I’ve shared some stories about my foster family before. There was a third story I wanted to share, but as important as it was to me at the time, I didn’t think I could remember it well enough to accurately share here. That was until I was speaking with Mama (my foster mother) and realized she remembered that day, and between the two of us, I could piece together enough to hopefully do the story justice.

At first, I didn’t understand why the other foster children stayed with us. I had been told that they stayed with us because their birth parents couldn’t care for them properly at that moment, but originally, that got translated in my mind to “they were wrongly stolen from their parents by the government, like I was.”

It would take some time for me to catch on to the details the kids shared and eventually piece together their stories and the real reasons they were placed with us. My view, and tolerance, of the other foster kids would change drastically as I finally started to understand these circumstances.

At first, I thought most of them had attitudes or behavioral problems; they were always angry or crying or refusing to talk to anyone or cussing, etc.; I was too young and lacking in self-reflection to realize that my own behavior when I was first placed was no better than what I now begrudged in new kids.

Honestly, I resented even the most well-behaved of foster children for the simple reason that they tended to monopolize Dad and Mama’s attention when they arrived. I’d gotten over my original resentment of being in foster care and instead quickly began to appreciate the simple stability and supportive attention I got from my foster parents, which Mom could never quite emulate. I didn’t like having that attention I desperately craved stolen away by new kids when they arrived, and so originally, I resented all new arrivals.

Eventually, I’d come to understand the horrors some of these kids had faced and realize that, as far as foster children went, I was comparatively lucky. I still had a loving mother, even if she wasn’t quite able to provide for me as well as I needed. I had never had a parent die, I’d never been beaten or verbally abused, I didn’t suffer from physical or emotional issues my parents couldn’t properly care for, I had never grown up in utter poverty, wondering if I would eat that night or fearing for my safety. By contrast to many of the other foster kids, I’d lived a life of luxury!

When I was older, I even started to form some twisted version of imposter syndrome as a result of this, worrying that my foster story was so positive compared to the average that I somehow didn’t deserve to have such great foster parents. Every day I stayed with my foster parents I was using up a room that could have been offered to a child who had a far greater need for it than I had. Eventually I started insisting Mom leave me home alone to fend for myself for a week or two when she went to get help instead of trying to wait until a time my foster family had an open room for me – she would always try to wait to get care until she was assured my foster family had a room available to take me in – because I felt like other kids needed my foster parent’s more than I did, no matter how much I would have rather stayed with them.

I think I was just starting to make the realization that other foster kids had it worse than I did at the time of this story. At this time, a foster boy, just a little older than me, had been with us for a week or so. Mama won’t violate the privacy of [Boy] by telling me why he was placed with us even today, but reading between the lines of what Mama said when we talked about him and going off of some of the things I think I remember [Boy] saying while he was with us I’d say he most likely had suffered both neglect and emotional abuse from one of his parents.

I don’t recall the exact cause of the incident, but [Boy] had just gotten angry at Dad and had been half yelling and half crying at him. [Boy] shouted the sort of things that would have gotten Sis or me in serious trouble if we said them, but which Dad mostly just took from [Boy] before suggesting that [Boy] should try taking some time to himself in his room to calm down. I was used to, and surprisingly okay with, the idea that the rules tended to be different for a new foster kid than they were for ‘the family’ – which I insisted on considering myself part of – so I didn’t get upset over that.

Instead, since [Boy] was clearly upset, I decided to go to his room to try to offer him a hug and sympathy with the naive idea that would somehow magically fix all his problems as if we were all on an episode of Full House.

Let’s just say I was not successful. He got angry and started shouting at me. I can’t recall exactly what he said, but I have a vague memory that there may have been some variant of toxic masculinity involved, that a Real Man doesn’t get hurt or need emotional support so my trying to offer him support was an insult as it implied he wasn’t a Real Man – though it’s quite possible I’m conflating that memory with another one from a different foster kid. The only thing I can say for certain is that I ended up getting a verbal lashing from [Boy], which led to my fleeing his room and curling up on my favorite battered rocking chair in the living room, trying my hardest to prevent myself from crying, and failing at it.

Then Mama came up to me and asked to sit with me. Soon, I was in her lap as she rocked both of us and comforted me as she asked me to tell her what happened. I complained it wasn’t fair that he shouted at me when I was just trying to help – again, utterly lacking the self-reflection to realize I’d basically done the same thing to my foster parents when I was first placed. Mama agreed it wasn’t fair but assured me [Boy] didn’t mean it and that sometimes people lash out at others when they are hurting without realizing it.

Now, this next part I don’t recall at all, but Mama swears this is what I told her. Supposedly I told mama the reason I’d tried to go to [Boy] and comfort him was because Sis (my foster sister) was away that week visiting her family and I figured since she wasn’t around to fix things for [Boy] the way she had done for me It was my job as the next oldest and most experienced daughter of the family to comfort the new kids on her behalf.

I have to admit, even if I don’t remember that part, it does seem like the sort of thing I would have tried. I idolized Sis and had this unrealistic view of Sis as a miracle worker who could fix every child’s problems. I’d envied her ability and natural charisma that helped her befriend, comfort, and help other foster children, and so it was natural I’d want to follow in her footsteps, I suppose.

Mama says that I recovered from the harsh words quickly enough, but continued to seem upset that I’d failed so spectacularly at my self-appointed task to comfort [Boy]. I’d proven I couldn’t do the stuff I idolized Sis for being good at and was upset with myself for being such a failure at it. Mama praised me for wanting to help, even if my first attempt was an absolute failure, and assured me I still could help [Boy] if I was still willing.

She told me that what he most needed was a friend his age, but considering I’d just tried to offer my friendship and got so brutally shut down, I didn’t see how I was supposed to be that friend for [Boy]. Mama told me that once [Boy] was ready for it, she would likely come to me to get me to help, and if I was still willing to help, all I had to do was say yes when she asked me if “I would please” do something, and try to be understanding of [Boy] if he got angry or upset at times.

Later, after both of us kids had time to calm down some, Mama brought [Boy] to me and asked me if “I would please” play a game with her and [Boy]. [Boy] was still angry; he didn’t know how to play at first, which led to his getting frustrated, and he’d prove to be a sore loser.

However, when he got upset or frustrated, Mama would ask if I ‘would please’ forgive him or otherwise give me hints on how to handle [Boy]’s behavior, and so with her guidance, we got through a few games like this and slowly [Boy] grew less frustrated and actually started to enjoy himself.

Later on, when I was alone with Mama, she praised me and told me I was a huge help with [Boy], but I didn’t understand how playing a few silly games could possibly be all that special. Mama insisted that having a peer to play with [Boy] was far more important to him than I realized and that she was proud of me for helping. Part of me suspected she was just making this up to make me feel useful, but I loved the praise and attention and wanted to believe I might be as helpful as Sis was. So, I let myself be convinced I had been useful and eagerly promised to help with other foster kids if Mama or Dad asked if I ‘would please’ do so.

It turns out that the ‘would you please’ phrase was something of a special code phrase that Mama and Dad had already been using for years with their kids. A normal please was nothing special, but if they added some variant of ‘would you’ in front of the please, that translated to “I believe your doing this would greatly help a foster child, and we would deeply appreciate it if you would assist us here.” I hadn’t realized it before, but they had used, and still occasionally continued to use, the same phrase with Sis and my foster brother when there were things they needed my siblings to do for me since the day I arrived.

The difference was that now I knew the secret phrase, and I felt so proud that I was entrusted with this secret. It made me feel like I was now considered a proper part of the family, not just another foster kid. And with that acceptance and trust the family had placed in me by sharing their secrets, there came the solemn duty as an official part of the family to help welcome in the new foster kids when asked to do so.

I still had the right to refuse a ‘would you please’, and there were times I would; but at the same time, I knew a please was far more important if ‘would you’ was put in front of it, and most of the time I would agree when they broke that phrase out. Sometimes I resented hearing the phrase, as it felt like the ultimate trump card; I had to give up arguing and give in even if I didn’t want to when they played that card. But I did want to help the other foster kids, and Mama and Dad were always careful about not abusing the phrase too often, so I believed whatever they were asking must be legitimately important when they used the phrase.

More importantly to me, every time they used the phrase, and I went along with what they wanted, they would always come to talk to me later to personally thank me for helping. They would tell me how proud they were of me and how much good I did, and often would try to offer me some special treat or concession to make up for whatever they asked me to do for the foster child. I was desperate for praise and adored every second of it, so I’d have done almost anything they asked if they stuck a ‘would you please’ in front of it, just for the praise and the sense of usefulness I knew would come from it. We’re all lucky they never asked me if I would please rob a bank for them, because there’s a non-trivial chance I’d have tried!

It would take longer for me to realize just how much some of the seemingly trivial things they asked of me really had helped. Dad, and especially Mama, were very good at understanding what fosters needed and subtly deploying us kids to handle situations they knew they couldn’t. To give the most obvious example, during our last talk, Mama finally confirmed to me something I’d long suspected about my own early foster experience. It wasn’t a mere coincidence that Sis happened to come knocking on my door to offer me a hug at just the right time back in my first story. Dad had been the one to see that I was hurting and recognized that I wouldn’t accept an adult’s comfort, so he had sent Sis to do what he couldn’t. I’d always thought Sis to be a miracle worker that just magically knew how to fix any foster child’s problems, but I eventually learned many of Sis’s supposed miracles were the result of Mama or Dad pointing her in the right direction and asking her if she ‘would please’ do whatever a child needed to comfort them at that moment.

I still remember the first time Mama told me that there was a new foster girl who was upset and really needed a friend her age and ‘would I please’ go talk to her. I felt so much pride and confidence knowing I was finally going to get to do for another what Sis had once done for me! I didn’t end up doing as well as Sis had with me; not only was I not as experienced at it, but the truth is Sis always had a certain natural charisma I lacked, but even if I wasn’t perfect, I still helped, and I was still quite proud of myself for doing so.

To this day, decades later, some of my proudest memories are still those times when I was asked if I ‘would please’ do something for a foster kid and I saw the good it did when I agreed to help. I owe my foster family a debt of gratitude I could never hope to properly repay, but those moments when I was called on by Mama or Dad to do something for another foster kid made me feel that maybe, in some small way, I had managed to pay forward a tiny measure of that immense debt I owed them for caring for me.

If Mama called me up right now and asked me if I would please do something for her, I’d do it immediately without asking any questions, no matter how strange it was, because I’d be certain I’d be helping someone who needed it. It’s the least I can do after all that my foster family did for me.

Related:
Fostering A More Personalized Environment (And Making Us Cry)
Fostering A More Comfortable Environment (And Making Us Cry)

I moved from the UK to Switzerland to do my doctorate. As part of the process, I get a letter stating that I need to do some modules to “catch up” my knowledge, with a list of about five to ten modules. I think this is odd, but I will discuss it with my supervisor when I start.

Well, I show him the letter, and he is really shocked by the number of modules. One or two is normal from unknown universities where there is a knowledge gap the university wants addressed, but I graduated from a well-known British one so it shouldn’t be a problem.

It turns out the admissions office of the university was confused about my master’s degree as I did an MSci, not MSc. The difference is that it is an extra year is tacked onto the end of your undergrad without ending the degree, so you can still use the government student loans for your Master’s year. However, it is still following the undergraduate calendar, so it is worth fewer credits even though it is still a Master’s.

Therefore, the admissions office saw the lower number of credits and decided that while I had the necessary Master’s, as they wouldn’t allow a student to study just from an undergrad degree, I needed to do the same number of credits to make up the shortfall, but while I was doing my doctorate.

It wouldn’t have been a problem, but they were a full semester’s worth of studying, and as my supervisor said, “you’re here for a doctorate in the lab, not half a Master’s in the lecture hall.” He told me he would sort it out.

How did he do it? By having a very long, loud and animated conversation with the dean of studies saying “either you accept she has a Master’s, and she is ready for the doctorate and so doesn’t need to do credits for the sake of a number, or she doesn’t have an acceptable Master’s in which case you need to accept her as a Master’s student until she is ready for the doctorate I want her to do.”

My supervisor won, and all the credit requirements were dropped.

Back in high school, a classmate and very close friend of mine had a big crush on a girl we often met on our way to the bus stop. We knew she had a boyfriend, but nevertheless, my friend wanted to try hitting on her. The problem was that both he and I were absolute beginners with the art of flirting, and it never went past him talking about how beautiful she was.

Until he went on vacation with another classmate and came back all proud of having done his move: he had sent her an anonymous postcard with a declaration.

A few days went by, and the post service delivered the postcard, after which we heard through friends of friends that she had received an anonymous postcard and was fuming about its contents, and that if she could find who had sent it, it would be their end.

I asked my friend what he had written. He told me that to get the courage to write it, he and the other friend had drunk some beer, and then the other friend came up with the awesome declaration: “Your hair is so long and beautiful that I always wondered if it’s fake.”

It didn’t take much to realise that the other friend was also a total novice.

CONTENT WARNING: Passing Of An Old Pet

I was inspired to share this story with you by seeing a related one here.

By the grocery store I used to work at while I was in college, there was an alley cat that everyone called “Razorface”.

Middle-aged, for a cat, and full of p*** and vinegar. He was a Tuxedo cat with striking golden eyes who was missing an ear. He’d been known to sneak up on people who were shouting at employees in the parking lot and giving the shouters an earful, growling and yowling at them.

Once, he even bit a woman who had thrown a slushy at an employee.

He hung around in a burrow that had probably formerly belonged to some other animal, dug into a patch of dirt near the grocery store. Whenever a can of cat food was damaged out, for whatever reason, we’d leave it out near his den.

One day, while I was dealing with the dumpster at the end of my shift, Razorface approached me. It was uncommon that he’d approach so openly; usually, he preferred to sneak up on people.

I figured he was hungry, and was trying to remember if there was a box of cat food that had been damaged out or not. He yelled at me and then started walking away. Then he walked back towards me, yelled at me again, and started walking away pointedly again.

I got the idea and followed him. He led me to the tree in the parking lot over his den, and then vanished into the den. I waited a bit, uncertain, and he came out of the den with a kitten. The kitten looked nothing like him, being nearly fully white with green eyes and a small orange spot on the top of her head. She had a badly damaged paw and was bleeding sluggishly.

At first, I thought Razorface had attacked the kitten, to be honest, but it quickly became clear that Razorface was aware that the kitten was hurt and was looking for help.

I brought the kitten, and Razorface, with me to an emergency vet… that put me back about $800 for the kitten alone, and another $600 to get Razorface looked at. It had been difficult for a poor college student to cover!

After that, I took both cats in. Razorface had a harder time adjusting to domestic life than the kitten, whom I named ‘Esper’ and he didn’t enjoy getting neutered, even though it did calm him down a lot.

Razorface died about four years after I took him home, of kidney disease. Esper lived to be about seventeen; that’s pretty old for a cat. She was four or five months old when I met her, though the vet had to amputate what was left of the paw. She passed last year of cancer.

Some of my coworkers at the time had also, jokingly, ‘refused to forgive me’ for taking Razorface home and thus removing their guardian angel.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The editors deliberated as to what category this story would fall under, but in the end, we settled on ‘Related’ because pets are family!

In 2019, I started working for a big accounting firm right after college. I already had a bit of experience because of a few internships, and I’ve always worked part-time since I was sixteen, but I was mainly hired because I spoke four languages and they had business with a lot of foreign clients.

I was hired as a consultant, but I did a lot of things. I really enjoyed organizing big files, and I had a lot of experience with Excel, since I had paid for a professional course during college, so besides my usual work of handling some clients and doing my reports, I was also doing a lot of things like sales reports, client reports, basically most of the Excel files, and a lot of computer-based tasks.

When COVID hit, and we started to work from home, I was able to automate most of my tasks for two or three months. I was able to program a code that would basically do the sales reports (the most important file) and a few more automatically, and I could update it if needed.

My boss was over the moon with the update part, but I did not tell him that it was being done automatically; I did not tell anyone, as a matter of fact. This gave me a lot of extra time to talk to clients and pick up a few extra new ones, which gave me a considerable pay rise, since I was highly appraised during the meetings with my direct boss and a few higher-ups.

Whenever I did take time off, I had to delegate all of my tasks and clients’ meetings to anyone I trusted, which was mostly Jimmy (fake name). Jimmy was a good personal friend of mine and was married to my cousin, so we would occasionally take time off at the same time for a vacation or family gathering.

I was saving my vacation days for summer and winter, and in the only days I took during 2020, I left my tasks running automatically. I told Jimmy that he didn’t need to do them, and he really didn’t ask questions since it was less work for him.

Jimmy and I also took a few days off at the same time to go to a wedding in another country. I was told by my boss that he would let it happen, but to not make it a habit to take our vacation at the same time, and that I would have to work a bit harder to thank him for his good deed. He also pointed out that my sales weren’t getting any bigger in the last few months. I reminded him that I had the highest number of sales in all the department and I was the only one with the extra tasks, but he just told me that it wasn’t a big deal, and that anyone could have done that.

So, when I went on vacation, I turned off all of my automated tasks.

This was a big deal, since it was the end of the month and my boss would need all my reports completely updated. Apparently, they had to put five people to do my tasks so that they could finish the reports, which delayed the work of that team, and the reports were late and lacked a few things that mine had.

All the higher-ups weren’t happy with my boss, since he showed them the reports late, and they were clearly a downgrade from mine, and they also commented that there was a team failing a lot of deadlines that month (which was the team assigned to do my tasks).

As soon as I got back to work, I got a call from my boss apologizing for not appreciating my work with the tasks, and asking me not to take time off at the end of the month ever again. I told him that it was an unreasonable request, and I reminded him that he already approved of my week off in two months. He straight-up told me that it wasn’t approved.

I am not an angry person, but I got really upset about that. He told me that as long as it wasn’t at the end of the month, I could take time off whenever I wanted. Okay, fine.

As soon as I got out of the call, I started looking for other jobs, and I scheduled all of my time off (about three weeks) in the next month (the busiest month for us). Most of the big clients didn’t speak English, and they only wanted to talk to me, but nevertheless, my boss approved.

Subsequently, Jimmy also scheduled time off at the same time, so despite not being the end of the month, someone had to do my tasks since I would, once again, turn them off.

Apparently, they weren’t able to handle either my clients or my tasks, so they just ignored the tasks until I got back. This caused some of the clients to get really angry, since no one could really assist them as well as I could (I actually got a call on my personal phone from one of them, asking me to assist him in my personal time).

This was a huge client. He was actually a great person who had huge respect for me, so I said it was fine as long as he came to my location (I was on vacation with my family).

Long story short, he came with a yacht and invited all of my family to go there and to the villa he rented. I spent a whole day helping him. Best of all, he was more than happy to offer me a job once he knew I was looking for other jobs, since apparently I had sent my CV to one of his buddies’ companies.

It was a great offer with lots of benefits, and the offer would also extend to Jimmy, who was actually going to work for me, with a great salary. In my country, you don’t have to give two weeks’ notice to your boss, so I just quit when I returned and told him that I wouldn’t do any of the sales reports. He was p***ed, but there was nothing he could do.

I am still in the same company, but with a higher position now. I don’t really have a schedule; I just have to travel a lot, which is fine by me.

Last I checked with a few friends that still work in my old company, they had to hire a whole team to handle my tasks, and a few of the clients quit because they weren’t satisfied with how they were being handled. Value your employees more!