“I suspect there is another file…”
Category:Child Advocacy,Creative Writing,Foster Care,Memoirs
I was five years old. Someone decided that mattered enough to open a file. To remove me from the only home I ever knew.
Decades later I went looking for answers. Not justice. Not confrontation. Just… the beginning. Where it started. Why.
What I found was a file that knew I existed but not how I got there. A ward of the province. Where, when, and under what circumstances: unknown. Placed in a home. Why: unknown.
Unknown. The word appears so casually. As if a child’s origins are a minor administrative gap rather than the whole story.
And then this: “I suspect there is another file.”
They suspect.
Somewhere there is a file that knows what this one won’t say. And nobody thought that mattered enough to find it.
In writing.