Simple Rules

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The day I found out my adopted son was a pedophile was a rough day.

It remains with me with the grim clarity of a plane crash.

As I moved past simple shock and devastation I sought advice from Jesus.

How do I do this?

His advice was simple–the truth will set you free.

We all have the right to tell the truth, and yet there is such an extreme pressure from other humans to hide it.

We are afraid to acknowledge our monsters. As though they will befriend us if we just pretend they are not real?

There is a dark side to adoption. Not only are we adopting parents sometimes a rum bunch, we also are trusted with children who have been profoundly changed by their own biographies.

And the result can be quite difficult to parse.

“Normal” people may not get it.

But Jesus has never been normal, so he does.

The injunction to let the truth set us free can be terrifying and lonely.

But truth is the seminal condition of heaven.

And what is heaven if not the cure? The safe haven? A place where hiding things will be impossible and unnecessary forever.

An old story for a new friend

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I sat on the beat up couch and told my mil the story that had just unfolded with heartbreaking force–years of sexual abuse perpetrated by our adopted son Charles. Stopped as soon as it was uncovered but not soon enough to obviate years of damage and pain.

She looked stunned (of course) and managed something about God blessing our family.

At the time I thought, does she see what I cannot?

God has blessed me. God has blessed my family. But she did not know what she was talking about. She was a woman on the mainland of “normal” and I was drifting in the dinghy of “messed up life.”

Attachment disorder will do that to ya. It will put you out to sea with issues so devastating that Richard Parker starts to look like a tabby cat.

Love, if you hear adults, professionals, “experts,” tell you things that do not make sense, learn from my lonely voice.

Your children all have an equal right to live in peace, safety, and love. If one of those children threatens the safety of the others…

Yell loud at anyone who will listen. And don’t stop until you get the help you need.

You have a right to live free from the constant threat of harm.

And so do your wee ones.

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.

Casey Kasem’s Dilemma

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I used to listen to him regularly. I bet at one time or another most Americans have.

All those years, if you had told me Mr. Kasem would end up dying of thirst and starvation and medical neglect, I would have been shocked.

And yet no one besides his wife seems shocked now?

Our country has become a full-on fulfillment of sci-fi dystopia. We fight and argue for hardened child-rapists and -murders to have the right to die of old age but we let our judges rule against basic rights for the dying.

The right to water should not be withheld.

The right to nourishment is so basic. And yet time and again the most fragile members of our society are starved and dehydrated to death.

Shame on us.

We neither acknowledge the pain of the dying nor the ultimate cost to our souls of suborning justice to lower a hospital bill.

But who will pay for our lost compassion and our broken souls?

Attachment Parenting/attachment disorder

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The descriptions are eerily familiar–children acting out violently and relentlessly, tearing at the fabric of the home they have been placed in. Making life hell for years on end.

No cure in sight.

I think about this–the things we find cures for: flabby skin, erectile dysfunction….

But I doubt anyone is even looking for a cure for RAD.

Anyone who matters, that is.

Sure, there are the people impacted by RAD children. But we are not exactly powerhouses of charitable financing.

It is hard to raise support over the din and chaos.

Like so many scourges the easiest, simplest cure is prevention–babies need to be held regularly, fed regularly, nurtured consistently.

There are places we say this out loud. But often we don’t. We don’t have the guts to break through the uncomfortable silence that surrounds the abuse and neglect of children.

Tragic.

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.