ONCE A FOSTER KID, ALWAYS A FOSTER KID?

It was a full-of-promise spring day the night the fire killed my mother, making me an orphan at the age of six. My father had been long-gone by then—avoiding all emotional, legal, and financial responsibilities. He had left me out in the cold and in foster care.

I turned to and desperately begged my father to let me move in with him and his new wife, but instead, they requested Child Services to transfer me from foster care to an orphanage.

All this happened back in the militarily occupied Hungary that was surrounded by barbed wires at the time. After bouncing around from one well-intended but hollow foster home to another, I tried to emancipate myself at the age of 16. But it turned out there is a reason kids need solid support.

The childhood saga of home-less-ness turned into homelessness not long after I aged out of the system. All it took was a debilitating car accident and consequential loss of income. Without a caring adult providing somewhere to go, suddenly, I had nowhere to go.

Fast forward to California, where—after deciding to leave everything behind—I immigrated as a young adult. This year, when I got caught in the midst of one of the greatest natural disasters in American history: the Los Angeles wildfires, 180,000 people were displaced, 50,000 acres burned, and 12,000 buildings were destroyed.

As dangerous flames began spreading throughout the city and the evacuation orders were extended, the concerned messages I received from friends matched the severity of the catastrophe. In just a few days, I got over 700 communiqués from all over—many even offering me their home to stay. The outpour of love by the people I have encountered over time in the USA was far greater than I ever dared to imagine.

At the same time, I received zero inquiries from the Hungarian family members who had neglected me when I was left parentless as a child.

I didn’t hear from my father and his wife, their adult children, my father’s brother (my uncle), his wife (my aunt), or their children (my first cousins). Nor have I heard from my godfather, whose very role—as per my mother’s dying wish—was to be there for me.

Not that this silence was shocking to me. Foster kids get used to being abandoned: it’s been our inhumane and painful reality.

As I was staring at the fast-approaching, blazing fire, I did my accounting:

700 is a bigger number — yet zero feels more impactful.

700 makes me look popular — yet zero makes me feel worthless.

700 is a testament to my life — but zero makes it meaningless.

Meaningless because everybody should have somebody, but when you don’t have anybody, you feel like a nobody. And nobodies don’t matter.

While we may matter to many, we don’t matter to those very humans to whom we absolutely should need to matter. And when we don’t matter to those who would make our lives matter, our lives become lifeless. Lifeless, like burned cities with black ashes that belong to the dead.

And dead we often feel! Until, if we’re lucky, death dies in us either through newfound love, family, or healing. Then and only then, we start rising from the ashes and show the world our tiny green leaves that we had the strength and courage to grow through the hard cracks of the burned soil.