… It was six months before we’d be driving somewhere that he’d tell me what he’d done the previous night. Another six months before he’d tell me anything he was feeling,” Lawler continues. “This was a kid who’d learned not to trust people because they’d let him down.”
Foster kids often move from placement to placement with few belongings, not even photos of their siblings and families of origin. However, one possession that Ricky allowed Lawler to view offered insight into his silence.
“He kept a compiled ‘book’ of himself, awards from completing different programs, and he had family pictures in there,” says Lawler, adding that Ricky has had 16 various placements since entering the foster system at age six, including stays with three different sets of foster parents.
Ricky had pictures of each foster family, two dogs he loved at one home, a professional picture of himself as a baby, pictures of his half-siblings and his grandmother, and a photograph of his mother, a heroin and crack addict and North Avenue prostitute.

See the full article from “Baltimore Magazine”