KAILEY JOHNSON

kailey was born to ariana hopkins in san diego, california in 2002. her mother wasn’t together with her father. edward ‘ed’ martin was deployed at the time. he was in the army, and ariana wasn’t his wife. he was married to lena martin who lived in his hometown of dallas, texas. ariana introduced ed to her daughter when he came back from his deployment. he was convinced that she’d had the kid to scam him out of child support money.

ariana did her best to raise kailey, but she had her own issues with addiction to cope with as well. she had not had kailey for child support money, but she had hoped that ed would help raise her. instead, his wife found out about his affair, the child and the mother’s state when kailey was three years old. ed’s wife called cps on ariana and had her declared an unfit mother.

kailey went into foster care and for the most part she had a good experience. she was cared for, brought to pre-school and did have better care than her mother was able to provide. her mother was put into treatment involuntarily. when she completed treatment, she would be allowed supervised visits with kailey and eventually be able to take over care of her again. they did make it to the supervised visits stage, but ariana relapsed before she was able to take over care of her daughter.

kailey started school while she was in foster care. she was young, but she wasn’t adopted like most kids her age because there was hope that her mother would recover. she was generally well cared for. her foster mother, nicole, was one of the best foster mothers in the district. she even made an effort to get to know ariana so that she would be able to update her on her daughter’s growth to help motivate her to recover. when she was in the fifth grade, she was able to go back to her mother’s care full time. things were weird at first, but she’d missed her mother and was happy to see her doing better for a short time.

when kailey was eleven, her mother died. she had been clean, but she was experiencing health complications stemming from her past addiction. kailey was returned to the system, this time with hope that she would be adopted. she grieved her mother from foster care, and from her first potential adoption placement. it made her act out, it made her angry because life hadn’t been fair to her. she was a good kid, she did alright in school and had friends. she’d just been disproportionately unlucky. she made it harder for people to want to adopt her, and she was getting older. it was always harder to place teenagers.

she had two more failed foster to adopt placements before she was placed with the secretary of veteran affairs at 14. it was the first time she had left the state for a potential placement, but everyone involved felt confident this was the last time she’d be in the system.