CyndiA's Full Review: Regina Louise - Somebody's Someone
Regina Louise shares her life as an unwanted child in Somebody’s Someone. This is a true story – a memoir. Names were changed for pretty obvious reasons.
Somebody’s Someone was written in first person and through the eyes of the child who was bounced through, at least, thirty homes during the course of her preteen and teen years. It took a few pages to adjust to the dialect and the voice of a child, but the story was certainly more powerful with taking this unusual approach.
Regina’s birth mother got pregnant early on and just left Regina with Big Momma. That’s where the mother grew up, so I suppose she thought it would be good enough for her daughter. Regina held her own there for a number of years but took off when another “foster” child in the home almost beat her to death.
When Regina ran away from Big Momma’s house, she ended up with her paternal grandmother but only for a couple of days. The grandmother sent her to an aunt’s house, and Regina ran again.
Ultimately, Regina’s birth mother did take her in, but the mother was much more concerned about her “men” and her little boys than a girl from an earlier relationship. Things did not go well, so Regina was shipped off to her birth father’s house.
Regina’s father had not known he even had a daughter. He had moved to California and planned to be a big star. He’d married and had a couple of kids. He was on the road all the time, so his wife had to deal with a young teen along with her little kids.
After all the family options were exhausted, Regina ended up in foster care and then ultimately as a charge of the state. As an older child and a black child, placements were difficult. And, they did not work out.
While race wouldn’t seem to be a big issue, it was in terms of this story. Regina was light skinned. She always felt she was too dark in some ways and too light in others. Since her family relationships had been so terrible, and since she watched television, she felt that she would be better off in a white home.
In fact, a caregiver did want to adopt Regina. And, Regina certainly wanted to live with the one person who did care about her. The caregiver was white, so that was considered a bad placement. Knowing that someone did want her gave Regina some hope for the future, although it took many years for Regina to sort out the horrible childhood she experienced.
Regina was abused in so many ways during her childhood – physically, sexually, mentally. The story is really heartbreaking.
On the other hand, Regina was a handful. She did things that would certainly have been hard for a family to deal with. It’s hard to incorporate abused children into a household. With Regina’s spirit, she would have been really hard to handle day in and day out. She would lie, steal, and would run off. She really needed total attention, and that’s hard to come by in “the system.”
If you ever want to read a story that will touch you, this is the book. You can feel this child and even when she’s doing things that would drive anyone nuts, it’s obvious why she acted out. She was not wanted. She was not loved. She was treated terribly. She just wanted to be somebody’s someone, and it seemed that nobody wanted her. Very sad.
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