Imagine feeling as if you’ll never belong, as if you have no input whatsoever over what happens to you, that your life is spiraling out of control and all you can do is watch it happen. While some people are fortunate enough never to have these feelings, they were permanent fixtures in the childhood of Ashley Rhodes-Courter.
In her memoir, “Three Little Words,” Rhodes-Courter reveals the realities and failings of life in foster care in a harshly honest tone. She weaves a storyline by describing memories from her past and mixing them with little bits of her own self-critique. Written for a young adult audience, the writing in this book is simple and easy to get through, but the content is so gripping that I had a truly difficult time putting it down.
It is her honesty and her ability to draw you in from the beginning that makes you care about what happens to this little girl when she is tossed so nonchalantly into foster care. You are there with her when she is ripped from her mother, when she suffers abusive foster parents and when she realizes that her mother is not going to come back. One of the best aspects of this book is that she writes in such a way that the reader can’t help but go along with her on an emotional journey – but it’s a trip that you actually want to take.
We’ve probably all heard the horror stories of kids who are shuffled around in foster care, but this girl actually lived it. Ashley Rhodes-Courter lived in 14 different foster homes in the space of only nine years. Before she turned 4 years old, she and her infant brother were taken away from their mother; it is a little unclear the role their mother played in the separation. She didn’t want her children to be taken away and it isn’t entirely clear why they were taken away to begin with. A vague reason is the stepfather being in trouble with the law, but in the beginning, it doesn’t seem as though her mother had done anything wrong.
This was an interesting moment of confusion for me – at first I thought that Rhodes-Courter was leaving out some painful memories, but as you get to the end of the book, you realize that she hasn’t spared any other details, so why now? My guess for this lack of clarity about her mother’s role is actually a criticism of the foster care system. As you see later in the book, there is a serious incompetence on the part of the social workers and aides in charge of Ashley and her brother.
I think that she is hinting in the beginning the foster care system did not actually have much reason to keep Ashley and her brother away from their mother. But after some misfiled paperwork, they slipped so far through the cracks that when something finally was done about it, their mother had become incapable of caring for them due to drug addictions and bad choices. I don’t think that she is actually blaming the foster care system for all of her time floating from home to home or for her mother going so far off the deep end, but she is definitely saying that the system contributed to it.
From hopeful beginnings to devastating disappointments, Rhodes-Courter reveals both the good and bad moments of her childhood. This book is much more than a complaint against her bad foster parents; it reveals the human side of foster care and shows that although it is hard, some children do make it through.
Being a former foster child myself and having worked with foster children for many years after being adopted, I was all too familiar with many of the stories that Rhodes-Courter told. This memoir served as a reminder for me that there are people out there who will take advantage of a child, but that there are also people out there who will go to any lengths to be someone’s savior.
Both a questioning of humanity and an affirmation of it, this book is a success in many ways. As for the “three little words” the book takes its title from, they aren’t the ones that you’d expect. Go read it for yourself and discover what they really are.
Melinda Truelsen is a graduate student in literature and a Mustang Daily book columnist. Her column, “Reading Between the Lines,” appears every Wednesday.