Just Jennifer

Etched in Sand: A True Story of Five Siblings Who Survived an Unspeakable Childhood on Long Island by Regina Calcaterra (William Morrow, August 2013)

Regina Calcaterra is a well-respected attorney in New York and was part of the response team for New York City immediately after Superstorm Sandy.  She has worked hard lobbying for social justice on the national and local levels, and is a board member of You Gotta Believe, an organization that works toward finding older children in the foster care system permanent home situations.  To read this story of a young girl who fought to keep herself above water and her younger siblings from harm makes her life, achievements and passions even that more amazing.  Regina, along with two older sisters and a younger brother and sister moved from house to trailer to apartment with their addicted and abusive mother Cookie.  Her eldest sister is married when Regina starts her story and her next oldest sister tells Regina it is time for her to take over and moves in with a friend from school for the summer.  Knowing the worst thing that can happen is for Child Services to find out about the remaining three siblings, Regina tries hard the summer she is thirteen to provide food, a relatively clean place to live and comfort for her younger siblings after their mother abandons them in a house on Long Island, doing whatever she feels necessary to keep the remaining family together.  When Cookie returns and beats Regina beyond recognition, a teacher in the school finally steps in and Regina and her older sister are sent to one home, her brother and sister to another.  Thinking that emancipating herself will save her brother and sister, Regina does just that, only to have Cookie find out, become enraged and take the children to live with her in Idaho.  Over the next few years, Regina fights for good grades in school, earns a spot on the gymnastics team but never gives up trying to save Norman and Rosie from her mother.  She also reaches out to the father she never knew and is rebuffed and tries, as she nears adulthood, to learn why her mother hated her most of all the children, hoping she will be able to heal from the abusive relationship, knowing they will never be able to have a healthy one.  That any of the children survived this life as well as they each seem to have is remarkable, that Regina was able to rise above it, educate herself and put herself in a position where she was able to help others from a similar fate is nothing short of remarkable.