Simply Neglect: Redemption Beyond Poverty and Foster Care

At three years old, Lainie wrapped both arms around her older sister’s leg and refused to let go as she was surrendered to the foster care system.

A year later, she was sent back home—back to the mother she longed to trust, and back to a place that was never truly safe.

For the next five years, Lainie endured hunger, instability, and neglect while clinging to the hope that her mother would finally choose her. Then, after another broken promise of forever, her mother gave her away again—this time in a motel parking lot.

By fifteen, Lainie was carrying the weight of abandonment, shame, and childhood trauma while trying to survive on her own.

Years later, marriage and motherhood gave her the family she had always longed for, but they could not erase the wounds of her past. Desperate to understand what had happened to her, Lainie began searching through her childhood foster-care records.

There she found four words that would change everything:

“No abuse — Simply Neglect.”

Those words forced Lainie to confront not only what happened inside her family, but also the failures of the system that was supposed to protect her.

Simply Neglect is a memoir of childhood neglect, foster care, abandonment, faith, forgiveness, motherhood, and the complicated journey of healing from trauma.

It is also a story of redemption: how a child who once longed for a safe home grew into a woman determined to create one for children who needed it.

Simply Neglect asks what happens when the wounds of childhood follow us into adulthood—and whether faith, truth, forgiveness, and love can help us write a different ending.