Sometimes, in the scattered experience that was her home life, Mariah would wake to her school day knowing she needed to be dressed and out by 5 a.m. to catch a city bus — sometimes more than one — to get to her regular school bus stop on time.

She was supposed to be living in the Fort Osage School District in Independence in eastern Jackson County, but with her parents’ difficulties, shuffling her between residences belonging to her father, his girlfriend, aunts and a grandmother — and sometimes without access to anyone with a working car — she had to figure out her way to school from different places as far off as Grandview, south of Kansas City.

It was a lot to ask of a girl still in elementary school.

When you’re a child, she said, “you don’t know how much is not normal.”

She would miss days, or get to school late, and her grades showed it. But whenever a teacher or a counselor would ask her what was going on, she’d tell them, “Everything’s fine.”

Even when she did get into Missouri’s protective services and the foster care system at the age of 13, that was only because she called the hotline herself, more out of anger with a relative than crying out about the hardships in her life.

Two years later, an unexpected phone call prodded her to think about all the difficulties mounted against her. Mariah was 15 then, a high school sophomore, and the woman on the other end of the call was Devon Robinson, a youth advocate calling from LINC’s youth transitions program.

It was just a get-to-know-you first call, and “Ms. Robinson” — as she would always be known to Mariah — told her she was in the business of making dreams come true for older youth coming out of foster care.

But Mariah couldn’t talk much at the moment. She was with her foster parent — one of her relatives — and they were in another relative’s house. Like most evenings in her life to that point, it was chaotic. Too loud. And her foster parent was standing right there where she would hear any grief Mariah might want to share.

As for her dreams, she told Robinson she wanted to go to nursing school. That’s one thing her aunt and other adults in her life had told her — become a nurse.

“We can help you with that,” Robinson said.

But nursing wasn’t actually a dream to Mariah. She didn’t have any dreams, she said now, remembering that moment.

“I was just trying to survive.”

Mariah was the only child her mother and father had together. But she had six half-siblings, four from her dad’s side and two from her mother’s. And in various shared-housing situations, Mariah could be living in a home with as many as 12 people, or sometimes even staying in hotels.

More and more she began to realize her life was not normal. She approached her middle school years increasingly aware that classmates, unlike her, had clean and new clothes. She wished she could use makeup like other girls, and change her hair. She was becoming isolated, unable to participate in after-school events and embarrassed to even try to have a playdate wherever she was living at any moment.

Her call to the state’s hotline at least got her safer situations, in homes that were monitored with oversight from state caseworkers. But so much remained unsettled. She started middle school in Kearney, Mo., but was switched to another relative within a month, transferring her to the North Kansas City school district. She was going through all the anxiety of adjusting to new classmates, getting in petty fights, trying to fit in — and then the Covid pandemic hit.

So, the Mariah that Robinson got on the phone on that November day in 2021 was an unmoored teenager. One more home change had her in Lee’s Summit, Mo., as a high school sophomore, trying to catch up her schooling in her first full year of in-person classes after Covid.

Everything had been constantly changing, including the state case managers that seemed to be cycling through her life.

Ms. Robinson, she figured, was just one more.

But what she got, 20-year-old Mariah says now, five years later, was reliability she had never experienced before.

“She was my only constant.”

Robinson is part of a LINC team that serves the Missouri Older Youth Program, which is funded through the federal Chafee Foster Care Program, named for U.S. Senator John H. Chafee, who championed the aid program for youth who age out of foster care and state custody.

Every year, LINC is supporting some 700 youth, providing help with school and daily living needs, helping them build confidence and skills to become successful, independent adults.

“I try to supply resources where I can,” Robinson said. “Give encouragement. Be someone you can bounce things off of. Building a relationship so they can trust me. Being what that one child needs, one child at a time.”

Mariah’s determination was remarkable, Robinson said.

“The emotional turmoil was hurtful for her,” she said. “But she always worked hard. She came out shining.”

Mariah regained her ground in school. She got a job at an Independence movie theater. Then, while in high school, she got into the Herndon Career Center in Lee’s Summit and was soon working as a Certified Nursing Assistant. She kept working as she advanced to college, often working longer shifts to earn needed bonuses.

“I wanted to work,” she said. “I wanted to go independent. I didn’t rely on aid.”

But she began to enjoy her meetings with Ms. Robinson, she said. Phone check-ins often lasted over an hour.

“She was always trying to help come up with solutions,” Mariah said. “She doesn’t want you to give up. She said I was one of her girls.”

LINC provided Mariah things a student from high school and moving on to college would need, like an iPad with a keyboard  — “Amazing!” Mariah said.

LINC provided new clothes to help her look and feel better at school. “And it wasn’t clothes from a thrift store either,” she said. She shopped Forever 21.

Life skills classes helped her learn strategies for managing finances, personal and mental health, job and school schedules. And incentive checks that rewarded her for her participation in classes and jobs helped her build up some personal savings.

By age 17, she saved enough money to buy a used car and pay for insurance and gas. LINC was giving her support, but, true to Mariah’s drive for self-sufficiency, she wanted to cover it all.

“She has always been like that,” Robinson said. “She said, ‘I got it, Ms. Robinson!'”

When Mariah was 18 she was able to move out on her own, into an apartment, which LINC helped her furnish.

Mariah, sitting on her white couch, swept a hand as if showing off the room’s decor.

“This is all LINC,” she said. “It’s amazing.”

She graduated high school and continued on to Metropolitan Community Colleges-Longview, where she is now close to becoming a licensed practical nurse.

She knows nursing will be a sturdy and reliable career, just as she’d been told when she was younger. But she is curious to see what else life can offer.

She can dream her own dreams now.

At Longview she met her husband, Moe, and they have a 10-month-old baby boy, Daniel. Mariah is determined to make sure he enjoys a safe and enriching childhood.

While she continues in nursing, she is also exploring creative ideas — entrepreneurial ideas. She thinks she might enjoy working at a nail salon, bringing dazzling beauty into others’ lives, maybe opening her own business.

She’s enrolled at the House of Heavilin Beauty College in Blue Springs. And she has set up her own pink-trimmed work station in her apartment with all the materials a nail technician needs, so she can practice.

“I want to add creativity to my life,” she says.

But most of all, she says, with Daniel in her arms, “I’m a mom. He’s my motivation now.”

Together with her husband, as she juggles nursing with nail art, Mariah imagines Daniel’s school days to come, and all the things kids get into.

“I’ll go to soccer games,” she said.

For a moment, thinking back on her hardest years, she said, “I would never have expected this.”

But maybe she did.

“What I got from (the hard times) was motivation,” she said. “How I receive difficulties is to do better, to come up with ways to come out on the other side. If you don’t want to be in the predicament you’re in, then work hard to get out of it.”

Robinson is still close by, checking in, ready with the kind of support an emerging young adult needs and deserves.

“I’m so very proud of her,” Robinson said. “She is determined.”