This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

And we return to our American stories.

Becky Schaefer helps young women aging out of the foster care system with her

organization called Saving Grace. Young women go to Becky to learn real life skills, skills that they

often didn't learn in childhood. But for Becky, this is more than just a mission. It's personal.

Let's get into the story.

Here's Becky.

If I hugged my mother and said, I love you, Mama, she would push me away and say, I really wish you had never been born.

She slept a lot. She stayed in bed a lot, she took a lot of volume, but when she was awake and kind of engaged, she was just violently abusive. There were five of us

kids and I was the second to the youngest. Oftentimes, even though we did receive assistance

from the government, which is why we didn't starve to death, we would still go days without eating.

I don't remember if it was once a month or quarterly or what it was, we'd have to go visit

the social worker at the courthouse. Before we did that, though, that morning my mother would make sure we were

bathed and our hair was clean and our bodies were clean, our clothes were clean. She would give

us a spoonful of dry oatmeal and a drink of milk so that when we went to the social workers

office and she said, what did you have for breakfast? I would say oatmeal and milk. And

doesn't that sound wholesome?

Strangely enough, she had favorites.

So my baby brother and my sister that was just a year older, or just five years older than me,

were the two kids that she probably doted over, I would say.

And then myself and my other sister, she did not. She was very physically

...