Category Archives: parenting

If someone tells you they have been abused

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Worth repeating.

Worth putting on your refrigerator:

When I first found out that my adopted son had sexually abused children I was in shock. The hours and days that followed were filled with anger, pain, and terrible questions.

They were also filled with calls to the state to report him and forensic interviews.

I understood that I had to revise my view of my son–he was capable of unspeakable harm.

How do we handle stories of unspeakable harm? Not well. We handle them with avoidance, ostracism, excuses, and silence. We blame the victims.

Don’t. Don’t do these things to a crime victim. Do this instead:

Be there and listen. Victims of abuse are all around you. Most will not share their stories because they know if they do they will be viewed as contagious.

Abuse is not sui generis contagious. Ignorance is. Refrain from perpetuating any stereotypes about the abused or their families. Remember, they are the victims.

Explaining to a child how and why an older person would take their innocence is a heartbreaking conversation, but it starts with repair–

What I told my kids was this–sex is like driving a car, good but challenging and not for kids.

Kids should not have to deal with sex–either in advertising, media, a bikini culture, pornography, or abuse.

It is our job to protect them, and we can’t do it by keeping our heads in the sand.

And if they have been hurt by sexual exploitation it is our job to be there to heal what has been broken–the human heart.

Just: a book review

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No one in their right mind writes a book review of their own book so people don’t have to read it.

So here goes:

I wrote Just because books had helped me through some tough times.

It is not a work of literature. It is a cry for help. I wanted to add to the voices of men and women who had helped me–mostly celebrity survivors who had been courageous and told their stories. Oprah, and Ellen, Sugar Ray, Ashley Judd, and Todd Bridges…

What would have I done without them?

So this the story: we fostered and adopted children damaged by neglect and abuse.

Life with them was so hard. It became even harder when we found out my adopted son had molested some of my children and others.

We pushed for legal consequences.
We dealt with the damage.

I was surprised by how little protection the justice system gave us. The book was a cry for help and a warning.

What I would add to that as an epilogue of sorts is that there is another book too painful and personal to write about what I call the shunning syndrome.

If you are brave or foolish enough to speak openly about being victimized by sexual abuse, you lose almost everyone you love.

Tough book to write. Even tougher to live. Par for the course for humans–we let our wolves drive our flocks.

But beyond the lonely places, we are fine (thank you).

Prayers for my reactive attachment disorder children

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I face this story every day, every moment of every day:

Once upon a time there were two teens. They both came from stories of neglect and abuse. Someone had hurt them by not giving them safety. Others by transgressing the most basic law of love–don’t hurt a child.

They hooked up. Had kids. Wandered into ways to dull the pain and longing in their hearts.

The children were so young but they still remember hunger, watching their parents leave them locked alone with a single cupcake to share among them all.

Longing. We all long for something–love, truth, justice. But what if that longing is never heard? A child cries but no one holds him? A little girl lives with a gnawing ache for food.

What happens when the search for love and safety comes up empty before they are one or two or three?

I watch her face in each picture. She never smiles. I want to say to her mother–pick her up, snuggle with her, talk baby talk to her and feed her. That is why you get wic, so she can be full.

Break the cycle, girl, for God’s sake, break the cycle.

What is it like to be raised by wolves?

Better than this. Wolves are social animals, willing to hunt for their young.

I search for answers, but there are few that satisfy. I cringe at memory–my own exasperation, impatience, and exhaustion. So many things I would do better.

I say that ruefully knowing that the maxim I had at 27 was true and mattered–regardless of the raggedy look of things. You must hold on. They need years of you just being there.

I am here. I won’t ever leave you.

He asks if we can meet. I say yes, but only me. The others are not ready.

Ready is a placeholder for heartbroken. Reactive attachment disorder can seep into the lives of everything it meets. It takes no prisoners.

I pray. I pray all the time. I pray they do not hurt or kill or disfigure. I pray for safety. I cast about for anyone or anything I could enlist to save them…from themselves. The longing for mother’s love turns to drugs, alcohol and reckless touch. Wires in a machine all shorted or circuited wrong.

Nothing will work but love, and by love I mean compassion. And by compassion I mean Jesus. I do the only thing that makes sense when the disease at the heart of your child is terminal–I cling to the feet of God and say, Save these babies, resurrecting God.

Cocktails and BOGO with the esteemed Dr. Gosnell

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Wait a second, we all remember what we are talking about, right?!

I mean so close on the heels of Kermit Gosnell’s house of horrors…we are all clear, right? We are advocating for or against a process wherein a living baby is forced out of her mother’s uterus in cut up pieces to be reassembled like a bloody puzzle…

I mean, with all the well-heeled ladies thumping their augmented chests over women’s rights and all…

It started to sound like y’all have forgotten that half of the human beings who go into abortion mills come out in bloodied pieces.

Little Pink Sneakers

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Let me say this straight off–I am a disenfranchised Texan. This happened several years ago at the end of a long and fruitless battle to keep children safe from identified sex offenders.

But last night helped.

I applaud every elected official who stood up for children’s rights in Texas last night.

Funny how the national press has focused on Senator Davis’ shoes. I focus on Ernest Hemingway’s. I have always loved the story of the six-word short story, not so much because it had to be Papa who told it, but because my heart has been broken more than once by the shoes never worn by babies–babies I lost to miscarriages or adoptions. I miss the children who should have worn the shoes.

Over 84 thousand babies lost their lives last year in Texas. Too many empty pink sneakers.

If you think that is a tragedy there is something you can do–

Trace the outline of a pair of baby shoes on a piece of paper and send it to Ms. Davis.

A six-word story is amazing. A picture is worth a thousand words. But the world entire is in the eyes of a child.

Speak for those who have been silenced.

What I remember

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My father was a southerner of the same generation as Ms. Deen. He did not speak directly to the question of the “n” word and his culture. As a child I knew these stories:

His father owned a hardware store. He was taught to call people “sir” and “ma’am” and so he did so until his father told him these terms did not apply to the African American customers who came to the store.

Why? My father wondered. He never, as long as I knew him, treated anyone with partiality. He was not convinced by prejudice and racism. Always fair at all things except cards–in which case the man played to win.

Or the stories of the black women who raised him. They loved him, put up with him, nurtured him, and gave him his taste for butter on rice and pinto beans. A taste that is sewn into who we are and what we call home.

And then there was Tav–Octavia, the subject of the most explosive argument I remember between my father and his parents.

They objected to loans she got from the government to renovate her shack. She was their employee. If they had paid her a living wage then she could have afforded her own linoleum and shingles.

Hardly luxuries.

But this last story is mine: I was 4 or 5 at most and a relative repeated a familiar rhyme that often has the word “tiger” in it. Only she used the n word. I did not know at first what it meant.

My parents (Paula Deen’s age and no angels) explained that it was a derogatory term we did not use.

If you can teach a 5 year old that some words are painfully off-limits, well…you can teach just about anyone.

Trick is to get’em to understand God sees us all the same–His beautiful children.

The Beautiful Song

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In the months before I lost Veronica I refrained from listening to ordinary love songs. I remember those months too well–waiting in hope and fear.

I had so much faith. I knew–knew He would bring her back. It has been 14 years. 3 to go…

I have felt that fear so many times since–the fear of loss and grief and love.

Perfect love casts out all fear.

Imperfect love clings to the scarred feet of Perfect Love, praying for flat out miracles.

Hypothetical Questions

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Imagine you thought you could change the world. No. Not the whole frickin’ thing, just bits and pieces…

Imagine you thought you could do it by taking care of troubled children–oh, sure, it wouldn’t be fun…

There would be the loss, for instance.
People would treat you like you had the plague.
Your family would say you must be doing something wrong.

But you would plough through. Deeply imperfect but there. And, yes, better than the alternative.

You would do it because you believed. You believed in nurture. You believed in God.

Imagine if you did all that and then, well, it seemed like the little tikes turned out to be losers. Yep. Remarkably similar to their genetic roots. Real bonafide knuckleheads.

Well…

If you got discouraged I would tell you what I tell myself.

We are all losers without Jesus.
And…it ain’t over till it’s over, girl.

Can’t drown love. They tried once. He just rose again. My kind of Loser.

Explaining Evil?

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He picks up a Shutterfly book his father made several years ago…our family before the flood.

There are pictures of flowers taped over my adopted son’s face. One of his victims has placed them over his face because her grief is still deep, and the righteous anger with it.

To her younger brother this is a strange thing. Who is this teenage boy? Why is his face covered?

I explain it to him. I explain the story using the simplest words I can find–the words of a fairy tale, a bedtime story. Only no one wants to tell the story of why the little girl has covered her “brother” in flowers any more than we want to face the hurt that happens when someone you trust and love betrays you and all you hold dear.

Hold dear…
Hm, little girl in the picture, I will always hold you, dear.

It is my job, like breathing.

Fear

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My children have led me into courtrooms, hospital rooms, doctors offices. Psych wards. Juvenile detention centers. Places of both extreme light and extreme darkness.

Some of them look like me, others don’t. Some don’t even live with me anymore. Some may have never known I was their mother.

I was a foster mother. Hard. I adopted kids: hard as well. I lost children, hardest of all.

But this weekend my tallest son taught me how to paint on an extension ladder. He is nearly a foot taller than I am, so he makes it look easy, but what impressed me was his success in teaching me to challenge my fear.

He taught me by doing it–first and better than me, then by walking me through my fears (and why) then how to overcome them.

We both know from experience that I am a crabby old dog, disinclined to new tricks. But love will prevail.

After all it is love, they say, that casts out all fear.

Good news when it is a long flight down.