Category Archives: child advocacy

Calvarium 4

Posted on by
Reply

At the beginning of the black-tie fundraiser (325-1675 dollars a plate, depending on your commitment to “the cause”), the organizers have a basket full of random names, (where did they come from? Who were/are these people?) to the current batch of servers-take one and pin it on they say, so they do and for this night they are foreign to themselves-Renata, Consuela, Xavier…instead of Pam, Ashley, and Rob… They have to remember these temporary identities when beckoned or chided by the plate-holders.  As when, mid-dessert, a tray falls, sudden show of violence, shattered porcelain, all those scrumptious (expensive) eclairs.

Wasted.

Calvarium 2

Posted on by
2

Old time-y barber shop, corner of a once prosperous downtown, old fellas talking about the game on cathode ray TV mounted on the wall.  Men coming and going, sitting, standing, paying tips with crumpled dollar bills. So many versions of the naked pate, the scruffy, and the wispy comb-over.  Knife to chin, razor to scalp, going through this mitzvah of voluntary loss as that ancient metaphorical talisman turns on its axis outside-red/white/red/white ribbons of our old, shared story of triage.  Triage or else.

Calvarium 1

Posted on by
2

the girl-woman in the kitchen takes her time, cracking the dome of the speckled egg with patience and surgical precision, holds the broken pieces together so that only the white can slip through, the round, intact yolk cradled in the serrated halves of a thing once whole and intact which could have been another thing entirely or…an omelet, a quiche, the whipped interstices of meringue, or these lovely macaroons scooped dough into her piping bag from the sterile bowl on the counter, suburban kitchen, tinted carnival colors, creamy in the middle.

editing Jen

Posted on by
Reply

I stopped half way through 

Jen’s autobiography

Because things got dark when

The Ouija board killed

The man cleaning the coffee pot in the kitchen

Close to the unnamed laundromat which seems to me to be

A protagonist they used to smoke and drink behind

She was only 13

Don’t-didn’t-can’t-now

Tell mommy

That is when the addiction started…

“We struggled, moved to the next road over in a house outta apt, Tara was staying out all night, got a boyfriend way way older than her”

She lived with her father and her stepmom until Jen was born and she was abused.  Then she came to live with her mother.

“The Monopoly Game at McDonald’s-Tara and I lived on that for that whole summer.”

Other people in the house played a different kind of monopoly game, eating everything, seven people in a three bedroom house.

“He and his girlfriend in my mother’s bed..we did not warn them when she came home…she threw the girl out”

Inadvertently losing both a daughter-in-law and her own favorite bar shirt which the young woman was wearing at the time.

“Mom started doing cocaine”

Lou started…

Only a fictional girl 

Posted on by
Reply

Only a fictional girl would walk into the house and not notice the prurient magazines by the front door, alighting instead on the cookie press  in the  kitchen grandma rolling out the dough after it has been mixed, pressed, shaped into a ball and refrigerating overnight derelict old phones and cameras, a stack of games she played with him in her (fictional) childhood, his competitive streak annihilating any possibility of comradery only as she revisits the rooms in the house like so much like a real house on a street so much like a real street 

Where a fictional man once lived 

Quiet Here

Posted on by
Reply

Jen asks me why the parenthesis around Badamo(?) and I give her part of an answer in words then spend the rest of the day thinking about how inefficient it is to attempt to distill rage, grief, voicelessness into a slim set of punctual marks.

There was a moment (or a million) after I lost my foster daughter (Veronica Celeste Badamo) when I thought, baby mills (they never cared who they were hurting, I was just a care-giver placeholder, God, how much this hurts)…

I was (just) a foster mother.  Just a bystander, unless heartbreak were a thing objectively quantifiable.

Not just the way they lied to us.

All the children who got taken.

All the voicelessness 

In parentheses.

So irrevocable.

Jen’s Story, Part 3

Posted on by
Reply

Still just editing:

Went to Gram’s, the window was busted, my brothers in the yard…the cops asked what I wanted to do.  Didn’t want to make trouble so I went with him to Florida for a year until my mother had him extradited.

When we came back they got back together!

Later he was in the kitchen washing out a coffee pot and he collapsed.  We had a Ouija board on top of the refrigerator.  Mom said that was what really killed him.

We waited 45 minutes for the ambulance.  Tara tried to give him CPR….

Jen’s Story, Part 2

Posted on by
Reply

just the (minimalist) editor here-

Part 2

I miss her.

She’d call me Jennybug.  She was sexually abused by her paternal uncle. They made my brother watch. Devastating.  Terrible monsters.

My father had been exposed to agent orange in Vietnam.  He got cancer.  It was bad…before he got sick…he stole me when he was in remission.

My brother had just gotten out of the army reserves and needed socks so we were living at my Pap-pap’s.  I was only eight.  I had a bad feeling and I begged and begged my mother not to take him to the store.

They left me at the laundromat to get the socks from the store.  As soon as they left my dad showed up and took me.

End Part 2

Jen’s Story

Posted on by
Reply

My friend wrote a story– hit me in the gut.  Here it is.  Not my words, hers:

We used to hide in the closet not knowing if our mom was dead or alive.  She had a scholarship but my Pap-pap got sick so we moved in and she hung out with the wrong people.

She wouldn’t go to school because people would make fun of her.  Her stepmom used to lock her and my brother in the basement, crack eggs on their heads, beat them…

She raised me, never had a minute without me unless I was with my Grams.

We had a boat. My dad loved her as his own.  We three were always on the boat.  We used to have to go chop wood and drag it and it was cold.

They were cheap so they used the fireplace, ugh-deer meat! They made us eat deer meat.  I refused to eat it. She did dishes, so I would spit it in a cup and she would throw it away for me. 

Funny…

End Part 1