Garbage Bag Suitcase: A Memoir
Shenandoah Chefalo is on a wholly dysfunctional journey through a childhood with neglectful, drug-and alcohol addicted parents. She endures numerous moves in the middle of the night with just minutes to pack, multiple changes in schools, hunger, cruelty, and loneliness. Finally at the age of 13, Shen had had enough. After being abandoned by her mother for months at her grandmother’s retirement community, she asks to be put into foster care. Surely she would fare better at a stable home than living with her mother? It turns out that it was not the storybook ending she had hoped for. When a car accident lands her in the hospital with grave injuries and no one comes to visit her during her three-week stay, she realizes she is truly all alone in the world. Overcoming many adversities, Shen became part of the 3% of all foster care children who get into college, and the 1% who graduate. Despite her numerous achievements in life though, she still suffers from the long-term effects of neglect, and the coping skills that she adapted in her childhood are not always productive in her adult life. Garbage Bag Suitcase is not only the inspiring and hair-raising story of one woman’s journey to over- come her desolate childhood, but it also presents grass-root solutions on how to revamp the broken foster care system.
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Highly Recommended! Full disclosure: I know the author, Shenandoah Chefalo. We live in the same city in Northern Michigan, I know her husband, we have many mutual friends, and I like her.The memoir is Shenâs coming out party. Sharing the truth of her childhood, an experience that I cannot imagine. Unfortunately, all too many children do grow up in homes where the adults are not grown ups and the childrenâs needs do not trump those for booze and drugs and parties.I loved the book, even though many of…
Riveting Read As an adoptive parent of eleven children who arrived at various ages from infancy to 15-years-old, I found this to be a remarkable book. While it is a story of one small child falling through every conceivable crack, it represents countless children across our country. Chefalo describes her chaotic, dysfunctional childhood with her family of origin, and then the continuing dysfunction with her foster family. The details are frightening when you realize that she was just a child. How is it…