It's called ReMoved, and it was supposedly created for the purpose of bringing awareness to training up loving and caring foster parents. A good motive, I guess, and I found it extremely well-made, moving, and upsetting... perhaps more than the average viewer, because I lived through this... but what seems so much more prevalent is the flawed concept of the removal itself. It wasn't with the foster parents that the issue lied, but with the unnecessary and traumatizing separation of the brother and sister. The downward spiral of her emotions, her sanity, her behavior, was a result of the constant mistreatment and rejection she was made to suffer. The re-locations. The all-consuming worry over the sibling she was separated from because she knew he was scared and she knew he needed her and she just wanted to tell him that it would be okay.
Although so much of this short film was nauseatingly accurate in its description of the mental state of a child forced through this unnatural procedure, I found myself wishing that someone would make a short film (any kind of film) depicting a child (or children) who were removed for no reason at all... who didn't have abusive parents, who didn't come from a broken home. Who were taken on the grounds of mere suspicion alone. Like my family. Because perhaps you watch this and you think "oh, but her father was abusive... oh, but it was for her own good..." What would you say if she was taken for no good reason whatsoever? What would you say if she was made to undergo this mental torment, this traumatizing upheaval of her life, of everything she held dear, for the sake of satisfying an intrusive agency's suspicion? It wouldn't make any sense. It would make it so much worse, because there'd be no explanation. No reason for this useless pain.
It didn't make any sense to me either. I come from a home filled with laughter. With love. With a mother who read me to sleep every night and a father who taught me how to pray. The foster homes and institutions we went through were filled with strangers, with loud, screaming children, with the sounds of a foreign language, with tears and bewilderment and loneliness and confusion. How does one tell the world of that pain, and expect them to empathize?
How could you ever understand where I come from? The little girl wonders.
How could you? I wonder, too.
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