Students's life becomes open book for project
If you ask Barbara Flynn who her parents are, you won't get a simple answer.
It has taken a mother, father, stepfather, aunts, uncles and ultimately foster parents to raise this teen, and she attempts to weave the fabric of her complicated life in a scrapbook she created for her senior project.
Barbara, a senior at Harlem High School, wrote her paper on adoption in Georgia and made the scrapbook - or life book - as her product. She now is living with foster parents Truett and Anita Abbott.
"The book shows what foster homes I've been in, friends from schools I've been to, and family," she said.
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Her saga, she said, began when she was 11 and her sister was 7. They were both put out of the car on Walton Way by her mother and stepfather. They walked to an aunt's house and the next year were adopted by an another aunt and uncle.
Barbara Flynn leafs through pages of the scrapbook she made for her senior project.
Photo by Jim Blaylock
For the next few years, Barbara said she lived partly with her aunt and partly with her biological mother, but the anger and resentment she felt toward her mother led her down a path to drug and alcohol abuse. Since August 2001, she's been in foster care.
"Mr. and Mrs. Abbott have given me the push that I needed," she said. "I really have come a long way in the year and a half I've been with them. I'm not the same person I used to be."
The scrapbook is titled My Crazy, Beautiful Life. In it is her senior picture with her holding her poodle, Rusty, and a picture of her with her Dale Earnhardt Jr. cake she had to celebrate her 18th birthday.
But the story's not over yet. Barbara said when she graduates she would like to go to Augusta State University or Gainesville College and major in psychology.