My Peers Story

My mother’s name is Lindsey Bernaquez, formally Lindsey Davis, formally “Linda”. That was before it was changed to Lindsey. She was placed into foster care as around four years old in Seoul, South Korea. This was a few years after the Vietnam war had just ended and of course there was going to be sour feelings against american soldiers overseas. Her mother was Korean, and her Father was a soldier who was stationed in Korea. Around that time, in South Korea at least, the foster care systems would treat the children with an american parent much differently than the children with both Korean parents. She felt that she wasn’t loved for a large portion of her life because she couldn’t understand why people were treating her this way and why no one would take her in. She was brought to the US at five years old without knowing any English and was raised for the remainder of her childhood up in Holland, Michigan. Her mother was verbally and physically abusive, threatening that she would ‘send her back’ if she didn’t behave like some sort of broken toy or a sick pet. Her sister was adopted at the same time as her and they treated her with love and affection, but they treated her like dirt. She has told me many times that in all of the family portraits they took together, there are no pictures of them holding her. Only her sister. She tried to convince herself that she was loved and her mother actually wanted her, but she believed deep within her heart that that wasn’t true. This made her feel worthless, unwanted, unloved, and the second she turned 18 she left and joined the navy where she met my father and had me and my two siblings. While she hasn’t let the way her foster family treat her affect the way she treated us, she tells me that she can never let go of the hurt that her parents placed on her for not only coming from overseas, but being a kid brought into a family that you didn’t give birth to. It caused her to develop a guilt complex and internalized doubt about herself and is constantly doubting her role as a mother. She might not have been bounced around from home to home like a lot of foster kids, but the memories of what she endured in the system and at a home of chaos has affected the way she sees herself and is constantly worried about the kind of parent she is.