Jack Brennan Perspectives

We have, of course, received dozens of sympathy cards since Abraham’s death. I had them sitting on my desk for a few days because I didn’t know what to do with them.  I decided last week though to hang them up so that my children and older grandchildren would see them.  Each day brings a few more, so each day I add more to the interior glass paneled doors that they are hanging on.

On Monday, I was hanging the ones that had come in over the weekend. Most of them are either Mass cards (we are Catholic) or straight sympathy cards expressing sorrow over “your loss” and so forth. But then I came to one that said straight out on the front of the card, “In Memory of Your Son…” I was taken aback by it and my immediate thought was that the person who sent it was confused.  Then I realized that they were talking about Abe. But not really about ABE, but rather about the RUMOR about Abe being dead.  The whole time, note, I was well aware – but not fully? – that Abraham was dead.

I caught myself, of course, and the whole thing happened in seconds, if not faster than that. But it revealed to me again this powerful defense that I am clearly immersed in.

The entire week this week, every time I have referred to Abraham – or rather, intended to – I have said Irving (see earlier posts). I catch it a lot, but I don’t know if I catch it all the time. Again, an automatic defense I assume.

But yesterday was the best.  I was talking to a friend about what I am going through and how I am getting through it (that is, by not going through anything most of the time except the intense loss of short term memory.) I was trying to explain how odd it is. Finally, I used one of my imaginary scenarios (earlier post). I said that if we were to get to my house, and Gilbert were sitting there, I would be as astounded as anyone. Gilbert was the first of my kids to die and that was nearly twenty six years ago.  It simply would not make sense for him to be sitting in the house. But, if we were to get back to the house and (I was about to type “Irving” but caught it)….Abraham were sitting there, I would not only have no surprise, but I would turn to her and say, “See….”  Meaning “See, I knew he wasn’t dead. I knew I was right about this. I knew it was all a rumor.”

That’s what I would do. Even though I know he’s dead.  It’s not what I would do with Gilbert though. Or Irving. Or Ricky. (earlier posts) If they were sitting there. Them, I’d be taken aback. I’d be surprised. I’d be happy, let me tell you, but I’d be knowing there was something off here.  But Abe? No, I would not be surprised at all. I’d be……vindicated. That’s the word: vindicated. I was right and you all were wrong. Especially that poor person who sent me the card saying “In Memory of Your Son.” I knew he was alive is what I’d say……

Now I am sixty one years old tomorrow. I know Abraham is dead. I can’t get him out of my head. His death is there morning and night. It’s there when I wake up and as I go to sleep. But I also can’t believe it. I simply can’t.  There’s too much between us; there are too many ties; ties that are too deep for them to be severed. All at once. Just like that. We go back too far. It makes no sense.  I know what I am going through; I know that it’s a grief reaction; I have been through it before. Still I was right last (written) post: it’s stronger than real.

I have experience; I have support; I know that I am not crazy despite believing these crazy things. No one is putting me on drugs; no one is forcing me to see a therapist.  I am furious but only at those who minimize what’s happened to me and my family.  The funeral director – and I’ve seen many in my life to measure him against – was beyond irresponsible: he was incompetent. The so-called-counselors from the organ donation agency would be fired in a second were I running that program. So too their supervisors. By no means am I done with those folks.

Yet, I know that my feelings are raw. I also know that my internal vision, part of my emotional senses, is laser sharp. I could smell disrespect now in doses too small to be seen. I know all this.  And I know that I will come out the other side, because I have come out before.  Because I am well aware of the boundaries between who I am and what I am experiencing.

But what if I didn’t know better?  What if I took from this experience of brokenness the belief that I was broken? What if I took from this experience of craziness the belief that I was crazy?  What if I took from this recognition of others minimizing that my perceptions were way off?  What if I took from all this that I was less than they?  That I was damaged goods – and the evidence is in what’s happened to me?

And what if you then you came and you took from me my house. And my job. And my car. And this computer. And my school. And my friends. And my bike. And my favorite foods. And my church.  And then did it to me again next month. Or next year.

And what if you told me that all this was my fault because of my behavior? What if I believed you then and concluded that not only my pain, but that Abe’s death was my fault?

And the only person I had to turn to was my social worker who is off – and took off early – for the Labor Day weekend?

What would I have to do to myself to keep myself sane if that were my lot in this life?

I know that Abraham is dead. I know I can’t bear to feel that loss every day all day. I couldn’t go to work. I couldn’t even talk the pain is so bad.  So something inside me simply doesn’t allow me to believe it – without me even realizing it’s at work in me. Except I catch that absurd refusal at odd moments – see above – and I am determined to document it to help me – to help us – figure out how to help all the other hurting, and originally innocent, Abrahams out there.  He deserved better. He did.

Jack

I am trying to work.  I found out about Abe’s beating later in the day on August 9th, and, obviously, my work has been impacted since that day. Monday and Tuesday I mostly did nothing. although I wrote the last posting. Yesterday, I traveled. But today, I need to catch up.  It’s hard because my concentration is weak.

I realized the other day that I could use this blog – for a while anyway – not only to make us look deeper at the totality of what the kids have experienced, but, in doing so, to help keep me together, and focused. And – after I wrote the last posting the other day I felt it – relieved somehow. Of course that means that I straddle, if I don’t cross over, the line I didn’t want to between diarist and blogger.  But so what. What does it matter in the end?

I go through periods where I am pretty much okay.  I look good – I look like I have it together – at least to myself. But other times – short periods, thank God – I can’t deal with the pain, the finality, the lack of hope I think.  When Irving died, one of my friends pointed out that I use everything I can to figure things out: what people say or don’t say; what people do or don’t do. His point was to tell everyone – joking? – to watch what they say around me because I’d use it. But joking or not, he was right. I do that. I don’t know if he realized though that I also use myself.

In the new training we are spending a significant amount of time on the relationship between feelings and beliefs, and how our feelings are, in very deep ways, determined by our beliefs. Change the beliefs and voila – the feelings change.

I am watching that now in me. I know Abraham is dead. I know he is gone. I know that I won’t see him again in this life. I know all that. I am not delusional.  Yet I hold myself together more than I don’t.  I realized yesterday why.  It’s because even though I know it – and I do know it – I don’t think I believe it.  I can assent to it; I am not trying to convince anyone that there’s been a mistake, that Abe is really alive.  Abraham is dead.

But I guess not to me.

Maybe that means that I am not letting him go. Maybe. But why I write this morning is because it makes me think of what Abe himself experienced so many years ago:

“Pop wasn’t here when I was hurt so badly by all those adults in my life. I know he hadn’t even met me.  But it’s Pop’s fault, nonetheless.”  Adoption transference we named it. It all looked so simple after we figured it out: I am his father, he wasn’t protected by me.  He knew I didn’t know him then; like I know he’s dead. But he believed – I now think – that he can’t have a father, and yet be so unprotected. It doesn’t compute. Even though both things were true, how could he accept that?  Like I know Abe is dead; but how could Abe be dead? It doesn’t compute.

I don’t want it to compute.

What is this power of belief that is so much stronger than our logic?  It is so strong that it is even the power that undergirds – even determines – our feelings.  Anyone who has experienced this grief that is swamping me (at times) has an intuitive sense that what I am saying is true.  Yet, what beliefs do we reinforce with our foster kids?  What does our behavior say to the kids?  Oh, your leaving your friends? Don’t worry, you’ll make new ones. Oh, your bike is missing? Don’t worry, I’ll look for it. Oh, your mom didn’t show for her visit? I’m sorry.  Over and over and over we minimize them and their lives. Then we wonder why they grow up with such strong ability to minimize?

I often say that a good parent is one who could raise their kids without ever saying a word.  I believe that deeply. Our words are only one part of our behaviors, but it is our behaviors as a whole, now that I think of it, that reinforce the beliefs of our kids.

When the belief, the certainty, that Abraham is dead gets inside me, I can’t control my crying.  So, most of the day, I simply do not believe what I know to be true.  I think that’s why the missing morphine got to me last week.  Abe looked more or less the same when he was brain dead as when he was in the coma.  So I was okay – which means I could hold onto my hope. And then I saw the morphine was missing. And it hit me.  What hit me? The certain knowledge – which I guess is belief – that he was really dead.  Even though I knew he was dead. Now my hope for him to recover was gone.

This power of beliefs in us must be the key for what is causing our kids their trouble.  It must be what we are missing.  What did Abe come to believe when those mice were in the room with him – assuming what I couldn’t say the other day: that they weren’t rats? What did he come to believe about himself when he couldn’t even move his hands to protect himself?  What beliefs got into his six year old head when his mother – his mother – was doing this to him?  And what’s the connection between those beliefs and the circumstances of his next thirty three years? And the beatdown that led to his death?

After the operation on his brain ten days ago, the doctor told someone who told me that it was up to Abe now and his will to live.  And some very conscious part of me got scared. Because I immediately knew that that was where Abraham and I would differ.  Some part of me knew then that if that were true, then it was over for him.

And so it was.

Our kids are entitled to better than we’ve given them and we continue to give to them. They are entitled to believe – to be certain – that they don’t deserve what’s happened to them. Our blah-blah-blah doesn’t cut it; if anything it actually reinforces our minimization.  Our loving them doesn’t cut it either.  We must teach them to love themselves. Not tell them: teach them.

And that means we need to change our ways.

Jack

Abraham was finally disconnected from the machines early Friday morning (see note). and they took the organs they could use.  His liver went to a fifty one year old man; one kidney went to a twenty four year old woman; and his other kidney and pancreas went to a woman, thirty eight, almost Abe’s age.    There is a wonderfulness to those final gifts of Abraham’s that I am very happy about.  Sunday was the services, which were to be followed by his cremation at some point.

So, he’s gone.

This morning I went to Stop & Shop. I came out and I could not find my car.  I simply could not find it.  It’s become an old bomb of a car so I knew it wasn’t stolen.  It’s a perfect weather day here, so I didn’t mind walking around the parking lot – but it wasn’t there.  I stopped walking and I pushed my brain.  I finally remembered that I’d parked it in the lot of the shopping center next door.  And then I cried.

He’s gone.

Yesterday, I was trying to clarify something and I pulled out a big file with all my twenty seven years of Abraham stuff.  In the file were notes from some of the years that Abe was in foster care. I don’t remember ever seeing them before or ever reading them before.  So I read through them and they confirmed Abe’s bad behavior, his very bad behavior, before I got him….I learned that he weighed only three pounds and one ounce when he was born either two or three months (conflicting stories) premature….and then I re-learned the details of his history, most of which I had known.  I read about his months in the incubator, and his first heart operation at four months and how he was put into foster care as a boarder baby (drugs in his system at birth) from there until he was returned to his birth mother at two and a half.  Then nothing till the next reports when he went back into foster care at six. The mother reported that he was uncontrollable.

And then – and I know I’d never seen this before – I read this: “She admitted that she and the putative father attempted to force Abraham to remain in his bed throughout the night by tying him to his bed, then locking him in his bedroom.  This did not work.”

I was horrified for Abe.  But nothing got to me like what I read in the very next sentence. I was torn apart for my six year old son, whom I met six years later – another lifetime for him: “Abraham kept food for himself and also fed and befriended the mice.”

While he was tied up? While he was so completely powerless? Were the mice crawling on him? Were they even mice?  Did he “befriend” them for real or just in his head in order to save his sanity?  Were they on his face? Across his eyes? How do you stay sane when you cannot even use your hands to try to protect yourself? Who reported all this?  How did it get in the notes?

I said a few posts back that even in death privacy has to be protected. It does. I said that it was a matter of respect.  And it is.  But the needs of the living always must trump the honor and the protection due to the dead.

Abraham – my much loved and now always to be missed Abraham – is dead.

I am writing about this – as deeply personal as it is for him – because we have to start getting it.  There is no way to protect the kids from situations with parents like his unless we really go big brother and start licensing parents. There is nothing else we can do to stop it.  If even that would stop it.

But it cannot be that there is nothing else to be done. It cannot be that such experiences doom people. I don’t accept it.  I don’t believe it. It is not my experience of me: the experience of me that Aunt Rita and Msgr. Huntington gave me.  When I was seventeen. Healing is a function of wholeness. And Abraham was whole.

I know something had to have happened to Abe’s thinking and beliefs about himself while locked in that room.  How could it not? In the years after, our responses did not free him from what he took away after those nights.  My son Irving (also dead) reporting to me on his own history of torture told me of a particular night and what happened to him. And he said to me, “Pop, I died that night.”  He didn’t, but something in him, that we need to figure out, did.

Our responses – frankly, middle class – have not been sufficient.

Abraham is gone.  But there are others still here. Still suffering. Still not knowing how to heal.  Still not sure that they can heal.

That healing begins with our witness.  Not our knowledge, not our information, not our theories.

It begins with our certainty: you are whole.  But if we have not come to believe it of ourselves, then we don’t stand a shot of convincing anyone else.

Our healing – all healing – begins with our wholeness.  For each and every one of us.

Abe is gone, but I’m not. And until I am, my stance is clear: we have failed our kids unless they leave us for their adulthood certain – absolutely certain – of their own wholeness.

Losing Abe is terribly painful, but despite knowing that I will never see him on this earth again, I remain the luckiest person I have ever met. I am, after all, his father.

Jack

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Note: (I am exploring the reason for the three days delay from when the papers were signed.)

On Sunday, my son, Abraham, more or less woke up from his coma. He had the breathing tube in his throat so he couldn’t talk, but he was able to respond to questions by nodding or shaking his head.  It seemed that he could see also.  Whew. With all that, he had obviously beaten the odds and avoided the brain damage we were so terrified of.

On Monday morning though, he crashed and his brain “herniated.”  They ran him into the operating room and he survived their desperate operations. But not with much hope. On Tuesday morning, they ran their tests, and early yesterday afternoon, Abe was declared brain dead.  He is three months shy of his 40^th birthday.

Today, they will “harvest” – how I hate that term – his organs, and disconnect him from his life support.  I dread it, though I dread it less than this horrible waiting around with nothing real to do.

I met Abraham when he was twelve; he moved in with us when he was thirteen; and I finalized his adoption when he was fourteen.  I knew nothing of his background except that he was in foster care for many years, was a very badly behaved kid, and had no contact with anybody in his birth family. His memories of that family, and of his younger years, were off – they didn’t make much sense to me. But, I didn’t do anything about it.  In those days it didn’t dawn upon me that his history would matter to him.  It was over; he was safe. What else was there?  I was very stupid.

Abe was a good kid – determined to be good. I didn’t know that there were kids whose good behavior was a desperate attempt to block enormous pain.  I had no problems with him day to day at all. He was honest, responsible.  He was so good that I remember saying to people that I thought he was God’s gift to me as a reward for what I had gone through with my older kids. I remember one day asking him what had happened to all that bad behavior that he had in foster care.  He said to me, “Do you want the troof? Do you want the troof?”  I said yeah. I wasn’t really interested in hearing any lies, I told him. So tell me the “troof.”  “You treat me right,” he said.

I treat him right?

I treat him regular.  I treat him as parents treat their kids.  What the hell did that mean that I “treat him right?”

At seventeen, Abe fell apart.  He found a cartoon one day in the Daily News and he brought it over to me and said, “Pop, this is how I feel.”  Whoa…an explanation?  Coming from him? I needed to pay attention to that.  I wrote about that cartoon in this blog last March. (copied below).  For nearly twenty five years we have used the cartoon, and its implications, as a partial foundation to build our adoption practices on at Family Focus.

Over the course of the past week, especially the past few days, everyone wants to know who did this to Abe; did the cops get the people?  Etc. etc. I could care less.  I find it a distraction and I wonder if folks use it that way in an attempt to avoid the pain of seeing Abe hurt so bad.

Abe gave us another gift at Family Focus: the concept of adoption transference.  After seventeen, Abraham blamed me for all the pain he’d experienced when he was young. The fact that I hadn’t even met him till all that was over, didn’t lessen the depth of his fury. The fact that I was the guy who took him out of the system that allowed him to suffer so, didn’t change how he felt.  It took my sister to help us figure out that he was blaming me because I was his father and I had failed in my primary job as a parent. I had not protected him.  The logical fact that I could not have – because I didn’t even know him then was irrelevant to that much greater truth: I was his father.

Abraham wanted help, he wanted to be free of all of it. He didn’t want the anger; nay, he didn’t want the rage; he didn’t want to carry around the consequences of his history.  Over the course of his adulthood, I tried to help him.  But nothing worked. Not because of Abe – though he would infuriate me. But because of us.  Not because he refused to cooperate, but because our solutions are nonsense. Nonsense.

If we can’t see that in looking at kid after kid after kid, year after year after year – and now I am old enough to say – generation after generation after generation that we are not helping, what is our problem? Our ways are not cutting it; our solutions don’t solve it, so then what chance does any kid have who had the horrific experience of being born into a family of people who don’t protect?

I loved Abraham. I love him still. I hate how he carried those consequences around; I hate how he himself, in turn, did not protect me, his son, his brothers, his wife. Himself. Right up until not protecting himself last week (by avoiding the circumstances. He is not to blame for his own murder.)

But never will I grant – ever – that he could have solved this himself. Never. We invented the foster care system that hurt him. We have not yet invented the way to help him heal from it. That’s on us. To say that he was damaged or broken in his early years is a cop out. I never experienced him – ever – as damaged, or as broken.  Normal reactions to abnormal circumstances look abnormal.

I experienced him as confused, as hurt, as lost, and in terrible terrible pain from seventeen years old….until Monday.

Yesterday, standing by his bed, what convinced me that he was really gone was that the morphine was gone. His pain was really done.

Abraham – let me repeat for the last and loudest time – did not choose the pain, the confusion, the hurt nor the loss. Nobody chooses that.  It doesn’t work to “just say no.”  It doesn’t work.

Abe is the fourth of my kids that I have lost. It didn’t work with Gilbert (October 15th, 1985), nor with Irving (February 4th, 1994), nor with Ricky (May 9th, 1995). It didn’t work because it doesn’t work.  Not because they are broken or damaged.  I loved them, I know.

Each of them was whole. I experienced their wholeness. I experienced it from each of them.

We have not figured out yet how to protect our foster kids, nor heal their wounds. That’s on us. Not on them.

I told another of my adult kids last night that one of the things that Family Focus has discovered is the importance of apologizing to our kids when we give them a family that gives them up.  When we don’t apologize to someone who has been wronged, especially those who haven’t much power, the wronged person can rarely be sure that they were wronged.

Abraham did wrong in his life, no doubt. But that life began with Abe being wronged to a depth, and for a length of time, that I doubt I will ever know, or understand. I hate that for him.  I hate that for all of them.

I am sorry, Abe. I love you so much and I wasn’t able to give you what you needed.  But I am sorry. And, God knows, no matter what else, I do love you.  You were, for a long time, my baby.

I am posting this as is. I suppose it’s turned into Abe’s eulogy. So be it.

And so much for not being a diarist, huh?

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[Many years ago, my then seventeen year old son brought to me a cartoon and said to me, “Pop, this is how I feel.”

It was a man in a spacesuit, standing on the moon, reading a note, left by his fellow astronauts, who were in the spaceship flying way above and leaving the planet. The note did not say what it should have. It didn’t say, “Henry, we are so terribly sorry to have left you here. We did wait as long as we possibly could. But the window of opportunity for us to get off the planet was upon us. Had we stayed any longer we all would have died. And we chose not to let that happen.”

Instead, it read: “Dear Henry, Where were you? We waited and waited, but finally decided that…”

Not only blaming Henry for their decision, but minimizing what they have just done. “We finally decided to go to the movie without you” does not have the same import as “we finally decided to abandon you on the moon.”

And what on earth does “where were you?” matter now? Blaming the victim was a concept that I first heard named in college when I read the book of the same name (thank you William Ryan) – but by no means was the experience it named new to me.]

When I walked into Children’s Village for the first time to apply for a job as a child care worker with their population of emotionally disturbed kids, I remember thinking how the kids there must be on the road to being model citizens. After all, I turned out okay; my sister and brothers and cousins and friends all turned out okay.  And none of us had access to the incredible support that these Village kids had: psychiatrists, and psychologists, and social workers, and special ed teachers, and so forth.  How could they not turn out (beyond) okay?

Furthermore, I believed that it would be an honor to be chosen as worthy enough to work with these kids, who had all been – in today’s language – so traumatized.  To be hired meant, to me, that I was being assessed to have the capability to help these kids.  It came as a shock to realize that my (naive) standards were (just a wee bit?) higher than the reality called for.

So I got hired, and I adjusted to the fact that it was all about behavioral control of the children. I bought into the therapeutic model that, if nothing else, we were taking the street and familial pressures off the kids and allowing normal growth processes to reassert themselves.  As time went on though, it became clearer that normal growth processes were apparently not enough.

When I took my first kids it was obvious to me that a protective family, and normal community living – what my aunt and uncle gave me – was the minimum that the kids needed to heal and that is why I became – and remain – such a strong believer in adoption. But as the decades went on, it became clearer still that even that was not enough.  I wasn’t buying into the “damage” argument – that the kids had been internally structurally damaged at some point – and I still don’t. I have seen growth and I have seen major change in some kids where no one would have expected it.

Then a few years back the trauma model developed and took off.  I haven’t been impressed by the implementation that I’ve seen, but I remain hopeful that maybe this is a key.  In the end, though, I believe that our kids beliefs about themselves have been distorted by what they have – and haven’t – learned. I believe that getting the kids to recognize the core of those beliefs, allowing them to examine them in the cool light of day, is their ultimate hope for change.  But I also believe that when they pull out those beliefs, one of the deepest core beliefs that they would find is the belief that there is no hope.  For them.  I believe that they believe that they are broken, damaged, and worse of all, just plain bad.  I also believe in the very deepest part of my own existence that they are wrong.

But I know that if someone believes that they cannot walk, then no matter how able they really are, they will not walk.  As a culture, when we reinforce to our own – especially to our kids – that there are people who are truly hopeless, we ourselves become the models for the power of hopelessness.

One of my adult kids is in the hospital after being beat very badly earlier in the week. He is in an induced coma and we wait until the bleeding in his brain stops to assess any long term damage.  The medical staff is very straight with us: three days later, and he still may not live. But they act as though he will. They treat him as though he will.  They’ve told us that he may end up brain damaged. But they act as though he won’t.  They treat him as though he won’t.

The medical staff lives with hope. And their procedures insist on hope. Not blind hope. Not false hope. Real hope.  What they say is: We don’t know yet.  We are going to protect his body and his brain in every way, in every least risky way, that we can. While we wait. Their approach doesn’t come from being nice: it comes from being respectful.

My son – himself a multiply rejected and multiply betrayed foster kid till he came to me when he was twelve – has no job, and no money.  You would never know that from the way he is being treated.

That approach, that perspective, is the model that I am talking about – a model of hope that reinforces hope, based upon the needs of a person, as a person, not as a bureaucratic object.  It is the model that we use at Family Focus, which is all about hope.

But it is a model that is missing from much in our society, including our criminal justice system and, in days to come, I want to come back to that.

Jack

When we talked, often, (at Family Focus Adoption Services) about me starting this blog, I put it off for many many months.  I was afraid that I would run out of things to say.  The people around me weren’t worried about that (hmm….) but I was.  I sensed, and then realized, that while it may appear that I have a lot to say, I actually say the same things over and over.  One of my colleagues pointed out that that is also true of the many columnists who write for the newspaper and whom I never tire of reading.  That’s true.

But the other day, reading something or other somewhere or other, there was a line written that grabbed my attention. It was about someone sliding over the line between writing a blog and becoming a diarist.  Immediately upon reading that, I knew that that was a line that I worry about.

My intention in creating this blog was to get the people reading it to think about our kids almost as though the kids were their own.  I hoped that readers would respond to the situation of our kids some way or another. The ideal, of course, would be that they would go so far as to adopt one or another of them.  Short of that, was that they would at least keep the kids in the forefront of their thinking. Perhaps they would think of a person whom they could encourage to adopt – or help with an adoption.

Maybe my readers would think of some way to help us stay in business.  One of our board members – a subscriber to the blog – found a site that encouraged people to donate a dollar to the charity of the day (Philanthroper.com). I’d never even heard of them. But he contacted them; they liked what he told them; they took us on; and that brought us in nearly a thousand dollars out of the blue.  Significant money for a small nonprofit.

So that was my intention. I did not want this to be a blog about me. I did not want to be a diarist (as I see that term).  But walking that line is hard.  People tell me – and I know that it’s true – that I have a million stories.  But most of those stories are personal in that they belong to other people.  I haven’t the right to make them public the way the Internet makes things public.  Getting permission, as my son Luis has been happy to give me, works sometimes. As does disguising people (“Ted”). Again though: sometimes. If someone is dead, it feels fairer to tell a story about them.  But even in all those circumstances, privacy matters, because respect matters.

So I am not sure where I am going to go with the blog.  “Ted” will be visiting every weekend beginning Friday, until he moves in.  Then my nearly sixty one year old self will have an eleven year old living in the house full time. Something that hasn’t happened here in thirty years.  Thirty years.  Half of my lifetime ago. I was only thirty myself the last time an eleven year old lived here full time. Carter had only recently lost to Reagan.  That really was a long time ago.

I have forgotten a lot about what that was like, living with an eleven year old.  But I am starting to remember…and what I am first remembering is that my time was not my own. I can’t imagine that the blog will not be impacted one way or the other.

I hope it’s for the good.

Jack

This blogging website has a spam catching service. Suspected spam comments are grabbed and deposited in a folder. After a few days, they are dumped.  Over the months, I have on occasion checked the folder and I have been impressed by the accuracy. Always, it was spam in there. But the other day, after seeing that they had grabbed over 200 spam comments since the blog began, I checked the folder which only had one current comment in it. It was, however, not spam. It was a real comment, which I then marked so, and it was then posted.

All that has led me to realize that others might have sent comments that I never saw because they were defined as spam and now they are long deleted.  The way it’s supposed to work is that all comments, not first defined as spam, are emailed to me for approval for posting – precisely to protect the blog from spam.  This automatic decision about whether a comment is spam or not is how legitimate comments might get past me.

I apologize to anyone who might have sent me comments and they never got posted. I have never rejected any comment (don’t get any ideas, Matt) unless I knew it was nonsense (Chris!).  If you sent one and didn’t see it posted, this is what happened to it. Again my apologies.

Jack

It’s been over seventeen years, not fourteen, since Irving died. I don’t know where my head was when I wrote fourteen.

Jack

Today, I found a clipping from last month’s (paper) NY Times on my desk. I reread it, and knew immediately why I had cut it out originally:  “When you are surrounded by something so big that requires you to change everything about the way you think and see the world, then denial is the natural response.”  *

The words took my mind immediately to the experience of too many of our kids who are “surrounded by something so big….” that is incomprehensible to me, let alone to them – who actually experience it.  I speak, of course, of their experience of abandonment.  But is it the original abandonment in and of itself, or is it that they are continuing to be abandoned by the very society that they continue to live in?

Dr. Francine Cournos, a psychiatrist in her mid-60s, teaching at Columbia, wrote a book (“City of One”) that we give out to all the people interested in foster care adoption who come to our introductory training (at Family Focus Adoption Services – [for Google as always]).  Dr. Cournos lost her father at three and her mother before she hit her teens. She then lived with her grandmother who eventually developed dementia. At thirteen, the rest of the family got together (aunts and uncles) and placed her into foster care in New York City, where she stayed till her adulthood.  Dr. Cournos writes that the fact that her family could so deliberately do this to her was a worse pain for her then the loss of her parents and grandmother. That is a very strong statement.

The foster kids who need new families often have their pictures and a short blurb about them posted on the Internet, at what are called photolisting sites.  What does it do to a kid to know that year after year after year nobody is interested – despite the “advertising” – in giving to him the family commitment that (s)he needs?  Nobody in the entire country?  Our question, as adults of course, is what does it say about our culture, our society, that we could leave any kid unclaimed and unloved?  But most of the kids don’t have the wherewithal to question the society.  Rather, they blame themselves for their circumstances.  And that blame reaches to a level inside themselves that makes it very difficult for them ever to transcend the self alienation that is an almost automatic reaction to the depth – such depth – of recognizing that they do not matter enough to anyone.

We, as a society, teach our foster families that “love is not enough” to heal the wounds the children carry.  The phrase probably comes from the wonderful book of the same title by the psychologist and Holocaust survivor, Bruno Bettleheim, written forty years ago and talking about children in institutions.  But in truth, I don’t know of anything that can overcome alienation, but love.

The reality that our kids have learned in their guts is so big that they are required to change everything about the way they think and see the world. But the denial probably belongs to us more than to them. What I have come to believe through my experience with these kids is very anti-cultural. I have learned that while there is lots of emotional attachment among people; even lots of very real caring; and even more feelings which are labeled love, the truth is very much darker.

Fourteen years ago, after I buried my barely 21 year old son, Irving, I came back to work and decided that if our training was to be worth anything, then we had to begin to talk about the nature of love, because adoption (which is necessarily always of a person who has been abandoned) cannot be about anything else, and still be real.  We developed a wonderful exercise that we still use all these years later.  At the end of the exercise, in one of my infamous imaginary scenarios, we change the original story (see below**) of King Solomon and ask our families: if Solomon had not changed his decision when the one woman told him not to chop the baby in half, but rather to let the baby go with the other woman, and that baby was never to be seen by her again, would you say that she loved her baby? 99.9% of our people say yes, and they say it pretty much immediately. Which shows – to us and to them – their intuitive sense, no matter how much they have been influenced by Hallmark, of the true essence of love: the willingness to sacrifice anything and everything we want for the good of the beloved, as a gift requiring nothing in return.

And by that definition?  I say it all the time – and get people very bothered by it: There is very little love in this world.

We all get it. The exercise proves that. But we don’t do it. The sheer number of kids with nobody is only one example among many that proves that.

It is very sad.  And very dark. Very much darker than most of us prefer to believe.

Jack

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* Thomas Friedman, a columnist for the NY Times, quoting a guy named Paul Gilding, from a book Gilding wrote about the environment.

** With my apologies to the religious folks who know the story better than I: King Solomon was a biblical judge who was very wise. Two women came to him, after the baby of one of them had died, each claiming that the living baby was theirs. Solomon decided to cut the baby in half to settle the claim. With that, one woman immediately said no. “Let the baby go with the other woman.” And with that, Solomon changed his first decision, now saying, “Now I know who the real mother is.” And he gave the baby to that woman  who was willing to let the baby go.