Trigger Warning: This article contains themes of suicide, abuse and violence that some readers may find distressing.
Several people take family for granted but the true value of having loved ones around is something that only those growing up in foster care know about. Not only does it leave a void in their heart, but also instills the belief in them that love is supposed to be conditional. Davon Woods spent the initial 27 years of his life without a stable family facing dejection and desolation, before he was able to become a part of a loving family. One day in April 2021, when he was at his job as a car salesman, a family walked into the showroom. Unable to hold it in any longer, a vulnerable Davon expressed his desire to be a part of the family and this wholehearted confession changed his life forever, reported LoveWhatMatters.
Representative Image Source: Car salesman using a digital tablet talking about a new car to customers in a store. (FG Trade/ Getty Images)
Davon is one of the thousands of foster care children who grow up with a traumatic backstory. Right after he and his twin brother were born, they were thrown into foster care because their biological mother was unaware that she was pregnant and didn’t even visit a doctor until she got into labor. “We weighed about 2 pounds each. They said we were so small we could’ve fit in a shoebox together, and we came back positive for crack,” Davon told LoveWhatMatters. The brothers spent two years in foster care before they were adopted by the Woods family.
Representative Image Source: Pexels | Roman Odintsov
But even an adoption didn’t mark the end of their misery as things got worse. “We had a very difficult childhood with our adoptive family,” Davon shared. “We got physically and verbally abused, we were never given a voice, and they never once told us they loved us. It felt like we were just a paycheck, but we were too young and afraid to tell anyone what was happening at home.”
Representative Image Source: Pexels | Safari Consoler
Like many foster care children, the lives of Davon and his brother were filled with uncertainty, confusion, and a lot of unprocessed traumas. Davon even attempted suicide many times. “I didn’t want to live anymore because of how we were being treated, but I was never able to go through with it because I didn’t want to leave my brother alone with them,” he recalled. By the time he was 11 years old, his excruciating reality drove him into the dark realm of drugs. At the age of 18, Davon became a drug dealer. To escape their sorrow, Davon and his brother moved to Georgia.
Representative Image Source: Pexels | George Ikwegbu
In Georgia too, they ended up getting pulled into the shadows. “We ended up getting involved in the gangs there,” Davon explained. “We saw people get shot in front of us. There were times we got guns drawn on us. We could’ve lost our lives.” Then one day, their relatives from the Woods family visited them and invited them to Church. They were reluctant to go, but when they did, their lives took a positive shift. The encounter with spirituality made them feel as if the emotional holes in their heart were being filled, and they felt healed.
Soon enough, they were taking up different jobs, away from the brutal life in the streets, before Davon settled into his role as a car salesman. That’s where he met the Wilkinson family who visited the showroom, and this reignited his long-standing dream of having a family. He requested them to take him into their family and in August 2021, the Wilkinsons invited Davon over for dinner, and later that year, for Thanksgiving. After about a year of knowing them, Davon asked them if he could be a part of their family and add their last name to his name, to which they agreed.
“I just want you guys to know that you mean the world to me,” Davon can be seen telling his family in a heartwarming video. “I never had a mother to hug me, love me or show me any affection. I never had a father to teach me different things or spend quality time with, and you all showed me the definition of family.” After he became a part of this family, Davon described his feelings to LoveWhatMatters, “In them, I’ve gained a mom and dad, brothers and sisters, and a niece. I’ve gained the white family I made up as a confused child. It goes to show: color doesn’t make you family, and neither does blood. Love makes you family."
Since then, Davon has quit his job and founded “Foster Kids Matter,” an organization dedicated to serving foster children in Georgia.
You can follow Davon (@davonwoodsfc) on Instagram and TikTok for more updates on his attempts to raise awareness about foster kids.
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Pictured: A healthy practice?
Will your current friends still be with you after seven years?
Professor shares how many years a friendship must last before it'll become lifelong
Think of your best friend. How long have you known them? Growing up, children make friends and say they’ll be best friends forever. That’s where “BFF” came from, for crying out loud. But is the concept of the lifelong friend real? If so, how many years of friendship will have to bloom before a friendship goes the distance? Well, a Dutch study may have the answer to that last question.
Sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst and his team in the Netherlands did extensive research on friendships and made some interesting findings in his surveys and studies. Mollenhorst found that over half of your friendships will “shed” within seven years. However, the relationships that go past the seven-year mark tend to last. This led to the prevailing theory that most friendships lasting more than seven years would endure throughout a person’s lifetime.
In Mollenhorst’s findings, lifelong friendships seem to come down to one thing: reciprocal effort. The primary reason so many friendships form and fade within seven-year cycles has much to do with a person’s ages and life stages. A lot of people lose touch with elementary and high school friends because so many leave home to attend college. Work friends change when someone gets promoted or finds a better job in a different state. Some friends get married and have children, reducing one-on-one time together, and thus a friendship fades. It’s easy to lose friends, but naturally harder to keep them when you’re no longer in proximity.
Some people on Reddit even wonder if lifelong friendships are actually real or just a romanticized thought nowadays. However, older commenters showed that lifelong friendship is still possible:
“I met my friend on the first day of kindergarten. Maybe not the very first day, but within the first week. We were texting each other stupid memes just yesterday. This year we’ll both celebrate our 58th birthdays.”
“My oldest friend and I met when she was just 5 and I was 9. Next-door neighbors. We're now both over 60 and still talk weekly and visit at least twice a year.”
“I’m 55. I’ve just spent a weekend with friends I met 24 and 32 years ago respectively. I’m also still in touch with my penpal in the States. I was 15 when we started writing to each other.”
“My friends (3 of them) go back to my college days in my 20’s that I still talk to a minimum of once a week. I'm in my early 60s now.”
“We ebb and flow. Sometimes many years will pass as we go through different things and phases. Nobody gets buttsore if we aren’t in touch all the time. In our 50s we don’t try and argue or be petty like we did before. But I love them. I don’t need a weekly lunch to know that. I could make a call right now if I needed something. Same with them.”
Maintaining a friendship for life is never guaranteed, but there are ways, psychotherapists say, that can make a friendship last. It’s not easy, but for a friendship to last, both participants need to make room for patience and place greater weight on their similarities than on the differences that may develop over time. Along with that, it’s helpful to be tolerant of large distances and gaps of time between visits, too. It’s not easy, and it requires both people involved to be equally invested to keep the friendship alive and from becoming stagnant.
As tough as it sounds, it is still possible. You may be a fortunate person who can name several friends you’ve kept for over seven years or over seventy years. But if you’re not, every new friendship you make has the same chance and potential of being lifelong.