REDEFINING NORMAL AFTER FOSTER CARE WITH JUSTIN AND ALEXIS BLACK

hello and welcome back to foster care and unparalleled journey with jason and no amanda amanda’s all busy taking care of important things today so i am here with the authors of a new book alexis and justin black they have a book coming out called redefining normal how two foster kids beat the odds and discovered healing happiness and love we got it right here and if you’re on the live stream you can see the picture of it we’re going to live stream a couple of our episodes to facebook from for the the current future and see how that works out so that if you guys are part of the group you can see the the podcast and come up as a video live streamed ahead of time it’ll still come out on the uh will still come out on your podcast players here in a couple weeks but we want to give everybody in the group an opportunity to come see this and you also have an opportunity to get to see and kind of meet some of the guests a little bit so alexis and justin how are you guys doing today i’m doing great we’re doing great um book launch is coming up soon and we’re just really excited so yeah yeah today is the we’re recording this on the 8th of november and tomorrow the 9th is your book launch right yes well you guys sent me an advanced reader copy and i got about halfway through it and i have not gotten a chance to finish it yet and i’m not gonna lie i haven’t read a lot of books lately and this is one that had me pretty much tied into it you guys talk about a lot of important things in this book you know as it kind of jumps back and forth through your stories growing up i mean my goodness i was i’ve met a lot of kids we’ve seen a lot of trauma we’ve seen a lot of problems that kids go through and so what we’re what i’m doing over here is reading this going i hear common themes of things that a lot of people have dealt with you guys went through some pretty traumatic pasts and that’s what we really wanted to showcase is that our story isn’t abnormal this is what’s out here and so many young people are dealing with um and i’ve met so many young people that have gone through it but then also a lot of adults that i’m very open about my experiences and what they’ve gone through and and how so many adults i know that are still healing from their childhood and so we really wanted to show the importance of that healing and working through that in order to be who we are today because i’m not going to spend my entire life working through that and and hindered by by those experiences i want to grow and succeed so you know i’m 43 years old yeah 43. i lose track eventually i’m 43 years old and i’ve spent a lot of time working with a lot of people running into people and culture and time you know everywhere you go and i meet a lot of folks older than me 10 20 years older than me sometimes who have not worked through that trauma from their childhood exactly you guys are really wise how old are you guys now 26. okay 23. man he’s a baby i was a junior in college he was an incoming freshman yeah making me feel old our oldest daughter would have been 24 this year oh my oldest 22. so but yeah it’s it’s amazing to see a young couple like you guys who are already working through this drama because that’s that’s the thing that most people don’t understand it’s a level of trauma that so many kids go through and a lot of kids don’t go through it in foster care because you know like my wife is a great story she had a traumatic childhood but she was never in foster care nobody ever gave her any of those services reached out to her helped her through that stuff she had to do it on her own and i talk about that all the time that the number of foster youth that are in foster care is over 400 000 but think about the kids who should have been in foster care and never were and that means that nobody advocated on their behalf and nobody set up for them nobody tried to help them and so that’s there’s so many services and things out there for foster youth that aren’t utilized but then what about the kids that should have been in in foster care and the resources that they’re not getting um is that they’re even further behind absolutely absolutely well i don’t want you guys to give away your whole book here necessarily but but you know maybe could can you talk about your childhoods and where you came from because i think it’s important to know where we came from to appreciate who we’ve become yeah yeah so um i grew up in detroit i’m from detroit and been there since pretty much the age of like 17 or 18 and um i entered the foster care system at nine years old because my parents deal with substance abuse issues and my dad was dealing with some of the same things and selling drugs and doing drugs and uh from there at nine years old um we for a while were on a run from child protective services i’m going back to our old neighborhoods living in abandoned housing and then it got to a point where we were just living in such extreme situations with no heat no water that we are transitioning to the foster care system and luckily i was able to live with family members for a while with my oldest brother and then living with my auntie for a while for six years before leaving there and then um being kicked out of there he just started going home from home uh eight months with of my brother’s best friend and getting into a group home right outside the city of detroit so from there just kind of feeling like uh you don’t belong in a certain place because you know you bounce around a lot and a lot of i feel like a lot of adults and people will give up on you easily so you start to create the sense of independence and um resentment towards a lot of people so going into college i um needed a sense of belonging so to speak and looking in the wrong directions for belonging but luckily i had a decent amount of godly values and christian values uh laid upon me in my heart to where i started to break away from it but i eventually came back to it and meeting alexis my freshman year she was a junior uh meeting her then it helped me kind of understand the situations that i’ve gone through and kind of cope with what i’ve been through and kind of process it in a way that it’s not normal what i’ve been through but i have an understanding that what i’m going through is something that can uh stop with my generation of people and you set the example for my children and my nephew’s nieces or my children i have eventually that um the lifestyle that we’ve lived and our parents live is not normal and it’s not acceptable and it can’t change with me yes um and i’m alexis and uh i would say i was i’ll start um with my biological mom um where at six years old she actually communicated to the side and after that i went to live with my dad full time before that um i was only with him i think on weekends but they were going through a really ugly custody battle after he first decided that he didn’t want me and then he i guess he decided that he did and then i guess it was right at the end of that battle that my dad won and then she committed suicide soon after that and i went to live with him full time and that’s when the abuse began it was physical emotional and sexual abuse for about eight years until i was about 13 uh and then i i was forced to to kind of tell on him of what happened and then after that i went and lived with my aunt and uncle where he was also an unhealthy situation where my aunt was very much emotionally and mentally abusive and so i couldn’t really heal from past experiences and then to kind of compound onto that of what was going on i was in an abusive relationship throughout that time because for so many years i believe that love her and i believe that i believe a lot of the words that my abusers have told me about myself my worth my value uh different things like that and having low self-esteem and just not understanding my worth as a human as a woman um and as a partner and so kind of just navigating life through that from 13 to 21 being with that individual or 13 to 22 being with that individual and then eventually my aunt kicked me out of their house i picked up all my stuff and put it in the driveway my junior year of high school and uh that was actually the greatest thing that’s ever happened to me because i met my foster parents who are now my adoptive parents and they’re just the greatest humans on the planet oh and we’re actually living with them right now even though we just got married um because of the pandemic which is always fun but uh and i have you know at home with five siblings it’s an adjustment for everybody uh being newly married and things like that but um so yes and then i i met them my junior year of high school um and got adopted in december from them so yeah that’s my story in a nutshell wow that’s a lot of story and i’m just going to say that that i think you all glossed over a lot of details that you went to in the book there that really oh yeah yeah we can’t give you like the whole book yeah you got to read it yeah but then also remember that um most memoirs are this length for one person right and we wrote a memoir together for two people so we had to leave uh leave out a lot of things that have happened to us um but we just gave you the general gist of like this is what we’ve gone through absolutely absolutely and that’s my point is as i’ve been through a lot a lot of the book already and i’m just going to tell you that there’s way more in there and it’s definitely worth reading definitely worth reading thank you you know justin you know you were talking through you know things like you know you just said it like it’s just part of life right because it was part of your life but abandon living in abandoned housing and people i don’t think understand the the commonality of that uh i work in in st louis city i’m in different parts of the city and sometimes i’m in the parts of the city where there’s a lot of that going on the houses that that you look at and you think man why don’t they tear these houses down these things are all you know it’s all abandoned and just you know this part of the city is kind of rotting away but man when you’re there at the right time there’s a bit of a community in there yeah and i don’t know about detroit i’ve heard stories as i’m sure you’ve heard stories about st louis they both have a little bit of a reputation but most of those communities where people are living in abandoned houses and stuff like that man they’re tough neighborhoods is that what you grew up in yeah so i mean the thing is um we were homeless growing up pretty often like growing up or living in shelters and moving home to home like pretty frequently being kicked out because the night was rent was laid and so many other things i talked about the home we lived in on dexter avenue um for a while and that was kind of where we lived for the longest i feel like and we have like a home base as far as southwest detroit where a lot of our family members or my dad so i grew up and as more familiar with and that’s kind of what we call our neighborhood but um we were on dexter and then moving from there is where we kind of were on a run from child protective services and yeah um again that neighborhood was pretty rough as well and um a lot going on in that neighborhood a lot of drama a lot of things just was happening all that once neighborhood full of drug dealers and and just a lot of things happening at once and going from that to our old neighborhood uh we’re on run from some child protective services and again we were we go to living in an abandoned house and our old neighborhood had multiple abandoned houses and our grand our grandparents our house was abandoned and we had a family member i think an uncle living in there a few houses down from where we stayed there was abandoned house people lived in there and um we luckily we had a next-door neighbor who had lights and everything going on in their house and we kind of used an extension course plug-in [ __ ] putting tvs and video games and stuff like that but one thing i will say is that the idea of normal and redefining that like that those living situations were normal for me um growing up in somewhat poverty and it the things that made me happy were you know as a child as a 9 or 10 year old were like the video games and you know if my dad was able to buy us mcdonald’s with kfc or something like that those were the things that made us happy and if i showed snow or did like you know cut somebody’s grasp for money you know that those are the things that kind of brought me satisfaction and happiness and some sense of hope and faith that my parents would kind of um restore our lives and make things better also sustain me but the idea of poverty and that normal was kind of acceptable within the neighborhood within our lives and we kind of just adjusted because it was it was okay and it was acceptable now in the book you’ll you’ll learn that it did get to an extreme where a lot of us are getting sick and you know taking bucket showers and when the winter came along uh things got brutal um you start to notice certain things you know when you get a stomach virus and it gets passed along the house and everyone’s extremely sick living in its abandoned house during the winter time you kind of notice how bad things are getting and that’s when you start to notice as a child like this is not normal and it started to click but as far as poverty as far as abandoned housing drug use um drug dealing those are like normal ideas and acceptable ideas as a child and and that’s why we definitely normally the title is so important because i had to kind of go through a process of changing that that normal and those ideas and that culture for myself

you know i was wondering that exact question when you mentioned not having electric and and utilities and whatnot you know because i’m thinking in st louis it gets cold in the winter michigan is freezing yeah yeah it was uh we moved in instead of abandoned house i think around october i think november like a little bit before december i don’t know the exact date but a little bit before december and it wasn’t as bad in the fall and i mentioned this in the book it wasn’t as bad in the fall that’s why i think things are okay and acceptable but once january and february came around and you really start to see the extreme situations and it just really starts to impact you where you know it’s like okay i don’t know how we can survive in this house with no heat and everything and taking you know i honestly would be transparent i wasn’t cleaning myself i wasn’t taking showers because we didn’t have a shower you know some people would scoop up the snow off the ground and wait for it to melt in front of a heater and clean themselves but i just wasn’t cleaning i was like a nine or ten year old i’m like this is whatever i’m just not cleaning myself i didn’t think about it i don’t think so many 19 year olds probably think about that too much but uh i just wasn’t doing it and i just didn’t think about it and it got to a point where you know you i don’t think i described this in the book but how we use the bathroom and how we went about that and you know when it was my turn to i knew it i also knew how bad it was when it was my turn to kind of clean out the bucket that we use the bathroom in i had to carry that outside and like dump it in the alley and when it was full and i don’t describe this in the book but i kind of spilled it one time and got on my shoes and i’m like yeah i don’t like this

i can’t imagine you would you know i’ve met a few nine or ten year old boys and they don’t tend to be real big into taking care of themselves but no child i don’t think really cares about that until their parent like forces them to i know looking at my siblings i’m like come on now like you know it’s time for a shower alexis i’ll let you in a little thing about boys is they start to pay attention to that stuff when they start to pay attention to girls and they really always pay attention to that yeah i started noticing that too i have a 15 year old son right now and i’ll tell you right now here of late we’re in a place where like he takes a shower without being told to you know he takes care of his hair who’s looking who’s watching yeah there’s a young lady i i don’t remember her name right now and i’d probably get in trouble for mentioning it so i’ll leave that alone but but yeah that makes a difference for sure for sure but you know most of us never lived that life you know we hear about poverty and a lot of us think you know i grew up in a pretty important place you know and i grew up my father was a police officer my mother worked for the police department a different police department in their evidence room right and the police around here don’t pay a whole lot i’m certain somewhere they get paid a lot of money but we didn’t have a lot of money growing up and i knew that we were probably towards the lower end of the social economic strata in our area but man most of us don’t know what living poor really is living in true poverty you know how is that how has that affected you as a man as as you’ve begun to grow and and get married and looking into the future um yeah uh that’s a good question that’s a great question it’s i mean she actually knows it’s still like small habits that i try to you know use up any and everything in the house as far as food and i’m not real picky with food at all you know if it’s something that you know her mom cooks that i’m not i don’t like i’m not going to say it i don’t like it it’s just you eat it and you enjoy it you know you enjoy the small things and i i had to be intentional and growing up about not thinking in a poverty mindset of when is my next meal going to come when is my next opportunity going to come making quick money where uh instead of building a business i could be working at mcdonald’s making quick money and started seeing the long-term future goals and i think that’s the biggest thing about the poverty mindset we’re huge on quick instant fast food so to speak type of culture where you need it quick right now because you don’t know where your next meal is going to come from your next dollar is going to come from you don’t know it’s just you so uncertain about the future that you make rash decisions and and these are not logical decisions that you make but one of the things that has helped me as an adult and as a man is my faith in god and you see scriptures in matthew to talk about um you know not worrying about where your next meal will come from where you were what clothes you were on your back but seek first the kingdom of god and everything will be taken care of it’s like you know we submit ourselves to god and we don’t worry about anything else and we just move forward and just have that faith and that faith has really carried me into adulthood and that scripture was specifically for me and even though the the analogy of food and clothing may be again an analogy in the scripture but literally in my situation i i dealt so much of worrying about food and clothing and all that but and in my adulthood i noticed i talked to my mentor the other day uh we talked about um trying to find a job i’m fine i’m applying for a bunch of jobs working on three businesses i talked to him about getting into real estate and like nine different pathways and he talked to me like dude you need to stop you’re doing too much and i can tell just about how you’re talking that you you’re showing how you you sit the situation you grew up in and you want to try a million different avenues to try to make money and try to be successful and try to be happy but you’re going to wear yourself out and you’re not you’re not completing the will of god and what you need to do in life and you’re going to wear yourself out trying to overcompensate for the poverty you were in as a child and you’re trying a million different things and i was you know i was trying to study real estate try to get into that try to learn investing and work on the businesses and then try to find a job at the same time and then all these things all at once and i’m over compensating but i’ve learned to kind of take a step back and let uh just just let these opportunities come to my doorstep because once i have that faith these things will come to my doorstep and just worry about what i can control and just do my best in the areas that i’m working in like the businesses and the book and everything else yeah because i i see that like before we got married it was a lot of um anxiety he started having anxiety attacks and things of like i’m not ready to get married i can’t provide for you right now we’re not bringing an income and like it was just so much anxiety around that and i think that that’s really common for a lot of men um but then specifically men that come from poverty and and wanting better and wanting to provide for their family and and not seeing that um that realization right now and you know just i think that’s also the importance of having that strong partnership and then that relationship with god of um of like your partner reminding you that what you’re working on right now doesn’t have value and um and we’re building for the long term not for just right now like yes we can go out and get a job right now but i don’t think that that’s our path that we’re meant to be in this moment that we’re building legacies far beyond that and that’s with the book that’s with um our of our three businesses that we have right now and just the amount of progress that we’ve made in this last year is just phenomenal um and and opportunities will come but just not continuing to not try to just think today um and that’s that was always my uh my thing too because i was an extreme planner i plan my day down to the second and if i left my planner at home in high school i would i would try to call home like i’m going home for the day i don’t know my day’s going um planning gave me that stability and so to go to college and to to think long term far beyond like what am i doing in this moment what am i doing next week but what can i do next month next year five years from now and having people question me on that i didn’t know how to respond to that because i wasn’t used to to doing that because i was so used to planning for today and so i think that’s how we can complement each other as well as like is learning to play and beyond just today absolutely absolutely well alexis how about your childhood you know where you came from because you had a pretty deep story as well that was totally different than justin’s but it was still a deep and common story yeah um and so i grew up with a lot of abuse and sexual abuse and um and that was pretty i it was it was pretty common with the with the girls in my neighborhood in my apartment complex and i brought up to them of what was going on with me several of them said you know that that’s also happening with them and so that kind of rationalized what was going on in my home that that was normal um but then when i started to talk to other other friends maybe outside of my neighborhood once i um once i switched schools and i started talking about what was going on and them telling me like you know that’s not normal like this isn’t how my family dynamic is this that’s not healthy um and so that’s when i really started to to realize that and that was when i was like 11 or 12. um and so that’s when i really started to pay attention to that um and uh i also went through a lot of depression and suicidal thoughts and things and um in high school i was hospitalized um for being suicidal and i was put on medication i was on suicide watch and all these things and i i had at least four suicide attempts um i talked about that in the book and if i would have known my family history and that my mom committed suicide and that my grandma did also her mother uh that this runs in our family and i need to be proactive on that i need to be careful um and what can i do about that but not knowing that history of something so big like that um and how you know it could run in my genes like and i and i may not know that uh it’s it’s really impossible for me to kind of be proactive on that but then also just with so much compounded trauma um and i had one individual well when i was in high school i had um there was a girl that i knew that she died by suicide and um i had somebody tell me that if anybody were to do that in high school they thought it would have been me and that and how like that that hurt um and so that was also like a moment where i’m like dang i really gotta i gotta get this together i gotta figure this out and um seeing how that we talk about it a lot in the book of how it really impacted our relationship especially in the beginning um of the way that we communicated with each other and we i the way that we communicate with each other and the way that we handle conflict and i tell justin this all the time that um i feel that one of the hugest issues in families and communities is the lack of communication skills and lack of conflict resolution skills because if you don’t have either of those then you’re not understanding what a healthy relationship is in your home an intimate relationship in a professional relationship that you think that fighting is always the way out violence is always the way out um that there’s not there’s no real resolution there there’s no real um getting to the root of what’s happening and i always tell justin that you can look at an entire neighborhood and probably every single home is going through the same exact traumas but nobody knows that because nobody’s talking about it and everybody just tries to dress up their trauma in what they’re wearing what they buy things like that and and um and so i saw that in my life and in the way that i was dressing and um the way that i try to present myself to the world and just try to dress up my trauma in a way and cover it up um and not dealing with it until we kind of started dating

well i i gotta ask um what age did were you when the the abuse really started in in full force you know uh it was i was about six so actually the beef started before my mother died and i actually um you know as an adult you can look back and memories can be distorted but how i remember it is that the abuse started before my mother died and i think that’s why she was fighting so hard for her for my dad not to get custody um is because she saw how evil he was and in my mind i told her what was happening don’t know how true that is um but i think that’s when it began was was right before that um but then right around six was then it was when it really started um and i and my dad would um say things like you look like your mother and uh but then when he was mad he would say like you’re a bee just like your mother you know it was uh i think he took out a lot of that anger from her um on me and then he used a lot of that as sympathy like to other people like he would say like you know when he was late on a bill or when he was in court or whatever he would say like um oh you know my girlfriend died by suicide like you know for pity points and so uh i think i think a lot of that started because of um because it was like taking out a lot of that anger and frustration out on me um and nobody was there to supervise or check on me kind of thing well i imagine a lot of that had a lot to do with the depression and suicidal thoughts i mean i’m no psychologist here i mean i claim to be a completely untrained and unprofessional part-time hobbyist psychologist so i’m pretty sure we all are in some way shape or form in in this world you almost have to be you know but i i see a lot of a lot of kids who’ve been through the things you’ve been through who deal with depression anxiety suicidal thoughts that sort of thing where did you find help for that at that young of an age or did you find any help i didn’t find any help until i was um well let me say this so when i was in middle school um the first time that cps ever came to our house was when i uh was when i told a counselor in school because um he he beat me really bad one night and i went to school the next day and like i had bruises and stuff and um and i went to the school counselor and i told her what happened she called cpi cbs came and the beating was way worse the next day so um and then i just called the counselor and the the and the cps person and i was like yeah i made that all up sorry like you know try to back out of it um it was way worse that night so then i just regretted ever say anything um and so it wasn’t until i was 13 when my best friend’s mother um well my best friend told her mother what was going on and she called me over and i was over her house every day all day i mean this was my person like i would just walk in the house without knocking in the fridge all the time like i was basically their daughter and she called me over and my best friend wasn’t there and i’m like okay this is weird now where’s she at and then she she said you know alexis let’s sit down and talk about this and um and so she sat me down and said you know what’s going on at home and uh and i was like nothing’s good and and then she’s like you know my daughter told me everything and so then you know i’m kind of in a corner of do i say something do i not what’s gonna happen next and then i’m you know remember the last time that i said something and she told me you know if you don’t say something you have one week if you don’t say something i will and so she gave me in my mind she gave me the power to be able to say something myself versus it being taken away from me um but within that week uh i was i was still forced to say something because i went to a concert and i think i i got home late and uh he was really mad at me um and like i got a really bad beating that night with like like he’s throwing golf balls at me and punching me and slamming into a wall and things and dislocated my shoulder and the next day i went to church and my arm was blue and my friends my friend saw that and then she told her mom who’s a police officer and so that’s when balls start rolling you can’t really go back from that you can’t take that back uh you know the the evidence is there um and and then also text messages in her daughter’s phone were there and you know all this all this stuff so i can really back out that time and i was taken to the hospital they did a rape kit um and a whole workup assessment and then i went and lived with my aunt um my aunt uncle and it was then that the judge ordered counseling um and i don’t remember like when i first went to counseling like if i actually tried to talk or say anything or whatever i just remember a lot of quiet time like going there and kind of just sitting there and i’m sure that a lot of it was purposeful because at home my aunt like the first when i first moved in with her at least the first month she really tried to be a mother to me and um be that mother that i never had and so i trusted her i opened up to her but then about a month after that she completely flipped the script and the things that i opened up to her about she started throwing in my face and then when i would get in trouble she would down in the basement and grab my suitcases and threatened to run to kick me out and start grabbing my clothes and throwing them in and so it was that also that trauma and so when i would go to counseling i would just sit there and say like i just need quiet like right now and like and then i i would beg to go to counseling because i’m like i just i want to get out of the house like give me an hour away you know and so it kind of turned into that but i don’t think i actually started to heal from things until i was probably i think it was in high school and i started going to group therapy and i think that that was one of the greatest things that i did um because then it was a way for me to connect with other young women who have gone through similar things and to hear their side of it and to know that i’m not alone in my experiences and that there are other women out there and how are they healing from it what are they doing and that was one of my favorite things i did um because individual therapy is cool but like i don’t know group therapy was always my favorite and then um and then when i graduated high school and i moved down to my aunt or um sorry after i moved out of my aunt’s house i stopped going to counseling and i stopped taking medication on my own because i’m like i’m healed i’m good i’m out of the house i’m taken care of and that was that was not true um a lot of times we don’t realize the damage done until you leave the situation and i noticed that from when i left my aunt’s house and then i also left my abusive relationship and then i’m like oh wow like the amount of like trauma that’s kind of compounded but then also i had ptsd twice um diagnosed i’m sure it was probably more than that but diagnosed twice um and and then uh i went back on my own and sought out counseling and that was definitely one of the greatest decisions i’ve done uh for my own individual healing and we talked about that a lot in the book that we are here right now so much of because of our community but then also because we are so purposeful on our individual healing um and self-discovery before we could come together because we would not be successful if we came together and just kind of put each other’s trauma on each other and said you know you’re the you’re my person like i’m gonna tell you everything and i’m gonna just expect you to heal me that’s not that’s not real life that doesn’t happen i have to do that on my own nobody’s gonna heal me but me you know like i mentioned my wife went through a lot of stuff as as a as a young kid and i thought for a long time that and i even said this that part of my job as a husband was to heal some of the sins of the father so to speak and eventually i learned that that wasn’t actually true my job was to create a space where healing can occur exactly and i think that that’s exactly what he did um because i told him when we first started dating because when we first started when we first met i was seven days removed from an abuse relationship for eight years and i told him like i need time i don’t even know who i am i don’t know who i am my morals my values anything my identity as a as a whole was wrapped around this other individual for eight years i mean from 13 to 22 like that’s your formative years of who am i you know and um and i told him like i don’t want to date you like we can be friends and he said you know i’ll be your friend i’ll be there um and then we ended up being best friends and then once we actually started dating and things started coming out and just him being that person i could just i could just be safe with and he’s like my he’s my home he’s my safe place and um and just being that person that he provides that safe place for me and 100 i know like without a fact this book would not be written without him um just because we we wrote this together we were so vulnerable together and we were we wanted to do that before we got married because we’re like okay most marriages or at least over half the marriages fail um and and then add on the fact that we’re in a racial couple then add on all the trauma and all the other things it’s like it statistically we’re bound to fail and it’s like how can we work past that and how can we make our relationship stronger and that’s where really this work this book was birthed from um and from that aspect and just him being my person and feel safe that i could write this book with well i want to give you a little bit of good news you know my wife and i have been through our fair share of struggles and traumas and we’ve been through a lot and she uses a lot of that same verbiage that you have just used about about the way that our relationship was built and well our oldest is over 20. so we’ve managed to make it a long ways past all the reasons why we should be divorced according to culture according to the statistics we we shouldn’t have made it this far exactly and if you’re intentional about that you can change that that narrative in your story and change that generational problem that you guys have have had for so long and i just wanted to bring up one point you mentioned about going to you know a friend’s house and having always been there being the kid who just shows up right and i think a lot of us have that i mean i know i have a couple kids who do that um i have one kid who shows up at my house in the middle of the night sometimes and he’ll come over and hang up or hang out and and he’s just you know poor floyd floyd has seen me more times in the middle of the night with like an angry face because i’m like i hear a noise in my house and i step out of the bedroom and and here in missouri where where our gun laws are are a little different than a lot of the rest of the country um i i’ve stepped out of my bedroom with a gun in my hand before because like i hear noises out now so i step out and he says it’s me don’t shoot yeah you know that poor kid is seat but but floyd showed up a lot all the time we’ve had a lot of kids who showed up in our world that way and a lot of parents do and i wonder just how many of those kids are the kids like you who had a story that they were hiding that they were running from looking for a safe place and you know parents are providing that for another kid not knowing it yeah it’s definitely something that just struck me that that’s something to always be watching for because i mean the story is not it’s not a one-of-a-kind story unfortunately it’s too common in our world yeah and kids you have to think about it kids don’t necessarily know how to translate their emotions to words and and almost always it comes out in action and so that’s why it’s so important to to just observe children and see what are they doing are they acting out are they speaking out yelling and running away what what does this mean and how do you translate that because i believe that it’s a parent’s job to translate their kids actions to words and and what does this mean for them and help them to translate that um to to be able to communicate that to the rest of the world um and watching my mom’s my adoptive mom watching her with my siblings of you know you know they act up they this house is this like this healthiest safest house on the planet i tell you they’re just the craziest greatest parents ever and but they’re you know kids uh yell and scream and other things but it’s they’re just translating their emotions of like i’m upset right now and okay but why are you yelling at me why are you doing this why are you doing that and and just watching her extreme patience i’ve never witnessed such patience in my life like just watching that and how she communicates with them and and especially ob who’s the four-year-old of running around screaming crying and that’s just his way of saying like i want to be held right now like i just i just want you to give me attention to love me right now and the second that she you know holds him it stops and just seeing that is so beautiful to me of like how much the parents how much is the job the job in the duty of the parents to really translate that emotion and to make them feel safe in those emotions and whenever my siblings cry she doesn’t tell them to stop crying i’ve never heard her say that i’ve never heard her say stop crying i’ve never heard her say go to your room and cry or anything she doesn’t want to isolate them she doesn’t want them to feel that their emotions don’t matter or that crying isn’t good even for especially for the boys i have several brothers and for them she’s never said you know stop crying man up or anything like that things that i’ve grown up hearing and i’m sure justin has heard um and just the importance of parents um saying like more positive things about trusting their emotions and listening to them you know i have a friend of mine jeremy roadruck he was actually on the podcast quite a while back but i’ve known jeremy for a while and he talks a lot about things like things about the uh the bs in our lives and and the real bs is called belief systems right that’s what i love and you know you you grew a bunch of belief systems through your early childhood through your your early adolescence justin i’m sure you grew a lot of those those belief systems as well and now that you you’ve come out of that situation you’re in a healthier situation you’re having somebody actually model loving um kindness caring that sort of stuff for you how has your belief systems been affected yeah i think i think um my some of the biggest things my belief system is just uh first it’s a curiosity just a state of curiosity to try and evolve new things and always wanting to grow and do more um i think being in foster care and moving home to home adjusting to that was huge and some of the things in my belief system came from people believing to me when i didn’t believe in myself like um i don’t know if you’re in this part of the book yet but just being in a group home at like 17 or 18 and having mentors of mine speak life into me and speak so many good things into me that i didn’t believe myself at the time like going to college like doing great things and i had like a two point maybe one or two point two at that time and they believed in me to get my my grade point average up and to go to college and and to just explore and try so many things and telling me oh you’re a great writer you’re a wonderful writer i see you doing this i see you doing that and it takes it takes a lot it takes a person or a community of people around you to change your belief system because honestly whatever your community is whatever your family says or culture your family that is your belief system you you naturally uh accept or receive that belief system of uh the people that are around you and um what they accept or what they believe so you believe what they believe so with the changing of people around me and going home to home and being around the right group of people in the right community really changed things for me and changed my belief system and with that curiosity of just wanting to do more that they instilled in me of okay you can do these things you can do great things you can go to college and for me to live in detroit for like 17 or 18 years and then move to kalamazoo michigan at western michigan university go to college and be the first person in my family it’s like knocking down that first door of being the first in my family to go to college and graduate college being the first kind of was almost like an addiction within itself you know just trying to do more do more and and uh uh test my limits and more feel like that didn’t have any more limits being that i was the first my family to do something and understanding the work that was put in to get to that point understanding the process i think is a a great component in your belief system as well is understanding the process of growth understanding process of you know failure is actually you just learning from something and learning how to do better and there will be trials and tribulations and understanding that where there is success there was trials and tribulations so there would never be success easily there will never be something you’ll achieve easily so understanding that component of how to achieve and how to believe in myself really helped me understand the process of taking things to another level in in my professional life and in my personal life and when it comes to traveling abroad and being that we’ve been able to travel to 30 countries combined and 13 study abroad programs and creating a study abroad program taking things to another level and knowing that there will be obstacles and things along the way that that will test us and that will be a a barrier knowing that we can overcome that and the process on how to do it really starts to alter your belief system and how you believe in what you can do yeah exactly and i think for me the biggest thing was unlearning the fact that love hurts because it started with my parents just teaching me that love is transactional love hurts you have to give a piece of yourself in order to receive love or you’re inferior to somebody else especially a male figure and so translating that and into my value and um and into that long-term abusive relationship of um my worth is less than this other individual and also that everything he says to me was true it was fact um because that’s really what i knew um and and internalizing all those things that somebody so somebody could say that’s so evil um and and i talk about some of those things that was said to me in the book and and just um but then also what really rationalized so much of it was that uh there was a couple times where these things that was said by this individual or done by this individual was was done in front of family and nobody stood up for me nobody did anything and so i’m like you know what maybe this is normal and and i asked my foster now adoptive dad i asked him one christmas holiday and i said you know do you ever call your wife the b word um and he looked at me shocked and was like no i love her why would i ever do that and i’m like well that’s basically my second name like i’m called that at least once a day and you know it’s it’s like little things like that i’m like is this normal and just constantly questioning like what what was done to me what was said to me what is around me is this normal like and we all have our different perspective on what that is and there’s not one definition of what normal is or what um what should be done or what shouldn’t be done but there’s definitely right and wrong in things and and that’s what i that’s what i’ve been really struggling with and working through um you know it’s a lifelong journey of still continuing to unlearn and relearn and um and work through that healing is a lifelong journey but i wanted to do the grand majority of it now so that i’m not so i’m not struggling with it but then also i have my partner who’s willing to to stand on my side through it um and then i have my faith in god that that really that really has been supporting me um but that was definitely one of my biggest things is um who who am i what is my identity and what is that rooted in um and knowing that it’s not in another individual not even my husband so um i think that was that was definitely the biggest thing for me because then once i learned that man i just kind of took off like i started doing really well in school i started getting awards and scholarships and getting more involved and just growing myself personally and professionally and then in my faith and um so yeah so it’s it was just figuring out that at first and then it’s roller coaster after that you know if if you’ve been a listener to the podcast at all you’ve heard me talk about the uh the dad’s group on men the data the dad edge alliance is actually the uh the sealy group but um larry hagner runs it and he’s got a uh he’s got a podcast called the dad’s edge i believe it’s the name of it now if anybody’s interested if you’re a dad you should listen go check out thegooddadproject.com there’s a little free plug for larry because you know he’s he’s got an amazing group over there and one of the things i’m one of the first things i learned from his group was it was it’s uh saying i believe the quote comes from jim rohn if you’re familiar with jim rohn he’s an older guy but he was a a big public speaker motivational speaker but one of the things he said that that’s really resonated with me is you are the average of the five people you spend the most time we say that all the time and that’s in the book too well justin you said something a couple times that merely made me think about that talking about having mentors and where where did you learn that that was something you even needed to do in your life because most young men don’t have that and how did you find mentors that were worth having well again this is just god leaning his hands all over my life because i was at a point where i was living with my brother’s best friend parents and i lived there for about eight months um a situation where it’s just you know i needed to leave because they didn’t want me there anymore i wasn’t doing good as far as getting in trouble in school here and there um just grades weren’t good um not doing as many because as consistent with chores as i need it to be and just in general raising someone else’s kids is not your own is difficult so i was transitioning from that house and uh i was actually preparing to go to a juvenile detention center because there was really nowhere else for me to go and and or at least not that not exactly a detention center but like something like that for foster youth who have foster care teenagers who have nowhere else to go so i was in this position and then my foster care worker told me that there was an opening in the house right outside of detroit where uh it was a house for four boys and there were three boys in the house right now and they had a spot available and they had an opening and there was an opportunity for me to go there and the structure of the house is the group home again with four boys transitioning into adulthood and out of the foster care system and there’s two house clearance but there’s a church just pouring into the house donating money to the house and most importantly the church and different people within different fields are just contributing to the young men who are preparing to get into adulthood so it’s not something that i was intentional about seeking or something that i just knew to do like i needed a mentor you know at that age i didn’t know everything that i needed but i knew i i wanted to do better and stop getting kicked out of houses that’s for sure but uh i the house was set up the structure of the house is beautiful where you know you have mentors and there are so many african-american men that i never seen too many african-american men in my life so they’re pastors and businessmen and um just engineers and black men who are doing great things and just again just speaking life into me and so many good things into me and the structure of the house again it was just set up beautifully where we were able to interact with mentors and um people who uh if we if even if i was taking a spanish class and i was struggling in spanish you know they would find a spanish tutor somewhere and you know just help me out if i was struggling in the math class they would have someone to help me out and just anything we needed the people who created the house the four couples who created the house were very intentional about mentoring us making sure we were good and just uh making sure we weren’t lacking anything that any other kid was lacking but even if you if you’re not in foster care i feel like you do need a community and you do need mentors around you and it was just great for me to have that as a foster youth who didn’t exactly have uh traditional parents uh i was living with at that time and mentors i would say really saved me and you know i every year at the end of the year we sent an update document of you know what we have going on and just how they’ve impacted our lives and just how they contributed to us and made things this is better for us in general professionally and personally and again like i said mentors have saved my life and believed in me so much that it is it’s only right that i go back and pay it forward and mentor other teenagers talk to you other black men and other men and women who are struggling with they’re in the system uh in poverty or just need something small and something to help with in general so i do what i can to pay it forward but yeah it’s nothing that my own doing of having mentors that important to me you know i was on a group call here a while back in the dad’s group that i’m in and uh meg meeker if you guys aren’t familiar with meg meeker she’s the author of strong father’s strong daughters i believe it’s the name of the book and if you have a daughter you should read that book she’s a just an amazing person and at that point in in time when it was going on we had a bunch of the the racial tensions that were in the news going on and somebody asked a question of her about that and the way that she saw the way to solve almost all those problems immediately and i agree with her she said if we would put one strong black man on every corner of every neighborhood you would solve most of those problems because i’ve been in those hoods right i’ve been in some of those places you know like i said i work in st louis a lot and i’ve been in a lot of those rough neighborhoods and man all the guys i meet one guy told me that one day he had 17 children with three on the way oh my god yeah i didn’t i didn’t ask how that math worked out yeah but you know he’s on the way yeah yeah i’m not i don’t think it was it was a single a single mother of three i think it was three separate mothers that he had three on the way at the same time and most the young men i see out there man they’re they’re all dressed in color-coded clothing and they’re selling something whether it’s you know drugs or they’re selling you know bodies on on the street out there man it’s it happens all the time and that’s who i see in those neighborhoods and there’s so few strong men out there who will step into that difficult world and be that mentor and i hear a lot of people who say i can never do foster care i can never foster kid i couldn’t let him go it would hurt it would this and i understand all that but man one of those things that i think that you hit on right there that’s what you can do you had you had businessmen and pastors who were stepping into that into the world of some young men in a hard place who sounds like they completely changed your world yeah they did i mean first foremost grace mercy of god really impacted me the most but um i think that there are people putting our lives to help us and save us and um i think just the men around me and women also um of black men and women uh other men and women who just contribute to continue to help and support and it’s not even just the words they said but the things they did they did just to believe in me and the small things of um never giving up on me and always seeing the best in me when things get rough and um there’s a scripture and uh uh that talks about the definition of love and in a lot of times in the world we have this idea of love there’s a strong passion and emotion whether that’s romantically or in any relationship and i i’ve noticed that a lot of times that when i engage in a relationship with foster parents or um someone that i live with or a house parent or whatever there there’s been somewhat of the world’s definition of love of a strong passion and emotion and when you bring in a new kid in their strong passion and emotion you feel you feel deeply about that person but the true definition of love is not just a strong passion or emotion because that will burn out you know emotions change one day you’re happy when you’re sad you’re angry but when you have those bad days who is going to be patient and kind and see the best in you and not keep recording the wrong who’s going to display those actions and ideas and i think that the mentors and the people who were in my life at that right moment when i was preparing to go to college i had some some of the people in my life um really displayed some of those actions and ideas of always seeing the best of me and always contributing to my life and not just an emotion of things are going good right now so we’re going to be happy but when things go bad and you know i may not have done some of the right things or i may have made a mistake are you still going to love me and contribute to my life and be there for me when i need it the most because you know it’s easy to love someone on a good day when it’s happy when it’s sunny and everything but um when there’s a bad day we make a mistake when your child makes a mistake when things go wrong can you help them can you be there for them and i think all my mentors that i have right now who are still in my life they’ve always contributed to me and they’re always by my side when things get rough and always there to help me correct those mistakes and see the best in me when i make those mistakes it sounds to me like the two of you have really found some good people to put in your life that are putting you both on a path of becoming those mentors for others and as young as you are and yeah i can say that because you know as young as you guys are that’s a trajectory that’s going to completely shape not only your lives but the worlds of the people around you because it’s that it’s that image of of the the airline um yeah the aircraft carrier out in the ocean right when he wants to turn around it doesn’t get done right now right he makes a one degree shift in a one degree shift and a one degree shift and and four or five of those little bitty one degree shifts is the difference between hitting africa or australia when you guys have that long-term future out ahead of you where if you stay on that path my goodness you all are going to make some big differences in this world that’s the goal i mean we already mentor and give back as much as possible and like one of the greatest things for me and i wrote it in the book is um when my mentees text me you know their successes because like you don’t have to fail in order for me to succeed we can all succeed and so it’s building up other people and and it was just one of the greatest days when my mentee texted me and said you know that he won the presidential scholar award from western um and that’s the highest award that you can get from the university and just just seeing that and seeing like pouring into somebody and helping them believe and telling them telling me you know you believed in me that’s why i made it here you showed me you paved the way i did it because of you type of thing and it’s just like that’s why we do it i mean there’s so much of why we do it it’s just um it’s showing people that what what we’ve done is possible for other people and that’s why we wrote this book and as nerve-wracking it is as it is to publish your diary um knowing that it’s it’s a much greater purpose and a much greater impact than than us it’s so much bigger than us yeah i just want to point out the fact that you just you use the word but you know you’re 26 years old and you have mentees

yeah we’re never too young to have mentees yeah i mean it’s really just all passing down information you know yeah our mentors give us information and strategies and things of what we can do we pass that down to people younger than us or maybe even people older than us you know yeah people who are old enough to ask us questions about how to do this how to do that how to figure this out we just pass them along information and once we go through those trials and tribulations of how to figure out something as small as how to work a certain application of you know for our businesses we pass the information along you know and it’s just everybody just passing on information that’s basically what a mentor is something that someone who’s done something that you want to do either professionally or personally or whatever area in life and they pass down that information and kind of set the pathway before you show you how how to do it and what to like to do is in the don’ts and you know how to overcome those trials and tribulations so whenever we receive information from anybody we just pass it along so it’s it we a lot of times people view us as mentors and it’s like real glorified but really we just passed along what we’ve learned to other people yeah and i mean just in the same way that i have mentors um in a person in a personal sense but then also in a professional sense i have many different mentors i’m probably 15 and but they all have their sort of different capacity in my life of what they’re going to help me with and i tell my mentees the same thing is i shouldn’t be your only mentor you know you need other mentors whether i’m helping you personally you need professional mentors or get more mentors that are going to help you personally and help you stay accountable and on what you’re doing your goals and your dreams and the path that you’re wanting to take it can’t just be placed on me um you need that network and you need your community and you need to build that and that’s really what we’re doing um and it’s just always being that open resource for people and and i think because i love information that’s just a natural pathway for me uh is that i hoard information i just want to share with the world uh and and i think that’s that’s played into why i want to be a mentor as well but we all have the capacity to be mentors um whether it’s what you’ve gone through um whether it’s information that you hold that you want to share with others and whatever whatever way shape or form it is you have the ability to be that mentor for somebody else well i just want to call you both out a little bit that information is really important but the other thing that you’re doing is you’re handing out some love and that’s something that this world is a little bit short on right now oh yeah it’s been short it’s just a little shorter now it’s been short for a lot of for for more than a few millennia and you guys are handing out some care to people who really need it and i just i want to say that out loud because that’s that’s the biggest part i can tell you anything but if you don’t think i care about you you ain’t going to listen absolutely i agree and i mean and also i think for men like if you do have a mentor and you are a mentee it’s taking that information and processing it and receiving it and actually implementing it in your life like for an example my pastor she has many mentors as you can or mentees as you can imagine but she says she pours into them all of her love all of her information but most of them do nothing with it and as a mentor that’s really disheartening and and it kind of hurts because it’s like i love you i’m pouring into you i want you to do better but you have to receive that and i think that’s also uh it’s also something that we have to learn is being able to receive and if you can’t receive you can’t receive information you can’t receive love you can’t receive vulnerability you can’t receive success i mean it’s piled on it’s many different layers and it’s being able to receive and for so many years i couldn’t receive that um just because i was closed off and i had those walls up and um now my pastor and i like she i don’t know why we always end up on the phone at 11 or midnight i don’t know we’re on the phone for two three hours and we pour into each other because every relationship no matter personal professional it’s mutually beneficial that’s a relationship and you have to pour into each other um and so and and now and for i mean it’s probably been years my pastor every time i call her on the phone for two three hours i’m learning from her now we’re at the point where last night or two nights ago we’re on the phone for two three hours she’s like alexis we’re gonna schedule another call and i want to wreck your brain i want you to teach me now and it’s like how beautiful is that like that is awesome and that’s how it should be is that you know you pour into each other

you know i just i love the fact that you guys you’ve got and just like the title of your book says you have two foster kids you know who who came out of hard places both of you from you know everything from physical emotional sexual abuse and poverty and and not having the things that most people consider normal needs to this place where i see the two of you sitting here smiling together and and building beauty out of the ashes

and i love that you guys are going to be are going to be an example to somebody you guys are going to inspire some people out here today who really need to hear a story that says hey i’ve been there

yeah i’ve been in that abandoned house i’ve lived in that place i’ve been in true poverty i’ve been beat half to death by my parents i mean we’ve already gotten some really beautiful testimonies from reading our book um and we’ve only shared it with our launch team right and and that’s a very small number of people that’s going to read this book and just the amount of perceptions and and lives that are being changed within this small group of people and and women women that are married with kids that texted me and said you know what alexis i’ve been through similar experiences and i’ve never even told my husband and you’ve given me the courage to deal with that and it’s like you know that’s this is another huge reason why we did this and we were super intentional on that subtitle where it says how to foster kids like the how to part because it plays on the term of how to you know so we weren’t just writing this for us we’re writing this for you two of how can you do this as well and that’s why half about halfway through the book we switch from writing in our narratives to more or less being a teacher and showing you you can do this also i mean again we’re still sharing our narrative but in a it’s more instructional versus this is just about us because it’s not just about us well the two of you are going to make some waves in this world and i’m glad to see it thank you thank you so much we appreciate you so much for having us on and being able to talk about this this is awesome i love this yeah i may have some people i can point you towards too as well um then i think you you could add a lot of value to their uh to their communities so um i don’t think that this is going to be anywhere close to the end of your journey you’re getting ready to change the world so just hold on thank you thanks for listening

Foster Care: An Unparalleled Journey

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