When someone believes in you, you can’t be stopped

As an adoptive parent as well as a professional foster parent maintaining, along with my dear wife, a foster home for kids diagnosed as having Reactive Attachment Disorder, I go to educational conferences each year for help improving my parenting skills. This weekend I am privileged to be attending a conference whose keynote speaker is Deshawn Patrick. For those of you who are not Mariner fans, Deshawn came to that club in the same year as Junior Griffey, 1987. They were both outstanding athletes who could run and hit as well as any players in the majors. The two of them got to the majors through two very different routes. We all know the story of Junior, who had a world class baseball-playing father to guide and support him thorough his formative years. Deshawn Patrick, on the other hand, was in foster care from the time he was one, bounced from home to home to home. Considering he was signed by the Mariners when he was 19, there had to have been something more than the non-existant doting dad to help Deshawn achieve the baseball success that he did.

I asked Deshawn what happened in his life to allow him to avoid the pitfalls of foster care (75% of today’s prison population has spent at least six months in foster care). His answer was quite revealing.

“One of the things that foster kids hate the most is the fact that they have a thick file that follows them wherever they go. The minute they get into trouble at school, the principal reaches into the file cabinet to pull out their thick file. And you know what? That file never says ‘Deshawn has the potential to be a great baseball player, or a prolific writer, or a dynamite artist’; instead, it says ‘ Deshawn never completes his work, is a distraction in the classroom, and is a social misfit.’ No one reading that file would ever give me any hope for achieving something good.

“Baseball, and the coaches who said I could be a great baseball player, my ton of friends, and my grandmother who always loved me, gave me the passion to endure all the foster homes could give out. I made up my mind that I was going to make myself proud. I knew that everyone one expected me to be a troubled foster child with a checkered past and a doubtful future, but I knew differently. I knew that what was inside no one else could see unless they looked past my foster home files. No one, not even my closest friends, could comprehend how it felt to come home from school and not know if the state had decided to place us in another foster home or if my foster parent had thrown in the towel. It was hard to concentrate on the ABC’s and 123’s when I didn’t know where I would be living one day to the next.

Deshawn became emotional when he talked about the support his grandmother gave him and by the time he had finished talking about how powerful it can be when someone believes in you there wasn’t a dry eye in the room. As I drove home this afternoon I thought long and hard about what I was or wasn’t doing to empower my children to become the very best they can be. Those thoughts took me to my passion, baseball umpiring, and made me take a long hard look at what I do to empower players, coaches, and my peers to be the very best they can be. I’m not sure what the answers are in either arena, but I do know I can’t wait to get back to Day 2 of the conference tomorrow, whose theme is based on Deshawn Patrick’s book, And Some Rise Above It. Maybe Deshawn’s insights will help me find those answers.