Behind the Curtain: Honest Conversations about Foster Care and Adoption
Each episode will feature a conversation between host Rebecca Harvin and foster/adoptive caregivers or members of the community who support foster care and adoption.
Behind the Curtain: Honest Conversations about Foster Care and Adoption
Former Foster Care Youth Turned Bestseller: Kate Angelo's Story of Resilience
In part one, Kate Angelo shares her extraordinary journey from a chaotic childhood with exotic pets, parental kidnappings, and neglect to finding purpose after aging out of foster care.
• Former foster youth who became a bestselling author and now runs a nonprofit for strengthening marriages and families
• Grew up in extreme chaos with exotic pets including a lion, bobcat, and monkey while experiencing neglect
• Experienced trauma including witnessing her stepfather's murder and her grandmother's suicide
• Was "parentified" at age 12, driving and working to support younger siblings while her mother was absent
• Made the difficult choice to enter foster care as a teenager when given the opportunity
• Struggled with abandonment when her mother took her siblings back to Texas but left her alone in foster care
• Uses her experiences to help others develop healthy relationship skills through her writing and nonprofit work
This is part one of Kate's powerful story on Behind the Curtain, with part two coming in the next episode.
Links to Kate Angelo's Book Forsaken:
https://kateangelo.com/forsaken/
Pre-Order Girl Lost Here:
Hey guys, thanks so much for joining us today. On Behind the Curtain I'm your host, rebecca Harvin, and this is where we have honest conversations about foster care and adoption. Today, my guest on the show is a former foster youth. She aged out of the foster care system when she was 18. Her name is Kate Angelo and she once sold a lion to a circus in Shreveport after her mom realized lions weren't great house pets. We mentioned that in our podcast and the story just goes from there.
Speaker 1:Growing up, she was a bookworm, dog groomer, exotic pet wrangler, horse trainer and teenage pool shark. After aging out of foster care, she broke into tech at the height of the dot-com era, helping build web tools still powering businesses. Today, she's earned recognition as Publisher Weekly's best-selling author, cela award winner and Amazon Top 100 bestseller. Her journey from foster care to best-selling author fuels her fast-paced romantic suspense where flawed characters discover hope and healing through life's fiercest trials and relationships. And when she's not putting fictional characters through the wringer, she's either helping writers automate the boring stuff so they can get back to writing, or creating real-life happily ever afters for couples at conferences and events nationwide. Our conversation covers her life in foster care and after and the work that they're doing. It was such a good conversation and I don't want you guys to miss any part of it that we are actually going to do Kate's podcast over two episodes.
Speaker 1:So today here is part one of Kate Angelo on Behind the Curtain. One of Kate Angelo on Behind the Curtain. Hi, kate, thank you so much for reaching out and for coming on this podcast. I am so excited to have you here today. It is not often that we get to hear from somebody who was on the other side of the dynamic. We're often talking to caregivers and you actually were in foster care. You aged out of the system and the opening line on your website is about you once selling a lion to a circus, and when I read that I was like, oh my God, I cannot wait to talk to this person. So can we start there with just that little fun story?
Speaker 2:Yeah, thank you so much for having me on the podcast. I'm so excited to be here. I'm very thankful to have a platform, first of all, to both be on both sides of foster care. You know, coming from the foster care system and then all you know aging out, like you just said, and then also as being foster parents and adopting from foster care and watching that foster child, adopted child, grow up and seeing some of the same issues with that and so, yeah, my childhood was very crazy all the way up until I went into foster care and you would think that, like having a lion in your home with small children in the suburbs of Houston, Texas, would be the reason that children go into foster care.
Speaker 1:No, I don't know, that is not it.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:That was not it.
Speaker 2:So my biological mom and I'll kind of refer them as biological parents, you know, for the sake of clarity, my biological parents had a really chaotic life and, honestly, like a lot of kids who go into foster care, it was like neglect mostly just neglect and some abuse, like psychological abuse and physical abuse, but oddly enough, most of the physical abuse came from other people which so I'm going to sidetrack a little bit and just say, like my husband and I have a nonprofit and our nonprofit is about strengthening and encouraging marriages and families and the reason that we do this for me, my passion. When we met I was like here's my passion and why I want to do marriage ministry, and that means premarital and marriage and family, all of the things. Because I grew up in so much chaos and I had no skills communication skills so I want to give these to other people. But also, a lot of children go into foster care because the parents just don't have those skills that they need and they don't realize, like, what their actions are doing to their children, or even that they get married. They have some children, they can't reconcile their differences, so they get divorced and then you put your children in the worst possible situations where they can be abused, and so most of my abuse came from that, and we can talk about that a little bit later.
Speaker 2:But yeah, it was total chaos living with my mom, who had exotic pets. So we had a lion, I had a pet Bobcat, I had um, a pet monkey, I had a um, I mean, we had all kinds of exotic birds. She also raised um. She was like an AKC breeder for poodles and then she also was a breeder for Himalayan cats at one point, and so there was a lot of animals in the house. And then also I'm one of nine children and so and they're kind of, you know, divided and split, but for the most part I think that there was five of us in the house at a time, five or six of us in the house at a time with a lion and you know all these other kinds of things. So, um, yeah, it's definitely chaos. I think that what you do for a living and you know your audience would see chaos and some people see humor and some people say interest, like what is that?
Speaker 1:like Um, but I immediately saw chaos. Yeah, I immediately saw chaos. Now, to be fair, I have a chaos marker from my own childhood and, like so much of what you're saying, I'm like, hmm, this is similar. Right, not all of what you're saying. I didn't experience foster care, but my house growing up was very chaotic. There were five kids, there was a ton of animals. I was talking to very normal people one time at dinner and I like, randomly, half-heartedly I didn't even know the sentence I was saying was weird that I came home from school one day and there was a horse in the living room and no, but you understand what I'm saying, right, and that's correct. And so the table, like the conversation at dinner, stopped and all attention like turned in my direction and I was like, what did I just say? Like, where it's like this, you have to kind of reverse and go. Oh, not everybody's life was as chaotic as mine.
Speaker 1:Not everybody had this same childhood, and so, yeah, and as an adult, like I mean, my house is chaotic now. So that's, that's its own thing.
Speaker 1:But yeah, I read that and I was like, oh man, this is chaos. So you were raised in this. Um you experience I guess raised might not be entirely the right word, but at the beginning of your life you experience a very chaotic um. To go into foster care, you have to be abused, abandoned or neglected. So you experienced some of that. Um, how old were you when you went into foster care?
Speaker 2:So the other thing with trauma, which you probably know firsthand is, or secondhand is that you don't always know the ages you were when things happen, and so, like even my foster care, I'm like I was either 13 or 14 ish, but I was in high school whenever I went into foster care, so I kind of was raised that way, except for I was what they call parentified. One of my earliest experiences was seeing my stepfather murdered. He was robbed at gunpoint right in front of the vehicle where we were. He stopped to cash his paycheck because that's what people did back in the day They'd go into a convenience store, cash their paycheck and then coming back out, and since he did it at the same place at the same time people knew that he was doing that, and so these young men robbed him and shot him and killed him, and I think that also, just kind of that, sent my mom back into the arms of my biological father, because I think they were separated at the time and that was a stepfather, and so that that sent my mom back into the arms of my biological father, because I think they were separated at the time and that was a stepfather, and so that that sent caused a whole lot more chaos.
Speaker 2:My parents were just young and immature. My mother was an alcoholic. Her mother was an alcoholic. My mom was also a teenage mom. She had three kids, very young I think. She was maybe 15 or 16 with my oldest brother and then probably 18 with my sister, maybe 20 with me or something like that. So lots of kids when you're young and immature and unable to take care of them.
Speaker 2:So for a time we lived in a school bus, but not the cool school buses that you see on HGTV. That was not us. We lived in one that you know was just basically a school bus that had the seats taken out of it in Houston, so no air conditioning and no plumbing. And I remember them bringing my baby brother home from the hospital into this bus and putting him in a laundry basket because that was going to be his bed. Was this laundry basket that was sometimes at the foot of their bed at the back of this bus? And so, again, not near as cool as what HGTB makes it seem like.
Speaker 2:But then they got divorced again. I don't know if they were ever really married and divorced or how that was, but my maternal, my mom, didn't really have a lot of support from her family. Her mom passed away and then my grandfather. Her mom passed away and then my grandfather, who is the only biological parent I really, or family member I really talk to anymore this is kind of sorry, getting kind of crazy here. So she didn't have a lot of support. My father had my grandmother and grandfather, but my grandfather passed away and that sent my grandmother spiraling into a depression, and so when I was with my dad, I was with him and a grandmother who was severely depressed, and then when I was with my mom, I was with this alcoholic who was really looking for love in other guys, and so there was a lot of chaos in that.
Speaker 2:And then at some point my parents like my whole life for as long as I can remember, was them parentally kidnapping me and my older sister back and forth, back and forth. So he was convinced that the baby brother that they brought home and put into the basket was not his son, biologically his son. One look at him is, you know, he's almost as tall as my dad was and so they were parentally kidnapping us back and forth so we could be at school one day and over the intercom they would say you know, please send them to the office. We would go to the office and it would be my dad. You know, take, pick us up, take us, everything we owned would be left behind and completely lost. And then, you know, six months later, four months later, a year later, then my mom would just show up. I remember one time we were waiting for the school bus and she's like pulled up and was like get in the car, get in the car. And we didn't even know the guy driving the car, we just knew it was her. And one time they had an altercation at a Home Depot in the parking lot where it was a huge fight and things like that.
Speaker 2:And so when we were with my mom, she was very much. She would drink from the time she woke up until the time she went to sleep. And she was, she would. She was a depressed, sad drunk, and so she was not abusive in any other way other than neglectful, emotionally abusive, passive, aggressively abusive, favored the ones who did better. You know, like any attention you wanted was because I got A's in school and things like that, you know. So those were the successes that she honored and for her it was like, oh, you're going to be a good kid. Who's going to take care of me when I'm older, kind of thing. The same thing she was looking for in a guy to take care of her, you know. So. So she would also get all upset with whoever she was with. So the stepfather, who was there for the majority like the one that I remember for the most part, and she would she would go I'm getting all the kids in the car and I'm going to leave you, and so we'd get in the car and we'd start, we'd drive off somewhere she's completely drunk and she'd pull over on the side of the road and call him from a pay phone and say I'm going to kill the kids and then I'm going to kill myself and then you'll be sorry, and just things like that that you're hearing and stuff like that. And so that's life with mom. But also, like with the lions and the exotic pets, she was spending money on that instead of money on taking care of her kids. So the lion ate raw turkeys, but the kids ate cornbread for dinner or something like that, or you know, we just didn't have a lot of food or clothes or anything like that, and she did not take, like did not care what we were doing, like basically feral children who ran around the neighborhood doing whatever we wanted to do. And so when we were with my dad, we were with his his mom because he was a truck driver and she would take care of us. And she got so depressed after her husband died that she moved out of the house they were living in and into an apartment, um, like into a condo, and thought that might help her like, get. Let me get away from some of the memories, cause that was like the house they bought when they got married and brought. You know, that was just their whole life, um, and my dad was an only child and so, um, so she called my mom one day and they were doing that parental kidnapping thing and she's like I need you to come and get the girls. I can't get a hold of their father and I'm not feeling good. I just need you to come and get them. And she thought it was a trick, she thought they were, she was going to have the police arrest her or serve her with some sort of papers about the custody. So she said she would come, but then she never did, and so my grandmother tucked us into bed and read us a little story, and then she went into the other room and killed herself and left us there.
Speaker 1:Oh my goodness, yeah, oh my God. So, kate, oh my god.
Speaker 2:So, kate, it still chokes me up every time. How could it not so? Um, when I think after that my dad let my mom have us for a little while and then he picked up with the parental kidnapping again and he would leave. He had a girlfriend, and so he would leave us with this girlfriend and she was much older and we were told that she was old enough, that her daughter was the same age as my dad, so whatever that meant. So maybe she was 50. And you know he was.
Speaker 1:What is age when you're, when you're a kid, right Like an adult?
Speaker 2:is an adult, right? I don't remember, I just remember she seemed really old to me but she had wrinkles, yeah, exactly, and and I think she's passed away and I think her daughter has even passed away. But the two of them were physically abusive. I never understood it why, other than just they were mean and hateful people and the daughter was almost worse. Um, and so the abuse there was like very physical and um, and child protective services were called multiple times and they never did anything. They didn't, they never removed us from the home and I, I don't know why, cause as a child you don't really realize that, but I remember all the times that they would, you know, take pictures of cigarette burns and my sister. They poured boiling water on her one time and, you know, locked us in closets and didn't feed us or left us outside in the hot Texas sun. You know just the kind of abuse that you just never want to know a child goes through.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the kind of abuse that totally dehumanizes the person that's being abused, where you're like how could you do that to a person? How could you? And and the hard part of this world that we live in, that you had to experience, that we bring kids into our home is that this isn't like theoretical, this is actual life and it's horrible troubles and you know, in my mind growing up I feel like the physical abuse was almost easier than the psychological abuse that goes with it.
Speaker 2:You know the bad things that they said, or the things I heard my mom saying that that those were the real wounds that I carried and so my they got really great. My father was a truck driver so he'd be gone like two weeks at a time or two weeks at a time.
Speaker 2:And if I said, you know, they burned us with this cigarette, like here, look at all these spots they would say, no, those are mosquito bites and they won't stop scratching them and that's their fault. And then they would make the abuse worse when he left. So we got to the point where we never said anything, and you know. And then something else that I had to like explain to my husband, even when you know, is that you grow up learning to fear the police and you learn that foster care is like. If you think it's bad here foster care is worse, like you would not, even you wouldn't believe what happens there. You won't have any people just want you for the money and and all these lies that you internalize and believe. So you don't want to tell anybody about the abuse.
Speaker 1:And there's an element. I would assume that at a certain point you understand that this is abuse, but at the beginning you don't understand that this is abuse. Yeah, friends don't have like exotic pets and lions, I mean and I'm taking the low hanging fruit here. But you look around and you're like, I mean, my life doesn't look the same as everybody else around me, but this is my mom, she loves me. This is my dad, he loves me, he wouldn't leave me with somebody who was doing this. And but then you're experiencing the reality of your experience is that he is, he does, and it is happening.
Speaker 1:I remember sitting with somebody a couple of years ago and I said, like a lie that I believed because of whatever, a core belief kind of lie. And she looks at me and she goes Rebecca, you know that that's not true, right? You know that you don't have to perform in order to be loved. Let's say that like. Let's say it was that. And I said well, part of my brain knows that it's not true, but I have experienced the reality of the lie.
Speaker 2:Mm-hmm.
Speaker 1:And that messes with your brain.
Speaker 2:Yeah, when somebody says no, that's a lot that's not people who love you wouldn't do that. And you're like uh right, like it's true that people love me more when I succeed, because you're, you're perverting the natural instinct to celebrate, perverting the natural instinct to celebrate somebody's successes into your identity.
Speaker 1:Or yeah, or behave, or in order to belong, I have to do X, y or Z, and while we're not talking about belonging, I think I want to highlight that the psychological abuse is so incredibly difficult here and it really invades every space, right?
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely so. My older brother who was with my mom, he turned to drugs and alcohol and anger and abuse and like he was like in and out of jail for that and you know he was, you know, just constantly in fights and drugs and dropping out of high school, running away and things like that. And then my older sister she turned to finding love from guys, started being promiscuous at like 13, 14 years old and and we wonder how the cycle repeats itself Right, right.
Speaker 2:Exactly, yeah. And then and I come with my own set of heavy baggage of, you know, staying out of the way. So when there's conflict, I'm like whoa, whoa, whoa, let's just sweep that under the rug. And then, and then finally like run away and never want to face it and then just blow up at some point, just psychologically Like, and it doesn't. I'm like it doesn't happen as often as it used to as a kid or as a teen, because now I have skills and I have things to manage and self-regulate and things, and you learn about yourself, you realize that what you were doing and how you can change those things, and so, but there's still that instinct that that was built into very early on to hide or run and stay out of the, just stay out of the fire. You know what I mean? And and please everybody, so nobody gets upset and nobody throws things through the wall.
Speaker 1:Yeah, how do I disappear?
Speaker 2:Yeah, there you go what I realized that my mom is doing and I silently judge people. You know, we know we shouldn't judge people, but I silently judge people Every time I see a young couple they're dating or they get married or just anybody that I know. I know them enough to know that maybe they're not. Basically they get. They get animals to fill some sort of void.
Speaker 2:So my mom was like having children, because every time she had a baby there was like that elation that you know that what we call like seeking the dopamine rush, right, and it the amount of elation that she felt being pregnant and having the child and having the baby.
Speaker 2:But then comes the harsh reality of you have to actually take care of this child. And it's the same thing that we see with people who they get an animal, because there's all that excitement and love and, oh, I got this puppy, and then it has torn up your couch and peed everywhere three or four times and you're tired of cleaning up the mess and having to come home from all the fun. You're having to take care of it and you end up going I can't take care of this dog, I need to rehome it, and so. So that's a very real thing that I see now that she was doing by having this exotic pets and bringing them in. She was just constantly trying to fill this hole, this void that was within her. And so you can, like we just said, you can put anything in there. You can put drugs in there, you can put promiscuity in there, you can put being a workaholic in there animals.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I would say like, to an extent, most people do this. They just don't do this to the extreme. This summer, I'm off of social media because I was like, oh, I'm using social media as a way of filling, as a way of detaching and disassociating, and I need to like actually be present and put my feet on the ground and root myself in and all of the healthy things that I know. But every single one of us has unhealthy coping skills that can run rampant if we don't have tools. If we don't have tools. So you go into foster care somewhere between 13 and 14, and you experience then high school in foster care, which is not an easy time to experience foster care and also, I think, one of the things that with teens in foster care is like you've lived so much life by this point and you're expected to still be a child.
Speaker 1:And that is so difficult.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so so I'll. I'll finish up a little bit on there, leading into that. Because my mom was so unable to function the man she was married to my stepdad at the time. He taught me how to drive at age 12. I remember learning how to drive at age 12 because he thought a 12-year-old behind the wheel was safer than a drunk like her, and they had a baby together and he was like you know, maybe if we move from Texas to Missouri, then you will just finally, you'll like stop drinking and like this will be a new start. We can just try again and you'll, we'll move to a small town instead of a big city and, um, you won't have all these, you could just start fresh.
Speaker 2:And so we made the move to this teeny, tiny little town, um in Missouri. And um, then they ended up getting divorced and he took his little daughter, who was I think she was almost two at the time, and he just disappeared one day. And so my mom was like, well, I'm familiar with this whole parentally kidnapping thing, so I'm just going to go find her. So she left me in charge of my younger brother and my younger sister and went back to Texas, and she was gone for like two months and I was working Texas and she was gone for like two months and I was working. Even at that age I had I think I was like 13, maybe 14 ish I had just gotten a job at um at Sonic. I applied and they never realized my age, I guess they just hired me Um, and I worked as much as I could to pay and raise my younger brother and sister.
Speaker 1:Oh my gosh.
Speaker 2:And so she came back once and then left again for like a month. And then she came back again and she brought my older brother, who is chaos himself he was 21 at the time, I think and she was like he's going to help you with the kids and help you work and things like that, and I'm going to still go find your sister. And so she went back to Texas and was just gone, and while he was there he was not helpful. He was just continuing, you know, drinking and partying and drugs and things like that. And he threw this huge party when I was at work one night and I came home to our house and I was like I'm just going to crash here and go to sleep because I've been working all day and I just can't deal with this. And so that's when the police woke me up. I remember a police officer nudging me awake with the toe of his boot and saying, hey, get up. And I'm like, oh great, what's going on? And then he tells me in that moment like your brother's going to jail because he's 21. And he was giving alcohol to minors. Your brother and sister, who were, you know, younger than me, won't have an adult in the house. So they're going to foster care. And do you want to go to foster care? And I was like, and do you want to go to foster care? And I was like, no, because I have to keep this house together. Like I've been doing this for like months now of working and, you know, trying to go to high school and like people at school in the small town had no idea, or maybe they didn't, I just didn't realize it, but they didn't know what I was going through. So while they're going to church and church camp and playing sports and things like that, I'm just working and trying to survive and help my brother and sister survive. So my mom actually came back for that. She came back because she was like going to get the other two out of foster care and then just move back to Texas. That was her goal.
Speaker 2:And the day that they were having a hearing about that, a caseworker and a guardian ad litem and some other authority figures had taken me aside and said you know, we can take you into foster care too and you can just choose to go into foster care and not have to live like this. Basically, and it's it's your chance. And I don't really remember what the conversation was, but I just remember that they were like the judge is going to ask you, you know what you want to do, and so it was almost like a custody hearing, right. And I remember standing there and I think they put me on stand actually because I could see him and I could see my mom, and I said I want to go into foster care. And her face, like I just remember that look on her face of like how betrayed she was, because that also meant that she wasn't going to get the other two kids back Because I had just I think I had testified to like everything that had been going on about me working and supporting and she wasn't there and all these other things. So, um, so that's how I ended up in foster care.
Speaker 2:My younger brother and sister were placed separately because I was what is called parentified, meaning I'm the parent, they're the children and, like you said, I had lived a thousand years at the age of whatever age I to them is like a year, and I think that's why time doesn't make any sense.
Speaker 2:Even as an adult, I'm like I have no idea. So I thought it was four or five when my grandmother had committed suicide. But I looked at her death certificate recently and I was eight years old or seven years old or eight years old, something like that. And I was eight years old or seven years old or eight years old, something like that, and I just remember feeling I was like much smaller than that and not really remembering a lot around it, just remembering some pieces of it, so. So that was kind of the beginning of me. My mom worked really hard to get my brother and sister back out of foster care but abandoned me, moved to Texas and left me in Missouri with no family, no one, and I was just there living, living in foster care. You went from complete and utter chaos to total abandonment.
Speaker 1:You went from complete and utter chaos to total abandonment. That's right. I just think you know the weight on a 17, 18-year-old's shoulders of looking at the future ahead and going where do I go on Thanksgiving next year? Where do I go on Christmas? How do I go on Thanksgiving next year? Right, where do I go on Christmas? How do I? How do I? How do I do this? And, and also, am I going to become my mom? Am I going to become my dad? Am I going to become like, um, like the, the?
Speaker 1:girlfriend and the and the daughter, like I don't have a role model around me. There's an element my husband and I talked about this a little bit of. There's a there's a beauty in knowing you don't know like. There's a beauty in knowing, oh, I don't have any tools whatsoever to do this life, and like actually understanding that and then deciding to go get the tools, as opposed to kind of never really even knowing, never being able to say, oh, my parents didn't teach me this, not because they're bad people, but because they just didn't know themselves. And so now, as an adult, I don't, I don't have these.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So my husband and I started our nonprofit for that reason, because I knew I did not have great relationship skills or any relationship skills other than really toxic ones. You know that had been taught to me of like how to fill the void with things. Instead of you know and not being able to apologize, did you burn through foster homes. So in my situation is very weird. I'll try I keep trying to like short story everything but but what happened was I went into a foster home, then, uh, and I was there for a while and then they lost their foster license because, um, I don't, I don't, I wouldn't scare anybody who's on the care side. Um, but a teenage girl had accused our, our stepfather or our foster dad of sexually abusing her and I think they chose to pull their license because they, you know, they had had things like that happen in the past and they were tired of that hanging over their heads. But there are career kids who know how, you know, they know what to say in order to move things around Absolutely.
Speaker 2:And the investigation you know showed that he had done nothing and I had said he has been here much longer than her and he's never done anything and so, um so, but it was still just kind of the end for them. And I remember going into my caseworker had had said hey, come by after school. My friend uh had driven me there because we were, we worked together and she was like and we'll go to work after you visit with him. And he's like, hey, so you're getting kicked out of your foster home and I have to move you and there's no place to take you. So you're going to have to go to a group home in the next town, in Springfield, which is about an hour away, which means like you're in the middle of high school I think I was either a freshman or sophomore at the time and been doing this foster care thing for about a year.
Speaker 2:And now you're disrupted and you're going to have to move to a whole nother city. At least there I had some friends, because I had. I knew these people and it's a small town, so I'd been. I was abandoned by all biological family and now you're telling me you're going to pick me up and move me to a new city where I know no one, and I'm going to live in a group home with girls that I don't know.