The 42-year-old comedienne reveals during a candid chat for the Variety Changemakers Summit that she thought she could not make it to 18 when living in foster care.
- Jun 16, 2022
AceShowbiz - Tiffany Haddish has reflected on the time she was placed in foster care. During a candid chat for the Variety Changemakers Summit, the "Girls Trip" actress admitted that she used to think she would die there before turning 18.
"When I was in foster care, I mean, I thought I was going to die there," the 42-year-old confessed. "I didn't think I would make it to 18. And when I made it to 18, I was like, 'OK, I got to really think bigger.' "
"And I did think bigger, and I'm definitely where I thought I would be," the comedienne went on sharing. "Well, it's bigger than what I thought, but I feel the way that I was hoping I would feel and that's secure in my ability to provide for me."
Tiffany said she wrote her book and created the She Ready Foundation, which mission is "to inspire, protect, and provide resources for youth impacted by foster care", because she wants to address the needs that she didn't get during her childhood. "[I] wanted to take away the feeling of feeling like garbage from kids," she said.
"When I was a kid and I was moving around, all my stuff had to be in trash bags, and moving like that is not good for the self esteem because it make you feel like garbage that can easily be transported to here or there," she divulged. "You start thinking of yourself as such, as garbage."
"That was the worst feeling in the world personally, and I told myself, if I ever get any power, I'm going to try to make sure kids don't feel like that," the ex-girlfriend of Common further elaborated. "If I can reach out, I'm going to try to change that feeling for them. So I started my foundation, and we started with just giving out suitcases."
Before she and her siblings were sent to foster care in her early teens, Tiffany experienced physical abuse at the hands of their own mother. "She knocked me out like, straight punched me. 'Cause she couldn't use her words," she once said in a 2020 interview. "Here you go from a woman who's like, owns two properties, has her own business, also a manager at the U.S. post office, has an expensive vernacular."
"[Then] she has this car accident and she has to learn how to walk, talk, eat, everything all over again. Everything she had taught me at that point, I'm teaching her," she continued recalling. "And the frustration of that she couldn't think of the words so she would just hit. And so I thought maybe if I did a dance for her then maybe she won't punch me in my nose today."
