Table of Contents
This book is for everyone who helped me along the way to reaching my potential
you know who you are.
And to the Tuohy family, you are truly a blessing to me. Thank you for helping me to turn my dreams into reality.
M.O.
Will and Madeleine: I love you both and am honored to be your father. Always protect each other.
D.Y.
PROLOGUE
Reaching Back
I felt myself breaking into a sweat as I walked up to the doors of the Department of Childrens Services office, and it had nothing to do with the fact that it was summertime in Memphis. I never would have dreamed a dozen years ago that I would walk willingly up to those doors. To me, they seemed to stand for everything that had gone wrong in my childhood, every bad memory, every feeling of hopelessness and loneliness and fear. And now I was headed inside.
It was a different office from the one I remembered. The big state government building downtown was the one that always stayed in my mind, and that was where I thought I was headed until the directions Id been given had me turn into an old strip mall lined with a payday advance center, a grocery store, and a lot of potholes in the parking lot. Id driven past this shopping center I dont know how many times in my life and had never really paid that close attention to what all was there. That afternoon in July, as I drove up for my appointment, I just circled past the stores in my car, looking for a place to turn back out onto the road because I knew the directions had to be wrong. But then I saw the familiar DCS logo on the glass door toward the end of the mall and I knew I was in the right place.
Suddenly, I lost about three feet and two hundred pounds and became a scared little kid again.
I was a few minutes early, but I was ready for this to happen. There was no use sitting in my car to kill that time. I had come here as part of my work to write this book and I had an appointment to meet, for the first time in my adult life, the woman who spent years as the states caseworker on my file. I needed to go in while I still had the nerve, so I parked and walked to the building, past all the other cars parked outside, past the waiting room full of plastic chairs, and up to the little reception window that looked kind of like a bulletproof barricade that you see in convenience stores in the worst parts of town.
Hi, I said to the woman checking people in. I had to duck down so she could see my face through the glass. My name is Michael Oher and Im here to meet with Ms. Bobbie Spivey.
Ooh! Its so nice to meet you! she almost shouted. Come on in! Weve been expecting you! Ms. Spiveys office is back here.
A security guard opened the door and led me through a metal detector and back into a big room full of cubicles and offices. As I walked to the conference room where our meeting would be, a number of women crowded aroundall DCS workersand said hello or told me how much they enjoyed the movie The Blind Side. I shook hands and said hello, but none of the faces looked familiar.
And then, all of a sudden, I saw her. There was no mistaking who she was. I was face-to-face with the woman who had been one of the scariest people in all of my childhood.
Hello, Michael, she smiled, giving me a hug. She barely reached the middle of my chest as I bent down. You look so different. Youre a lot taller. And your complexion is better.
I had to laugh at that. She looked different, too. I couldnt believe that the woman Id thought of for years as a relentless bounty hunter, always chasing down my brothers and me and trying to take us away from our mother, was really just a tiny, pretty woman with a nice smile and a gentle voice.
We sat down at a table as we went over the rules of our meeting. Any kid who has been in the custody of the state has a right to their information once they become an adult. However, when there are siblings involved, it makes things a little more complicated because the law only allows me to get information about my own life and not about anyone elses. She explained that rules like that have to be there to protect peoples privacy, so there might be some questions I would ask that she wouldnt be able to answer. I understood. I was just happy to have a chance to finally start to put together the pieces of all of the memories I hadnt let myself think about for so many years. Sean Tuohy said one time that one of my strongest gifts was my ability to forget. He was right. I had needed to forget a lot of stuff in order to not get swallowed up by the hurt and sadness. But I had finally decided that the time was right for me to start remembering.
I DIDNT WRITE THIS BOOK JUST to revisit Michael Lewiss The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game, and it is not meant to be a repeat of Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohys book In a Heartbeat: Sharing the Power of Cheerful Giving (which was released while I was working on this one). Lewiss book was originally aimed at football fans who were interested in some game strategy and a personal story about it; the Tuohys book was designed to help carry on a discussion with people who had seen the movie about our lives and were inspired to find their own way to give.
My book is as different from the other two as they are different from each other, and I have a couple of goals that Id like to accomplish with it. The first is that I want to help separate fact from fiction. After the movie came out, there were a lot of people asking me if my life was exactly how it was shown on screen. Obviously, the moviemakers have to make artistic choices to tell the story in the best way, but some of the details, like me having to learn the game of football as a teenager or me walking to the gym in November wearing cut-off shorts, just arent true. Since so many people seem interested in these details, I hope that I can help to make a little more sense out of it all for them.
My second goal with this book, and the much more important one, is that I want to talk aboutand tothe nearly 500,000 children in America whose lives have been so rough that the state has determined theyre better off being cared for by someone other than their parents. The odds are stacked against those children. Less than half will ever graduate from high school. Of the ones who drop out, almost half of the boys will be imprisoned for violent crimes. Girls in foster care are six times more likely to have children before the age of twenty-one than are girls in stable families. And of those kids, more than half will end up in foster care themselves. The outlook is pretty bleak for kids like me.
I beat the odds.
Most people probably know my name from The Blind Side. What they probably dont knowwhat no one knowsis exactly what happened to me during my years in the foster care system, the years before The Blind Side picked up my story. The things in my life that led up to it; the way I tried to fight back; the emotions that overwhelmed me and left me confused, scared, and alone; all of the memories that no one was able to bring out of me; everything in my life that came before the happy endingthose are the things I want to discuss. All of that, and I want to provide a voice for the other half-million children in the foster care system who are silently crying out for help.
