Category Archives: child advocacy

When things break

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Who can describe the sound?
The alarm of breaking china
Signals something–an ambulance
Or police car?

What if they did not come on time?
And the victim
Was trapped with
Both the criminal and the injury for years?

When you hear the sound
You think staccato things
Broken? Injury? Oh…broken injury
A redundancy of pain

In the face of a beautiful child
China round and smooth
Now lies in pieces

I can clean up pieces.

But I don’t
You and your sister do

Because I am trapped in a room
In a day
In a nightmare

Where a little girl believes
It is her fault
All her fault

When it is not
At all.

Matthew 25

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First, you should know: I believe in a literal hell.

Not so much because the Bible alludes to it as because the world displays its existence in broken children, enslaved humans. Sudanese women getting whipped while men stand by and laugh.

There are pictures of hell within easy reach. To not believe in it is hubris.

And then there is the time I have spent there myself.

In the fall of 1996 I sat across the table from two small faces and watched them munch down the first of thousands of peanut butter sandwiches at our table.

We did this because of some rather poetic injunctions in the Bible about helping “orphans.” None more poetic than Jesus in Matthew 25.

He says “the righteous” will take in strangers and feed them peanut butter sandwiches. He says they will share of their safety, abundance, and nourishment with people who are the riskiest and least able to pay back such snacks and beverages.

He says they will give themselves. The cost is implicit in the risk.

But at the time it was just a couple of sandwiches. The humiliation, rejection, exposure, assault, and duplicity would take years to fully unravel.

The emotional cost remains steep.

And the words of Jesus still echo in my head–the least of these…you did unto me..

And if the least of these punch you in the stomach? Take your trust and abuse it?

The sorrow is a badly drawn tattoo along the sternum. And hell comes in the vertigo of watching those you cherish hurt.

Back to the table…

I must return to the table and find someone else hungry and thirsty and lowly like me.

It is a gift to know I am the least of these.

And your attention to my grief, a cup of clear water.

Thank you.

Beneath the mango tree…

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We need pictures.

Pictures of the people we have lost.

And smells as well.

In May the mango trees would be in full leaf, but not fruit, months from the vinegary rot of dropped fruit- a condition you might never smell if the people who lived close to the tree were poor and hungry.

I used to live near mango trees. Despite what might get picked or eaten, dozens of mangos would fall to rot on the ground.

So to hang children on a mango tree. What does that mean? To hang them by their own clothes after they have been raped and brutalized?

To do all of this with family. To do it deliberately.

To lie in wait for girls to go to a field to relieve themselves.

To believe you will not face justice.

To almost not.

We need to see the tree. We need to see the broken girls. We need to face how close they are to our own.

Years ago I had a normal conversation with Charles after he talked to a pretty girl his age at a playground. I asked him about the girls he liked. He gave me a blurry answer except for this–

not Asian.

The not Asian has haunted me since I discovered that he abused children. He groomed us all. He was so very careful. Did he tell me that to deceive me? Did he tell me everything to deceive me?

We need a picture. A picture of grief. A picture of murdered children.

And another picture as well–

A picture into the mind of hate. The excuses, lusts, and prejudice that could effectively strip men of the last shreds of decency. The last vestiges of the soul.

The Hole in my Chest

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Four years it’s been since I knew I had an invisible arrow lodged in my ribcage–what comes of adopting “damaged” children.

We are all damaged somehow. Who can repair us?

I knew the answer–arrow or no. I knew the power of my salvific God.

But the arrow remained.

Sometimes it would hurt me less. Sometimes more–the ache rising with the deep regret of the past or knowledge of our frailty.

And then I began to wakeboard.

I learned that having this thing I could throw myself at would keep down the ache of the wound. I had let my children down. I had lived with a costly illusion for years.

Who else would he harmed before he was done? And who can fix such a broken soul?

The arrow remained
Lodged in my chest.

Last week I fell wrong off a kicker. I confronted the fear that had kept my mind off the arrow, and landed in a fast tumble.

Panicked, my son said, but I knew it was just speed and my characteristic lack of control.

No one tells you how much it hurts to hit water fast.

I think it is a cartilage injury to my left chest cavity. It makes some things harder.

But the arrow in my chest
Joined by a real wound now
Seems less intractable
Less lonely

With each small, survivable ache
I remember
The spear lodged in His chest
Eternal wound/God of resurrection.

What Good Does It Do?

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There are only a couple people I have ever met who I have wanted to actually kick.

I say a couple in case I am missing someone.

The one person I know I wanted to kick was my adopted son after I found out he had molested children.

We took him in.

We cared for him.

He violated children.

How do you get past that?

You don’t.

You go through it, and it changes you.

I did not kick him. No one did. In fact, very, very, few people confronted him at all.

It is hard to confront evil.

The other day I was standing in a beautiful place surrounded by people I admired, listening to the blast of a radio station–the foulest, most misogynistic rap I have ever heard.

How could someone write, “sing,” produce, edit, air, or listen to such explicit “music?”

Outside of hell. Each “song” seemed to be reminiscent of the soundtrack of hell.

Literal hell.

I was once chided for objecting to a hip-hop song with lyrics about infanticide- my fault for listening to the words in the first place?

As though it were a moral ideal to simply avoid the existence of evil.

I write all of this because it is worth pondering what exactly Jay-Z did to incite his sister-in-law’s wrath.

I have lots of family members who are real weenies but I don’t want to kick them.

You want to kick someone when they really hurt someone you love.

Do you love Adrianna Waller? Do you even know her story?

Can you face the pain she faced alone? A helpless baby.

Can you face the man who tortured her to death? Or the inevitable waves of pain, grief, and anger his actions unleashed in the lives of every single person who had to live past his aggression?

Can you reckon with his unrepentant soul?

Can you factor in the role of pornography in his premeditated rape of a baby? Or the pain and confusion of her agonizing death?

I cannot.

For the first month after I found out that my adopted son had molested children I cried. I yelled, ranted, grieved.

I will never even be able to reckon with his unrepentant soul.

And so far, his victims have survived his evil–scarred but whole. Lonely and aggrieved, but alive.

If we cannot face evil, how can we begin to overcome it?

And if we do not overcome it: what good do we do?

Atonement

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This weekend my glasses snapped–broken down their center line.

My friend helped fix them temporarily with a bit of purple tape. It was not my most fashionable weekend.

But I was catching glimpses of the crucifixion–reading chapters from the gospel. Little snapshots–Jesus betrayed, Jesus beaten, Jesus mocked, scorned, tried.

At what point would he have lost his glasses? I do not believe he needed them, let us be clear, but the question lingered–at what point did the story of the death of Christ become unbearable?

Pretty early on.

Jesus suffered agony and humiliation in my place. He took on more pain than we can bear to even contemplate.

Our mistake. We should.

Because the Cross was agony we have the glimpse and promise of heaven.

Jesus paid it all.

For us, with the rank winds of hell at our backs.

Bryan Singer: compromising positions

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When I first read about the accusations against Bryan Singer I thought–why does a grown man party with teens? Alcohol? Drugs? Young men?

But I also acknowledged that the alleged victim was waging an uphill battle. The gold standard for predators is they have a modus operandi. And modus operandi means multiple crimes.

In this case–multiple victims.

Now that a second young man is alleging abuse, the Bryan Singer story should be big news–criminal charges big news.

And yet it is not. Cutesy stories about celebrity posturing dominate the news, while all the usual suspects look the other way and assiduously avoid asking the obvious questions–is Hollywood populated with older men preying upon the young and vulnerable for sex?

‘Cause that kind of sex has a name–rape.

Sir Young, Judge Howard, and the myth of the “atypical” rapist

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This one is a doozy– a female judge in Texas sentences a man who sexually assaulted a teenager to a laughably light sentence that included volunteering at a rape crisis center!

This is Texas, people, and just like the affluenza case, it happened in Wendy Davis’ stompin’ ground.

And it is an affront to us all.

Not only is Sir Young a very typical and completely excuseless sex offender, the mythology of any of these losers being somehow “not your typical” rapist is an atrocious fiction.

An atrocious fiction that hides an egregious truth: in Texas and all over this country rapists and pedophiles are getting light-to-no punishment for rape, not just because of shoddy law enforcement and incompetent judges. No. They are dodging sentences, jail time, and felony convictions simply because the states, counties, and local jurisdictions do not want to be responsible for the cost of their incarceration and supervision.

We need to clean house and make the perps pay the legal price for rape. The perps, not their victims.

Charles Frederick Warner’s Legal Rights

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I believe anyone who is fighting for Warner’s right to life should have to read his trial record. We have seen massive media attention playing up the inhumane factors in death by lethal injection, but few people are willing to print the whole truth–millions of dollars have been spent trying to protect the life of a man who raped and murdered a baby. Little or nothing has been done to heal the wound this man left in the world.

Killing Charles Frederick Warner will not remedy his monstrous crime, nor will it restore the life of his primary victim. A playful little baby was turned into the recipient of unimaginable violence and premeditated rape.

One has to wonder about all the “good people” who defended this man–he did not file legal motions by himself. He had a mess of defense witnesses. Who are these people? What is their motivation?

Have we created a partisan team mentality that parses out the egregious crime and unrepentant criminal from the desire for safety for our babies?

Adrianna deserved to live. And once that right was taken from her she deserved justice.