She's Not Your Girlfriend

When I was eleven or so, living in a long-term group home where kids wait for families to adopt them or become permanent placements (damn clinical terms!), Rick, one of the houseparents (damn unnatural terms!) asked me what I wanted to do with my life. All my young, shocked mind could produce was that I wanted to return home to take care of my mother. He got really mad, and said forcefully, "She's not your girlfriend!" and something else about how that was wrong for me to do. His wife, Barbara, added that they had another kid grow up and take care of her mother. At least it wasn't unheard of. Well, you know what? Maybe things were unhealthy for me and my baby sister to be raised by our mother, but during those years I was being raised by "normal," "conventional" families, and my mother was villainized so much for saying weird things, my mother showed up every other week to visit just because she loved me. She didn't have to. She just wanted to. Very much. That's more true love and natural affection than I ever got from anyone. So, I think my wiring's confused deep down in there. There's distrust ingrained in there. My mother, who was considered abnormal and mentally ill, loved me very much, while "normal" families entrusted by the state with my upbringing, kicked me out, yelled and screamed, divorced, needed me for money and to pay rent, ad nauseum. I have some issues.
I have no time machine, however, and cannot go into the past to say or do what I should have to stand up for myself, to make things better today. I'll never know how things might have been different were the past different. I have to deal with now.