Gone As The Wind

All my life i dealt with drug addict parents and Ive dealt with foster care,
my parents were in and out of my life for the longest time, and now i am 19.
my sister and i was legally adopted and separated into different families.
my mother also suffered from schizophrenia and my father suffered from depression.
my parents were never well from the beginning.

I remember my beautiful life clear as day when i was just a little girl, i had the perfect life, two parents, nice house, stable life.
until my parents divorce and my grandparents passing's. my father took care of me for most of my life, he had a good job to support both of us girls and we lived very comfortable. My sister and i started noticing our parents fighting a lot more and strange smoke in the kitchen and beer cans scattered everywhere. they were fighting about my father losing his job and eventually losing our house a few months to come. my mother took off to Texas leaving us once again in our lives, she was in and out. my father started to sell things and eventually sold our food stamps when we had to turn to welfare when he lost his job. the bills weren't paid and we had shut off notices and the stress for the two of us girls was so u intolerable. my sister and i lived so poorly, and we were so sick of the fact that none of the family  tried to help us anymore. my father started letting himself go, always sleeping and never cooking for us, there were times when we ate oatmeal because it was all we could afford. our neighbors parents turned my dad in for child indecency and children youth services came to see us girls. we lied to them because we were scared to be separated, so then we went back to the nightmare, the druggies in the house, the no food episodes, the constant screaming from my father, and the more frequent visits from our mother. she would talk to us like friends, not daughter, she would come in our room and apologize for leaving us in a bad situation and that she loved us, then she would go downstairs and get high with our father. then, there were the fights again to were the cops were called and my father was in jail again.
all i remembered was having it so hard that i stepped up as young as i was to take care of my sister because i knew no one else could, we became so close and in the same way so scared because this wasn't like it use to be. i became a teenager dealing with this and i knew that things had to try and get better from here, so we had custody battles with my aunt and we end of moving to Beaufort, South Carolina for 4 years with my moms brother and his wife and two kids. we changed in and out of schools left and right. Everything happened like a blur, soon after we had to move back to PA with my dads parents due to my uncle moving from base. every summer we spent it with my aunt in new york, because she had some custody wit us girls.
I never got to experience life as a kid, because i had to grow up fast to take care of my sister and make sure everything was going to be okay with us.soon after that happened my father got out of jail, supposinly  clean and sober and he won back custody from the courts because he proved that he was stable again to have us girls. in all reality we all believed he was clean, and everyone believed him including us girls. He wasnt everything was starting to happen again, but only worse this time. i couldn't deal with it, my sister and i were so scared so hurt from not having the perfect parents. i started writing this poems, i wanted to commit suicide because things got so bad. i felt as if i couldn't take no more of what was going on and i started to question god on what i did to deserve this....

four years later....
2012

here i am, i graduated high school, was legally adopted, and i overcame everything, my father and mother are no longer in our lives, but they continue to live the life they choose with drugs and alcohol.
the downside on everything is, ever since my sister and i were separated we never maintained a good relationship together or being close like we use to be, we both tried to look past the life we had to live for so long and to try and find happiness wherever it may be.
we both have suffered from depression and anxiety from all the things our parents put us through.
i am on medication and i find my life still from this day hard to balance because i don't have my real parents in my life.
over and over again i talked to my father these past four years, he convinced me he was clean and was getting remarried and had his priorities straight, i decided from my heart and from my sisters heart to give him another chance because after all he was my father and we couldnt choose who was. He let us down, and he started to see our mom again, he never kept in contact with us nor did he care. drugs and alcohol ******** it from us again. all we ever wanted was to be loved and secure and we couldn't find that in him or her.

the only thing about giving my dad another chance was in order to give him another chance was to choose either him or my adopted family... i chose my dad and i lost, i risked four beautiful years with a great family for a father who lied to me once again. ever since that day my adopted family hasn't came around to forgive me and i think i hurt them more than i could ever imagine, they loved me and they gave me a life i wanted and longed for so long. my adopted mother, she was beautiful, so kind, she did everything she had to do for me, she tried so hard to make me happy and for the longest time i didn't accept it because i was still in that old life feeling guilty. I felt guilty because i thought it was all my fault for what my parents did. It was a mind game and it made my vision blurry for the future i was given. i had it so good, and now its gone. i graduated from high school by myself, the tears i cried wasn't happiness, it was loneliness that i felt. the tears was a void from this day i have in my heart from the pain i caused them. if i had one chance to go back to make something better it would take back that chance i gave my father, because i felt bad, because i thought he overcame drugs and alcohol. he didn't. and i was foolish for thinking that.

drugs took a lot of things from me that i will never have back, it took my parents i had away, it took a life i could have had with them, things i could have experienced, a emotionally healthy mind, people who walked in my life who loved me my adopted parents.  it took my relationship with my sister,please think twice before you ever try to do something like thatpa