Robin lost her mother at eight and was sent into foster care at eleven, and this conversation is about how she found belonging, healing, and a life full of love on the other side of childhood abandonment.
By eleven, Robin's father had chosen his girlfriend over his kids and sent Robin and her younger sister into the foster care system, rather than let them live with the aunt who wanted them. Five and a half years passed with no contact with her family. She grew up in a shelter and then a foster home where she was fed but not loved. And somehow she kept reaching for people. At eighteen she traveled alone to a nomadic village in Kenya, learned Swahili, and found the belonging she had been missing her whole life. This is a story about grief, foster care, resilience, reparenting, and the quiet power of connection.
Guest Bio:
Robin Rosenbluth is the author of the forthcoming memoir, Living With Strangers: Healing a Wounded Heart in a Distant Land (She Writes Press, October 27, 2026). A former foster teen, she advocates for finding permanent homes for older foster youth and sits on the board of You Gotta Believe. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Find Robin:
Website: https://robinrosenbluth.com
Substack: https://robinrosenbluth.substack.com
Chapters:
00:00 The choice that changed everything
03:00 Who Robin is in 2026
06:00 Losing her mother at eight
09:00 Parentified at eleven
12:00 The children's shelter
16:00 Learning what racism really was
20:00 Five and a half years, no contact
28:00 Taking her power back
30:00 A village in Kenya
42:00 Love as the counterpoint to grief
49:00 What she is most proud of
55:00 What she would say to her younger self
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Keywords: foster care, foster care survivor story, losing a parent as a child, childhood grief, abandonment, reparenting, finding belonging, chosen family, memoir, You Gotta Believe, The Life Shift Podcast
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