AUTHOR AND ADVOCATE UNITED STATESI applaud Ashley for bravely sharing her story and commend this young woman for her on-going efforts to help the children in the foster care system.
—SUZANNE BUCKINGHAM SLADE, AUTHOR
Seventeen-year-old Ashley was on a mission. She was determined to go to college, but she had hardly any money to do it. She’d been adopted a few years ago, and her adoptive parents, Phil and Gay Courter, gave her so much, including a safe, loving home, but they didn’t have the money to pay for her college. So she decided she would win money by entering writing contests.
The moment she read the call for submissions to the New York Times Magazine writing contest, prompting her to describe her most powerful day, Ashley knew exactly which day she would write about: her adoption day.
Recently she had settled in to the deep cushions of the sectional couch next to her adoptive parents. Bright light streamed in from the tall windows overlooking the Crystal River in Florida, but she was focused on the television screen across the room. She felt a flurry of butterflies in her stomach as the court video started to play and she saw herself come onscreen. When the judge on the video turned to twelve-year-old Ashley and asked, “Do you want to be adopted?” the Ashley on-screen shrugged and said, “I guess so.”
It was no Little Orphan Annie response, but that’s what made it all the more powerful. Adoption is complicated, especially for a twelve-year-old girl who has lived in fourteen foster homes in the last nine years, has dealt with forty-four caseworkers, twenty-three attorneys, nineteen foster parents, three abuse registry workers, and four judges. She was finally being invited into a permanent home, but how could she know this was really the best thing for her? To Ashley Rhodes, life was too full of turmoil to be excited about moving into yet another home.
When Ashley had written her contest submission, she titled it “Three Little Words,” for the three words she said to the judge that day, and sent it off, full of hope that she could win some money to add to her college fund. When she learned that she had won the grand prize, she was elated! Her story appeared in the magazine, the check arrived in the mail, and before long, book publishers were calling Ashley to ask if she had written a book. Everyone wanted to hear her story.
One of Ashley’s foster parents made her run laps in the hot sun until she collapsed! This woman was later charged with abusing many of her foster children.
Her story was long and painful. When Ashley was three years old, her birth mother, stepfather, and little brother were moving to Florida. “We’re moving to the Sunshine State to live happily ever after,” Ashley’s mother told her. But when they got to Florida, the police arrested her mother and stepfather and took Ashley and her brother to strange people’s homes. Sometimes she lived in the same home as her brother, sometimes she didn’t. For years, Ashley would wonder, What have I done that was so terrible that I had to be taken from my mother?
During her time in foster care, Ashley liked to write, but she never tried to write anything like a book. Mostly, she had written poems, songs, and journal entries—nothing that she ever intended to share with anyone else. Because she moved so much and often lived in homes with other foster children, who would steal or destroy her possessions, she didn’t even have most of what she had written anymore. Still, she found comfort in the process of writing, and then she would memorize her poems and songs so she could always remember them. No one could steal them from her then.
Through Shape What’s to Come, Ashley hosted interviews at the 2010 TEDWomen Conference. “One of the really cool things about Shape What’s to Come is that it really highlights the idea that . . . women . . . [are] no longer taking a linear path to school, careers, family,” she said in her interview with Girl Scouts CEO Jessica Lawrence. In short, both women agree that girls can choose the future that’s best for them—whether it’s traditional or not.
One winter when Ashley was in fifth grade, her teacher asked Ashley to stay after class. Her teacher was kind but firm. If Ashley ever acted out for attention, the teacher did not allow it. But she also seemed to notice that Ashley was special. This day, she was not holding Ashley after class to reprimand her but to reward her. She opened her desk drawer and pulled out a book.
“It’s Anne of Green Gables,” she said, smiling.
It was the first book that Ashley ever owned. When she opened the cover, she noticed that the teacher had written on the title page, which made this gift even more special. Then when she read the book and discovered that the main character—a red-headed orphan whose name started with an A—had many similarities to herself, she felt connected, not just to Anne but also to her teacher and to the idea that words matter.
Now that she was seventeen and had just won a writing contest, Ashley had no doubt that words mattered. But that just made the pressure to write a book that much scarier.
“Don’t worry,” Gay said. “I’ll help you.”
Gay was a novelist, so she knew all about the writing process and what it would take for Ashley to publish a book. She also knew that if Ashley was going to write about her life, they’d have to get the files from the state that included everywhere that Ashley had lived in foster care. Together Ashley and Gay went through the case files and contacted Ashley’s former foster homes. They compiled interviews and visited places that Ashley hadn’t been to in years.
Once Ashley had written a rough draft of the book, she had other people read it to tell her what they thought. One of Gay’s most frequent comments—and other readers agreed—was that Ashley needed to include more emotion in her book. This became her biggest challenge. “As a child, I was very closed off and tried not to let my emotions of rejection, sorrow, pain, guilt, and fear get the best of me,” Ashley said, so it was hard for her to include emotions she never really let herself feel. But she knew the feedback was true, that readers wanted to see her emotions in her writing to they could connect with her through more than just her descriptions of place and action, so she revised often.
The purpose of foster care is to provide a safe place for children to stay until they can be placed in a permanent, loving home—either with their family or with an adoptive family. Not all foster homes are bad, but many are less than ideal.
Ashley was clear that she didn’t want her book to be an orphan sob story like so many other books are, though. She wanted her book to call readers to action, to be aware of the state of the welfare systems in their areas and the challenges that foster children face because of it. She also wanted the book to be a thank-you to all of the people who work with at-risk youth and try to make a difference in their lives. Most of those people do not get thanked for their hard work even though they work long hours to help children find safe homes.
Three Little Words was published in 2008, when Ashley Rhodes-Courter was twenty-three. It has been a New York Times bestseller, and Ashley used her book tour as an opportunity to raise awareness of the foster care system. She even hosted a television show called Explore Adoption, which aired in Florida. The show won an Emmy. Ashley is also an ambassador for Levi’s Shape What’s to Come women’s empowerment community, and in 2011 she became an international correspondent for MTV.
In 2009, 424,000 children in America lived in foster homes.
With the money Ashley earned from her writing, she went to Eckerd College and graduated in 2008 with majors in communications and theater. Now Ashley’s in graduate school at the University of Southern California studying social work while she is also a foster mother and continues to speak about foster care to audiences around the country.
HOW WILL YOU ROCK THE WORLD?
I’m going to rock the world by writing and publishing a book to help teens get over the stress they go through due to family, friends, and school. I know for a fact that the reason most slacking kids don’t do their work in school is because of problems with friends or family. Teens need assurance and guidance that they can’t always get from their school counselor. I feel safe using advice from a book, and I know others do too. This is how I’m going to rock the world.
AGE 13