By Jordin Richardson

About 135,000 children are adopted every year in this country, and in 2008,  I was one of those children fortunate enough to be adopted by a wonderful family.

Being adopted gives you a new look on life. You might think your life is perfectly fine then in one night everything can change. That is what it happened to me. My life changed in a single night.  I was four when I was taken away and put into foster care.  I was then moving from home to home, but didn’t understand why this was happening. My sisters and I thought we were never going to find a home and find people who want us.

One day, my case worker came and got me and my sisters from our foster home at the time, a family named the Fosters. We were in the car for about 20 mins, and then we came to this long driveway that we did not recognize. We came up to this house where a little boy was already outside, and then two people came walking out on the porch. My sisters and I were scared to death. We didn’t know these people, and we didn’t know how these people were going to treat us.  We had already met so many people in the last three years who were mean to us.

We walked inside the house, and they showed us the room that was our room. It was pretty big, so we walked in and set our stuff down on the beds. Then, they told us we could go play outside, which was already a little different than some of our previous experiences where we only went outside to do chores. 

In 2008 at the age of seven, my sisters and I finally had a place to call home and parents to call Mom and Dad. Foster care was at times a horrible experience for myself and my sisters, but lucky for us, that experience only lasted a few years. Since then, I’ve never had to worry about getting ripped away from my family in the middle in the night. Sandy and Kenny took us in as their own and treated as exactly like their own child.