I tire of us
Top of the food chain (for now)
And rendered myopic by shear foolish thinking
You think you will be made immortal by
What?
Clever rocketry, singing voice, signature ass?
Naw. We all just be
bits of fur
Here for a minute
Gone tomorrow
Best prepare for when we go
up or down
Yonder.
In the mid- to late 90s President Clinton pushed through legislation to streamline and monetize public adoption from foster care.
People who adopted sibling groups, minorities, and special needs kids from foster care received free adoptions, public healthcare benefits for the children, and variable daily payment of ten to over forty dollars per day, per child. And in some states, like Texas where the Hart kids were from, college benefits.
Before this legislation (and the change in the ethos on adoption) children remained in foster care for years and parental rights remained robust.
After the legislation some enterprising judges saw a way to monetize the adoption of low income, disadvantaged children.
I lived in a county and fostered in a system where the abuses crossed every line of protection to include coercing disabled mothers to relinquish their rights or face the threat of criminal charges. Women would be targeted while pregnant, their babies taken from the hospital after birth, and adoptions processed within 6 months.
The Clinton system was designed to move foster kids out of the system. It was designed to monetize the adoption of children who were normally left in foster care. While it may have helped some, it harmed many.
There is a greater than 80 percent chance that the Hart mothers received generous federal payouts to take their “kids from hard backgrounds.”
Which means tax dollars would have funded their household, bought the car they drove over the cliff, and have been significant source of income intended for the benefit of the children.
No one should get paid to beat, starve, and murder children
Who never had a chance.
I can’t help but stare at the picture of this family swept out to sea. I know what it is like to attempt to parent children from “hard backgrounds.”
And yes, I have often tried to assuage my deep grief about the damage caused by my adopted children by telling myself that we have survived (so far).
None of this is fun to talk about, but I did talk–sometimes unsparingly, because I hoped that if people heard our story they could do something to prevent tragedies like ours.
More than the average mama, I can put myself in the shoes of these mamas, and I have two things to thing to say–
Just: a story of the lost and found https://www.amazon.com/dp/1468123459/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_JPNWAbDZT3TR5
It is a small label inside a second-hand London fog. Sez “waterproof” in a way that means tell the dam story. Which I tell in my head in one way or another
Every day
Protagonists too vivid to fictionalize and actual jackass antagonists who are surprisingly two dimensional for real people in a small
Awful story I don’t want to tell, but my lovely black raincoat says I must.
I have always marveled at the risk involved in the parable of the lost sheep. In fact, I can actually see the economists in the crowd shaking their heads and coming up to J. afterwards and trying to convince him that it just doesn’t make sense.
One lost sheep? Who is gonna watch the others?
I have a tendency to worry about all the sheep. What if there are wolves? Wolves stress me out. But J is unswerving. He leaves the 99 and goes to find the one. lost. sheep.
Of course he knows some secrets.
Like: the 99 are actually supposed to watch out for each other.
Like: a few stubborn jackasses in the flock help keep the wolves at bay.
Like: I am the one lost sheep. You are the one lost sheep.
We are all lost without him.
For J every last flipping one of us is that solitary-witless-easily-confused-fluffy-lost sheep.
Sometimes the only thing one needs to do to be found is to admit that one is lost.
Real lost
Without him.
After a solid fudging week of losing thumb wars to the god of grief I decide to change my stance.
Fine, I say, keep me up if you want, but we are going to do this together.
Make no mistake. He is not my friend. He is the quiet satellite tech on the slow train north. He is the Russian student who used to try to beguile me with roses and sweet talk. He is the dark standing just shy of sunset. All these years I have avoided his gaze, pretended I didn’t notice him at the same parties, never wailed and pummeled his dark, cold chest.
You win, I say, snake hole, only to realize he hasn’t, can’t because You have already–no matter how many days to resurrection.
The disembodied woman on the late night public radio station compares colors we cannot see to the notes we cannot hear in the full spectrum of light shaken by wind, the tree next to the street light makes a shadow puppet barn owl with its bare limbs alive, snow-globe present in this river of sky the color of a song sung by invisible voices, if I believed in ghosts you are there, touching my shoulder blade reminding me we all live forever somewhere, shiver down spine no word for this beautiful mammalian
Night river.
1. Take off your shoes
2. Acknowledge holy ground
3. Expect an uncomfortable sense of awe
5. Repeat
Over my shoulder I hear the PBS lady tell my sons about blizzards, how they are just snow storms unless the wind is strong and fast. Here in Texas we have driving rain, not driven snow, and it is the percussive light which wakes the dogs in the night. Poised for a fight. Hurricanes have the eyes of Quint’s soulless sharks as they roll across the landscape of childhood and wakefulness I will momentarily regret the home I left in fear. Regret what I did not leave there. Regret what I did, but not the winds. The winds around the eye, the deceptively calm eye, of every storm that changes the landscape
Of who we once were.
This started as a break up but ended with old friend, Wakefulness here in the dark, in the storm
It was a dark and stormy night! But it was the dogs that kept me up
Dogs of the past
Dogs of war
That dog whose name* I can’t remember who re-enacted classics like The Prince and the Pauper.
When names and sleep elude you, there are sheep. They start out chalky, outlined, and two dimensional, but they elaborate
In depth, complexity, and general fluffiness, but also about the weather, dogs barking at night, and all the ways it was and wasn’t my fault this chance we took hurt so much.
*Wishbone
