This box signifies something to me–six months of sorrow, but more than that the Man who sets us all free
Stones
Impossible stones
Rolled away.
Empty
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Category Archives: abuse survivors
Columbus Day Weekend 2009
You can forget that a baby had been born. Forget that your knees were never good. Forget that you had already started foraging for man-made bodies of water despite being so close to the sea.
Forget the pain that was to come
Just remember the anniversary, the series of tragic anniversaries
Cat’s Elea
She mistrusts me now, with good reason. I took her smallest one and when I brought her back it was only to say goodbye. She moves the surviving ones to the back corner of the closet where they are surrounded by the fragrance of girls’ Sunday dresses, sashes the vines and tangles of a forest we can only see through the window. She shuns the crass plastic takeaway boxes for the Formica bowls we bought in South Korea before you were born, before you were the little ones stashed in the closet for safety. I wish more things were just metaphorical thought experiments and fewer things were laced with grief and its outsider ways.
I understand when she lets me feed her and when she growls be careful, lady, I am done with white man’s justice.
“Don’t worry, Girl,” I tell her. “No white men here anymore.”
Thing One and Thing Two
Years after I first met M and C a little boy who I love more than the sky read The Cat and the Hat and expressed appropriate alarm over the treatment of Thing One and Thing Two–but they are children! He emoted.
Yes, Darling, there are many things about this story which trouble me also.
The first time I met M and C they burst through the door to the CPS waiting room. M was talking her usual mile-per-minute and both were whirling balls of energy. They went directly to the pastel plastic playhouse in the corner of the room and they reminded me of Thing One and Thing Two.
I wonder if anyone else wonders what happened to Thing One and Thing Two when they were all grown up?
This call is coming to you from a correctional facility
Adopted mom–denizen of the ordinary. Ordinary tea, ordinary clothes, ordinary mulch, overgrown flower beds. Scans the sky for rain. Rattles around in the-used-to-be marveling at how things have not turned out as expected.
Writing with Invisible Ink
Now that I have seen the diamondback rattler in the domain of children I see him again everywhere–the darkness notched between sidings and foundations, lassoed water hoses resting in the sun, tree branches in the grass, all become the skin and flesh and memory of the foolish man who held just the severed head of his deadly foe too close to human skin.
We keep the most dangerous pets coiled in emptied potato salad containers, hastily labeled with words too awful to write down in anything but
Invisible ink.
Ghost Child
To be clear you are all grown up now and living somewhere as I try yet again to excise what you have done to us all from pictures of beautiful children.
You were
You are a dangerous male child
But what you will be
Is mountains told to throw themselves
Into the Sea.
Mark 11:22-23 NIV
[22] “Have faith in God,” Jesus answered. [23] “Truly I tell you, if anyone says to this mountain, ‘Go, throw yourself into the sea,’ and does not doubt in their heart but believes that what they say will happen, it will be done for them.
Apophenia
I pull the elephant ears out of the water, one and then a handful and then none for awhile, risking dead fish and live snakes to find you. At dinner the little boy asks what miscarriage is and my answer is accurate but brief because why tell a little boy about lost siblings and the trees grown in their place or the way that forgetting is not better than carrying this
This memory of you dark, indelible angel, in the midst of all I hold dear.
Child to Parent Violence
Nine years ago I sat in a ob-gyn office looking at a pamphlet on domestic violence. I thought my partner is not the problem, but I am a domestic violence victim nonetheless.
During that pregnancy my adopted daughter kicked me in the stomach. During those years she subjected me to verbal abuse, kicked, punched, and hit me. We called doctors, the police, mental hospitals. Her anger was explosive and violent, but nothing she has ever done is worse than the things her brother did in secrecy.
Back then I did research. There was no support or process for parents attempting to pursue legal avenues of protection against abusive children.
I persisted. I attempted to get her charged with assault. I asked the police to take pictures of the marks she left.
They told me she was too mentally ill to be incarcerated. They told me to tie her up.
Juvenile court dropped the charges.
When I look back to the long-ago beginnings of my relationship with these two very broken people I see that their violence defined the relationship throughout. When young children with stories of neglect and abuse act out we may think there are solutions for caregivers in consistency, therapy, research, and time.
Maybe.
I never found those solutions. I found that their problems were bigger than us all, that I was lucky to have survived at all. Despite all our good intentions the advice I wish someone had given me twenty years ago—
Run fast, run far.
The Weirdest Thing
The weirdest thing how brave not knowing makes you. Not knowing the crash. Not knowing the presence of wrong. Not knowing the feral son has been a monster all along. He will not turn into a real boy instead he will be ever-so-carefully excised from the picture of the ordinary house, where trees have grown a rampart around all
who survive him.
Carrying Light 