When I first saw Akyra’s file, I almost skipped past it.
Seventeen years old. Over a decade in the system. Twenty-four placements. “Hard to place,” they’d written. As if she were furniture. As if trauma didn’t stick to you like a second skin after being moved house to house since kindergarten.
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But something in me paused. Her eyes in the photo weren’t angry. Just… tired. Like she had already decided not to expect anything good.
Still, I didn’t think she’d stay.
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The first few weeks were quiet. She barely spoke. Ate dinner with earbuds in. Didn’t even decorate her room.
Then one night, as I was cleaning up the kitchen, I heard the sound of music coming from upstairs. It was soft, melancholy, but it was the first sound I had heard her make that felt like a form of communication, like a sign that she wasn’t shutting the world out entirely. I knocked on her door softly before I opened it, not wanting to intrude, but also hoping to break through whatever barrier she had built around herself.
When I stepped inside, she was sitting on the bed, a guitar in her lap. Her fingers were moving slowly over the strings, and she had her eyes closed as she sang, almost in a whisper. The song wasn’t anything I recognized—it was her own. The words were raw, filled with emotion, and they spoke of loss and pain, but also a longing for something better.
I didn’t say anything at first. I didn’t want to interrupt. I simply watched her, this girl who had been through so much, who had seen so much hurt, yet still found a way to pour it all out through music. When she finished, she didn’t look at me. She didn’t even stop playing. But I could see the tension in her shoulders, the vulnerability in her posture.
“That was beautiful,” I finally said, surprising both of us. I wasn’t even sure why I said it—maybe it was because, for the first time, I felt like I was seeing Akyra, not the girl in the system, not the file marked “hard to place,” but the person who was quietly fighting her own battles in a way I couldn’t have understood until that moment.
She glanced up, her face hardening, as if she was bracing for rejection. “It’s just a song,” she said, her voice flat.
“I know,” I replied gently. “But it’s more than that. You have a way of making your pain into something beautiful.”
She didn’t say anything else. I could see she wasn’t ready for a conversation about it. So, I did what I had learned over the years to do: I gave her space.
Over the next few weeks, there were more small moments like that. Akyra began to show bits of herself, little glimpses that told me she was more than just a girl who had been hurt by the world. She started to talk a little more, especially after I began taking her to appointments and activities that I hoped would help her settle. Music lessons, counseling sessions, volunteer work at the local animal shelter—anything to help her see that there were people out there who cared, people who were willing to stay. And slowly, the walls that she’d built up started to crumble.
But there were still so many quiet nights when I’d find her sitting in her room, staring out the window, a world of thoughts swirling in her mind. I would stand by the door, just for a moment, wondering what was going through her head, what it must have been like for her all these years, being tossed from one home to the next. No one had stayed. No one had chosen her.
And then, one evening, she surprised me again.
“I want to meet my real mom,” Akyra said, out of nowhere. Her voice was small, but there was a determination in it that I hadn’t seen before. She was sitting on the couch, her hands folded tightly in her lap, her eyes focused on the floor.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Akyra,” I said softly, trying to keep my voice calm. I had known that this day would come eventually, but I wasn’t sure if she was ready for what she might find.
“I need to know,” she insisted, her voice trembling. “I don’t even know who she is. I need to know why she didn’t want me.”
I didn’t have an answer to that. All I knew was that Akyra’s birth mother had been one of the countless young girls who had struggled with addiction, with poverty, with choices that didn’t give her a chance to stay in her child’s life. Akyra had been removed from her care before she was even two years old. There had been no contact, no attempt to reconnect, no remorse from the mother’s side, at least not in any way that was visible to the system.
But Akyra didn’t know that. She only knew that her whole life had been one big question mark. So I did something I never thought I would do—I helped her search for her mom.
The process was long and grueling. We spent weeks combing through records, reaching out to people who might know something, anything. The more we searched, the more I saw Akyra’s determination growing. It was no longer just about finding answers—it was about reclaiming her story, her identity.
Then, one rainy afternoon, we found her.
It wasn’t a happy reunion. In fact, it was nothing like what Akyra had imagined. Her birth mother was living in a rundown apartment on the edge of town, battling addiction and depression. She wasn’t the picture of a loving parent. She didn’t apologize or show remorse. There was no tearful embrace, no rush of love or understanding.
Instead, there was anger. Anger that Akyra had dared to seek her out. Anger that Akyra didn’t understand the reasons she had given up on her.
But through it all, Akyra stood her ground. She asked questions, not to make her mother feel guilty, but to understand her own place in the world. And when she left that meeting, she didn’t look broken. She looked stronger. More certain.
“I’m not her,” Akyra said as we walked back to the car. “I’m not her, and I don’t need to be.”
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know how to comfort her, how to make this experience better. But I knew one thing for sure: she was choosing her own path now.
It wasn’t long after that, a few weeks to be exact, when Akyra did something that completely caught me off guard.
She asked if she could legally change her name.
Her request wasn’t about running away from her past—it was about reclaiming her future. She wanted to leave behind the history of abandonment and disappointment. She wanted to choose who she would become. And so, with the full support of me and a few close friends, we helped her through the legal process.
And as I stood beside her that day in the courthouse, watching her sign the papers to legally change her name, I realized something profound.
I wasn’t just her foster mother anymore. I wasn’t just the person who had taken her in out of duty or because it was the right thing to do. No, I had become her family. She had chosen me. She had chosen me after all these years, after all the pain and the uncertainty. She had chosen to trust me when so many had failed her.
And as she smiled at me, the first genuine smile I had seen in years, I knew that the journey we had both been on was only just beginning.
Sometimes, life doesn’t give us what we expect. We think the people who should love us will always stay, and we think that we have to stay the same person we’ve always been. But the truth is, we all have the power to change. We have the power to choose who we want to be, no matter the past.
Akyra showed me that sometimes, the most profound connections are the ones we choose. She had spent years waiting for someone to choose her, but in the end, she realized that the power to choose her own path—and to decide who she would become—was always within her.
If you’re waiting for someone to choose you, remember: the most important choice is the one you make for yourself. Don’t let the past define who you are, and don’t wait for someone else to write your story. You have the power to choose, just like Akyra did. And when you do, everything changes.
Please share this with someone who might need to hear this message. Life is full of unexpected twists, but we all have the strength to rise above them. Let’s continue to choose ourselves, every single day.
