Youth Blog

[Editor’s Note: May is recognized annually throughout the U.S. as National Foster Care Month. Cristopher Espino is a former foster youth and a current university student, advocate, and Youth Advisory Board Member of the Reproductive Health Equity Project for Foster Youth (RHEP). In the following piece, Cristopher shares deeply personal reflections of his experiences in the foster system.]

The first thing I remember is the light.

Not sunlight in the way most people mean it, not something benevolent, golden, forgiving, or free. This light arrived timidly, almost apologetically, leaking beneath a swollen wooden door in a crooked ribbon so thin it looked wounded. It crept across the concrete floor with the hesitation of something trespassing. The door itself carried a small square window, crosshatched with wire that fractured the glass into hard diamonds, little prison panes that made even daylight look incarcerated. Even the light had to splinter itself apart just to enter that room.

I would sit on the floor and watch it with the kind of attention children reserve for storms, funerals, stray dogs, and unfamiliar voices.

Watch it crawl. Watch it tremble. Watch it lengthen. Watch it recede.

Watch it vanish altogether.

And then, inevitably, I would listen.

At first, there was only silence, but not the peaceful kind. This silence was damp, swollen, breathing. It pressed against my eardrums like deep water. Then came the footsteps. Soft at first. Uncertain.

Measured. A faint percussion somewhere beyond the hallway, like the building itself was thinking. Then louder. Nearer. Heavier. Each step carrying consequence, authority, unpredictability, exhaustion.

I learned to measure distance by sound. I learned to measure danger by pacing.
I learned to measure safety by pauses.

I learned to measure adults by the way they reached for the doorknob. Who is it?

Is it someone patient? Is it someone hurried?

Is it someone indifferent?

Is it someone who will speak gently?

Is it someone who will speak about me as though I am not in the room at all? The questions arrived faster than the footsteps ever did.

In those moments, my mind became a hallway lined with mirrors, every reflection distorted differently. I rehearsed reactions before conversations began. I studied tones before sentences finished. I learned, prematurely and almost professionally, how to make myself smaller, quieter, easier. Children are not supposed to become weather vanes for adult emotion, yet there I was, turning toward every shift in pressure, every draft of tension, every approaching storm.

The system that claimed to protect me resembled less a home and more an enormous mechanical labyrinth, all hinges and locks and fluorescent buzzing, where children were passed from room to room like files in a cabinet no one fully intended to open. It was a strange allegory for care: doors everywhere, but very few exits.

Sometimes I would cover my ears.

Not to silence the footsteps, but to silence the anticipation, because anticipation is its own species of fear. Waiting became louder than voices, louder than arguments, louder than keys rattling against metal rings, louder than the hollow buzz of overhead lights that never completely turned off. There is a particular cruelty in uncertainty because it forces the imagination to become its own captor.

People speak about foster care in statistics now.

In percentages. In placements.

In behavioral outcomes. In policy reforms. In quarterly reports and funding allocations.

But they rarely speak about the waiting.

They rarely speak about how a child learns to read footsteps before learning to read chapters in books. How a child studies facial expressions with more urgency than multiplication tables. How hypervigilance quietly transforms into personality. How survival disguises itself as maturity. How a locked door can slowly teach someone they are both protected and imprisoned at once.

There is a loneliness unique to institutional uncertainty. It does not arrive dramatically. It settles gradually, like dust gathering on windowsills, like mildew spreading invisibly through walls, like winter entering beneath a doorframe one cold thread at a time. You stop asking what comes next because next has never belonged to you.

That is the part that remained with me.

Not one singular catastrophe. Not one cinematic moment of violence. Not one headline-worthy incident that could be neatly summarized for strangers. What stayed was the atmosphere. The perpetual suspense. The exhausting vigilance. The ache of becoming intimately familiar with instability before becoming familiar with yourself.

The light. The door. The footsteps. The waiting.

The wondering.

Even now, years later, I can remember how it felt to sit there cross-legged on that floor while adults I had never met discussed my future somewhere beyond the walls.

I remember how small the room felt. I remember how enormous the uncertainty felt. I remember understanding, long before I had the language for it, that childhood was happening around me rather than to me.

I was waiting for the door to open, and, in many ways, the door was waiting to decide who I would become.

And even now, I wonder:

What does it mean to grow up in a world where even light must ask permission before entering?