Raised by Strangers: How 13 Years in Foster Care Saved One Woman's Life

 

The first thing Tina Strambler remembers is the silence. Not the peaceful kind, but the heavy, knowing silence that settles over a house right before everything falls apart. She was five years old, standing in her aunt and uncle's home in Midland, Texas, when two strangers appeared at the door. They spoke softly. They reached out their hands. And for the first time in her young life, someone led her away from danger instead of into it.

"I didn't know then that foster care—a place so many kids fear—would become the very thing that saved me," Strambler writes in her newly released memoir, Raised by Strangers, Rebuilt by Love. "That strangers would become the closest thing I ever had to family."

The book, published in 2025, chronicles Strambler's 13 years inside the Texas foster care system, beginning with her removal from an abusive home at age five and ending with her high school graduation—the same night she met the man who would become her husband of nearly 30 years. It is a story of unspeakable trauma, unlikely saviors, and the quiet, relentless power of choosing hope.

A Childhood Interrupted

Strambler was born in Louisiana, but her earliest memories are fragments: the smell of gumbo simmering, her sister's hand gripping hers during play, her brother's laughter filling rooms that otherwise felt hollow. But beneath those flashes of warmth, instability lurked. Her father's choices led him toward prison. Her mother struggled with addiction, disappearing into herself even when she was standing in the same room.

"She was fighting her own demons—addiction, pain, and wounds she never had the space or support to heal," Strambler writes. "I didn't know what addiction was. I just knew that sometimes my mom was there, and sometimes she wasn't—even when she was standing right in front of me."

When a judge ordered Strambler's father to find relatives willing to care for his three children, an uncle in Midland, Texas, stepped forward. From the outside, he seemed steady—married, employed as a truck driver, a father himself. The family believed they were sending the children to safety.

They were wrong.

The House in Midland

The abuse didn't begin all at once. It crept in like a shadow. First came the rules—harsh, sudden, with no room for mistakes. Then the punishments. Strambler's aunt developed a nightly ritual, lining the three children up in the hallway and grabbing their chins, forcing them to look up while she searched their eyes for the smallest red vein.

"If she found one—the kind that appears when a child is tired or dry-eyed—she called it a 'devil,'" Strambler recalls. " 'You've got devils in your eyes,' she'd hiss. 'That means you sinned today.' "

Punishment followed without explanation. Strambler's brother was forced to eat from a dog bowl on the floor. The children stood on tiptoes for hours, arms stretched toward the top of the refrigerator, calf muscles shaking, until they collapsed. When they did, the punishment started over.

There were beatings with a paddle embedded with nails—just the tips showing through, enough to leave scars that would fade on the surface but never fully disappear underneath. Strambler still carries those scars on her thighs today.

"There are parts of abuse that live beyond memory," she writes. "They live in the body. Long after the details blur, the body remembers what the mind tries to forget."

The Day Everything Changed

The rescue came from an unexpected place: a school nurse's office. Strambler was in kindergarten or first grade when she was called down from class. Her sister was already there, small and scared but trying to look brave. One of her sister's teachers had noticed bruises. She made the call that so many children pray someone will make.

When the nurse gently asked Strambler to lift her shirt, she hesitated. She had been taught that telling the truth about what happened at home was dangerous. But the nurse's expression was kind. Concerned. When she saw the bruises on Strambler's back, her face changed just enough for the child to feel it.

A social worker came. Questions were asked. And a few days later, there was a knock on the door.

"We're here for the children," the social worker said.

Strambler remembers walking outside and feeling the sun hit her face—warm, honest, different. "For the first time in my life," she says, "strangers were stepping in to protect me."

High Sky Children's Ranch

In the 1980s, the foster care system operated differently than it does today. Keeping siblings together wasn't always a priority. Strambler and her sister were placed at High Sky Girls Ranch in Midland, a campus of cottages run by foster parents who lived on-site. Her brother was sent to a boys' home in Amarillo, miles away. He would become a ghost in their story for years.

High Sky was strict, but it was safe. For a child who had grown up in chaos, even strictness felt like relief. There were chore charts, mealtimes, curfews, schedules—things most children roll their eyes at but that children from trauma cling to like lifelines.

"It was the first place where I felt structure instead of chaos," Strambler says.

Over 13 years, the ranch became more than a place she lived. It became home. Cottage parents tucked her in at night. Counselors like Jalynn Hogan helped her unpack trauma she didn't yet have words for. Director Jackie Carter created an environment where broken children could learn to be whole again.

"I was raised by a village," Strambler says. "A community of adults who stepped in where life had left gaps."

The Call Home—and the Return

At 13, Strambler faced an impossible choice. Her mother had passed her drug tests, completed her inspections. There was an opportunity to go home. Rebellious and curious, Strambler said yes.

The reality was devastating. The small blue house in Tickfaw, Louisiana, had no structure, no rules, no bedtime. No one required her to go to school. She saw things she had never seen before—roaches, food stamps, cocaine on a table. Her brother, shaped by years in different boys' homes, was angry and lost. Her sister was adrift.

One day, overwhelmed and heartbroken, Strambler picked up the phone and called her counselor back in Texas.

"I want to come home," she said. And by home, she meant High Sky.

"I wasn't rejecting her," Strambler says of her mother. "I was choosing safety. I was choosing stability. I was choosing the life that had raised me."

The Night Everything Changed Again

Strambler graduated from high school after returning to Midland. That very night, she met a young man named Roderick, home from Sul Ross University to watch his brother graduate.

"We hit it off instantly," she recalls. "There was a spark—the kind that makes you lean closer, listen a little harder, smile a little deeper."

Something about him felt safe. Kind. Steady. For a girl who grew up in chaos and unpredictability, that feeling was life-changing.

They married in 1997. Today, nearly 30 years later, they are still together—parents to three sons, Darius, Dedrick, and Donovan, and grandparents to four grandchildren.

Breaking Cycles

Motherhood, Strambler says, saved her in ways she never expected.

"When I became a mom, I wasn't just raising children," she writes. "I was raising myself out of a past that tried to break me."

She poured everything she had and everything she never had into her boys: consistency, warmth, safety, boundaries, encouragement. She became the mother she wished she had. The protector she prayed for as a child.

"Every time I hugged my boys, a part of me healed," she says. "Every time I tucked them into bed safely, a memory of my own unsafe nights softened."

Today, Strambler works in sales in the oil and gas industry—a field where her ability to connect with people has become her greatest asset. Her husband has spent more than 30 years with the same company, ExxonMobil. Together, they have built the stability they never had.

A Message to Survivors

Strambler wrote her memoir, she says, not because her life was easy, but because it was hard—and she survived.

"I wrote it so that others who feel broken can see what healing looks like," she explains. "So foster kids know they can rise above their circumstances. So survivors of abuse know their story doesn't have to end in darkness."

The book is dedicated to her husband, her sons, and the people of High Sky Children's Ranch—the strangers who became family and rebuilt her life through love, structure, and hope.

"Forgiveness is a journey, not a destination," Strambler writes. "And every step I take brings me closer to the woman I was always meant to be."

That woman, she says, is someone she never imagined she could become: whole, at peace, and living proof that the darkest beginnings can lead to the brightest endings.