Today was one of those intensely sensory days. We went to an open house at a college to which my son was accepted. It started out with something they called a "campus fair." It was incredibly loud. On top of the relentless sound of the voices bouncing off the ceilings and walls of the gym, where the event was held, there was the blaring music, which was set at a volume designed to drown out the sound of six hundred people talking simultaneously.
My son, the Aspie, found it somewhat annoying, but I was clearly much more disturbed by the auditory assault. I wished, so much, that I had ear plugs. The sound was making me feel physically ill. I wondered how often my son, as a younger person, had felt just this way when he said, simply, "it's too loud."
Happily, the rest of the open house was much more moderated, and while there was a great deal of information, a tour, talking, and everything else one would expect at such an event, no further auditory assaults occurred. The morning's event receded to the back of my mind; the day's events wound down. We proceeded on our long drive home.
After getting home, catching our breath, and feeding the dogs, we went out for dinner. There was a long wait, but we were finally seated - at a small table, intended for two, but an extra seat was stashed at the end, in the bar area of the restaurant. To say it was noisy, would be an understatement of massive proportions.
Again, I found myself in a space with incredibly, painfully loud music, many loud voices, and acoustics that seemed designed to accentuate the noise. My headache grew by the minute. I couldn't hear my husband, my son, or even the waiter, because of all the noise. I felt very close to a meltdown. Again, my son didn't like it, but was not nearly as distressed as I was. I could feel how easy it would be, if someone were to demand anything of me, to respond in an angry or hostile way. The relationship between sensory overload and "acting out" behavior was so clear to me. On top of that, I was hungry, which made things so much worse.
I can't imagine what it must be like, for children, in school cafeterias, for instance, where it is loud and chaotic. The children are hungry. They are overloaded with sensory input, often to the point where it is painful. People, sometimes teachers, sometimes aides who barely know the children, are telling them what to do and where to go; the demands may be appropriate, and they may be unreasonable. And these children know they have to come back to these situations the next day, and the day after; day after day, week after week. No wonder so many children start engaging in what is then labeled "school refusal." If I had to face what I did yesterday, every day, I would refuse, too. And it would not be defiance, or oppositional behavior; it would be self-survival.
This is totally off topic, and it would take pages to trace how I got here, so I'll skip that part and just dive in: I'm thinking about the attorney who represented my daughter's mother (yeah, I know, your head is starting to hurt already) way back when my daughter was my foster daughter. Sometimes, I feel so much anger towards this woman, whom I have never met, it scares me.
I know that lawyers have an obligation to zealously represent their clients. I also know that zealous representation does not mean without limitation or regard for others - like the client's own child. A client in a dependency case should, must, be concerned about the well-being of the child. But this lawyer had a deep, unshakable certainty that all children - ALL children - belong with their biological parents, no matter what!!! And that is the result for which she fought - without regard for anything else. She did not care what was good for the child, what was good for her client, what was good for any other children in the family - she wanted every, single child that she could litigate over, to be back with her client, the mother.
So, my daughter, essentially a pawn in this woman's game, was relegated to staying with the mother when others of the children were removed, because of abuse and severe neglect (fun fact: more children die from neglect than from abuse). She stayed for two and half more years, after the others were removed. During that time, she experienced, of course, abuse and severe neglect. She was also pimped out by her father, and raped by more than one man. She was seen by neighbors fellating neighborhood boys. She was four years old. Yes, Ms. Attorney, you did her a huge favor, allowing her to stay with her mother.
"But that's not all," as the promos on TV always tell us. You made sure her mother had control over everything she possibly could. You made sure that her mother prohibited her from cutting her hair. She wanted to cut her hair short, when she was seven or eight years old. Why shouldn't a child that age have some say over how she wears her hair? Because her mother didn't want to allow it, and you made sure she had that kind of control over a child who didn't know where she would be living, or who she would call "Mom," from one month to the next. Good job.
But that, and the refusal to allow her access to her favorite toys from her mother's house - those were the small stuff. The big stuff was the stuff the smacked us in the face much, much later; after we'd adopted her.
It turned out that those "supervised" visits that took place so close to bio Mom's house, so it would be "convenient," even though she had door-to-door transportation provided when they were held elsewhere, weren't so well supervised, after all. At one of them, when my daughter was about eight or nine years old, and it was pretty clear that eventually, after you did all the foot -dragging and court appeals you could do, my daughter would be freed up for adoption, and we would be adopting her, your client - the woman who you insisted should be allowed to raise my daughter because my daughter belonged with her - elicited from that little girl a promise: a promise that when she was eighteen years old, and she was able to make her own decision about where to live, she would come back to live with her mother.
My daughter is a person of integrity. As she grew older, and age eighteen no longer seemed quite so far away, the prospect of the time coming when she would have to fulfill the promise became intolerable. She became severely depressed, suicidal. She could not go back to live in the house with a man who had sexually assaulted her, and the woman (her mother) who had not only witnessed it, but had denied knowing of its occurrence. My daughter believed she could not renege on her promise. She saw her only way out as suicide.
Ms. Attorney - I believe you set up this situation. I believe that you, in your relentless, soul crushing insistence that only a birth mother is the proper person to raise a child, set up the ongoing living arrangement, when my child was a pre-schooler, for her to be repeatedly sexually assaulted, and then, when she was a somewhat older child, to be placed in a position where she was not protected from the woman who was supposed to be the person who was supposed to be her primary protector.
The good news is, my daughter is great! She's grown up, with the help of countless people (mental health professionals, educators, amazing people who went way beyond what would be "expected"), she has survived some very difficult times. She now has her own family, and is happy. Her early life still affects her - it is not possible to "get over" the kinds of early life trauma that she endured. It is possible to learn to live with it, and to thrive - but it takes a lot of support, and a lot of work.
This is Child Abuse Awareness Month.
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