and after so long of trusting her, I stopped believing.

We were taken by CPS the day after Christmas – my sister was playing on her brand-new tablet and I was doing a puzzle of “Lady & The Tramp”, our mom had just come back from dropping the littles off at daycare. There was a loud, banging knock on the door, used only by cops. Immediately my mother started to yell as she usually does and opened the door saying, “I don’t talk to pigs”, which in my opinion is the worst thing to say in that situation. They told her their orders and the social workers came inside the house to grab us. I tried to fight and even successfully busted the lip of one of the workers (which once I calmed down, I apologized) when I believed she hurt my sister by putting her into their patrol car. I begged my mom to gain my trust again and “save us” but she never did, and we sped away.

When we got to the plain gray building and escorted inside, I was met with the beautiful eyes of my little sister. They had already got the two from daycare right as my mother dropped them off and unfortunately, because of my retaliation at the fetching of us, they had decided to separate my older sister and me from our two younger siblings. When I overheard this, I concluded that it was my responsibility to tell my remaining family, and at that moment, every person but those three sets of beautiful young eyes had lost my trust. Our goodbyes were long and full of tears, but eventually, it was time to separate and meet our foster parents. My older sister immediately loved the couple and their cat and was fine with staying in the home for two weeks, but for me, that first night had the feeling of eons. I tried to run away, but being eight comes with the disadvantage of not having a sense of direction, so it became pointless to try. I had cursed the world for my stupidity, for my mom’s lack of strong will and powerlessness against the cops, and for the fact that I would forever be haunted by the remembrance of this pain. I continue to curse the world for making trust such a dangerous tool easily set into others.