MY WISH LIST

1. to go home to my father
2. my sister and I both live with my father again
3. get into a school that I can be excited about for undergrad.
4. go to law school and get my law degree
5. sue the state of New Jersey, the Somerset County Court Family Part, Judge Marino, Bonnie Frost, DYFS and others… (* I don’t want tons of money from Judge Marino; I want her to resign her judgeship indefinitely, go to prison for at least as long as she unjustly put my father there, and for her to do community service at the shelter she placed me in, where I spent just about an entire year of my childhood thanks to her.)
6. get my permit
7. get my license
8. tell Ava I love her
9. hug Ava
10. get a lap top
11. get my journals back from Bonnie Frost
12. reconnect with my old friends
13. graduate from Pingry with my class
14. crochet Mr. Bill a scarf and hat for Christmas
15. live a full year of my life without feeling threatened or scared at all for that entire year
16. re-read Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy and buy a new copy because pages are falling out of my old one
17. get my stuff back from my mother as well as an inventory
18. have a completely decorated bedroom just the way I’d like it
19. improve children’s rights
20. finish reading Hamlet and take the time to really enjoy it
21. audition for a Broadway show in which I could tap dance (preferably 42nd Street)
22. be an interior designer/decorator
23. write/take photos for National Geographic
24. write for Teen Vogue
25. write for Time magazine
26. be a mother
27. have a healthy marriage; be a special wife and be best friends with my husband
28. be as good a parent as my father is to me
29. help Jovani get a green card so that he can visit his family
30. write a book telling my story
31. pick Ava up and carry her around again before she is too big for me to be able to do that anymore
32. see my mom, Tina, Grandpa, Winston, and Alessio prosecuted for sexually abusing me
33. go to Disney World just with the Honeyhood – my dad, my sister, and me
34. crochet bunny slippers
35. go back to the Scenic Overlook on Rt. 78 with my father again; I’d also like to bring my sister one day and share it with her too
36. have a bedroom with a big window so that the light comes flooding in onto my bed in the morning like it used to in my house in Warren
37. take the $50 dollars that the man at Aeropostale gave me and buy one of the men on the street in NYC a really delicious meal (I think I’ll have to ask them what they’d like, then maybe we can go eat it together in a restaurant. I wouldn’t want to leave him to eat it on the street – and company is always something that makes a great meal taste even better.)
38. donate hair grease and rubber bands to the shelter, because people hardly ever donate that stuff
39. donate combs they could use for braiding to the shelter, because everyone always used to steal my combs I needed to detangle my hair in the shower… (eventually, I gave up and just resorted to using my fingers)
40. crack down on cops who are mean like the ones in Bridgewater that were mean to my roommate, Zandria; the house we live in is not a last-chance house nor a place of punishment – cops need to be more educated on what they are dealing with if they are going to go and talk to kids who live in these places about AWOL-ing – nobody deserves to be treated that way; also, I really want to make sure that cops stop getting away with beating kids up so easily, like the Bridgewater police did to one of my roommates at the Shelter, Raquel, because they are racist and she is hispanic
41. kids should be able to make the really big decisions about their living situations for themselves, not rely on DYFS workers or judges to do it for them, because it’s unfair when other people make the wrong decisions and the kids have deal with knowing what should happen and not being able to make that happen – like when Maria Jose didn’t want to go back to her father, but her DYFS worker and her father were friends or something so the DYFS worker kept sending her back, even though her father beat her so much (I cried when I saw her welts and bruises that her father left on her thighs, arms, and ribs) – we ended up having to help her run away again, because she was so scared to go back to her father; he only wanted her back because he had money being taken out of his paycheck now that Maria Jose was in a state funded program; *If kids were acknowledged as people who can think and feel for themselves, rather than being left to the system which assigns numerous doctors and therapists and case workers and case managers to try and decide what they think and feel for them, then a lot of really bad situations would be avoided. If I was granted that right which I believe absolutely every child deserves, I would have never had to spend ten horrible months and eleven horrible days in that awful environment at the shelter. I would never have been so scared to tell that boys there were sexually harassing me because I would never have been restricted from calling anyone, God forbid something horrible happened to me as a result of telling (i.e. The staff at the house talks to Marcus, and he gets mad and embarrassed and takes it out on me – then I’m in even a worse position with him, and I can’t tell staff again because they are the ones who messed up and made it worse – they obviously don’t know how to handle this delicate situation in an efficient manner that protects me, and I can’t call my dad and tell him, “Daddy, this boy won’t stop touching me and no one will do anything about it,” because the Court and DYFS decided I am not allowed to talk to my father at all! Nothing in the world is more frustrating and infuriating than having everything sacred to you walked all over by people who are supposed to help, and claim they are helping – which adds insult to injury.) I want to make sure that the right to make your own decisions is respected with children, because from what I have seen, the courts and DYFS only make things worse when they overstep their boundaries as a part of the state and interfere with familial relationships and try to control such personal aspects of a child’s life as those. How can they all be so dumb? Doesn’t it ever cross their mind the damage their doing not only to the child on an individual basis but to society as a whole? Child, preteen, adolescent or adult, we are all people from the moment we are born to the moment we die. People all deserve to be treated as such, people. Children don’t just miraculously grow a brain on their 18th birthday here in the United States. Nor do they miraculously acquire a set of principles and values and everything that makes up their entire perspective on that day. Their eyes, hearts and minds are open throughout this sacred stage of life called childhood. Why do we treat them with this iron fist, leaving only the tiniest bit of room for us to merely feign sensitivity to their needs and desires(i.e. letting the child state what they want somewhere one way or another in the process, but giving that factor little to no weight as far as what determines the ultimate outcome of whatever the situation is that is being addressed? Then, after conditioning a large part of the generation that will be left with the responsibility of taking care of the older generation and maintaining our country’s stability to accept that they should not have control over their own lives or be involved in taking responsibility for caring for themselves, we complain that they don’t know how to take care of anything, and that they don’t even want to. Well, of course they don’t want to! They don’t understand the idea that they should and can! It is the polar opposite of what they have been taught. They had to accept bad and unjust treatment, and they will continue to do so. Why should they see anything wrong with other members of their community receiving the same kind of treatment? We never let kids make important decisions for themselves, yet we expect them in adulthood to suddenly know how to make important decisions that will affect the community in a positive way. We never respect their minds enough to let them use them on anything of any kind of consequence, and then we expect them to use their minds once they hit age eighteen. So what do we do? Do we change the way children are treated by the system? No. We make it easier to get a high school diploma without doing much of anything. Then we complain about public school education being low quality. Our kids are not looking so bright when comparing standardized We cultivate helpless weaklings and expect brave leaders to emerge.