Devoured Lives

They have devoured lives; they have taken treasure and precious things. Ezekiel 22:25

Sometimes I am so unhappy. Sometimes I am full of despair. Sometimes I feel I’m under it, under a burden too heavy for me to bear. It is the weight of the abandonment of my orphaned children, the weight of their years of abandonment, neglect, abuse, and absconding by their birth parents, their first parents, their so-called original parents, the ones who gave them birth. Parents who are not parents at all, except that they’ve produced offspring, which even animals do. And they act like animals, these parents, because when they have children they do not want, and they have children they treat as objects and non-people, children whose lives they devour and then pass on to others to try to repair: that is what they are. They haven’t acted human. They have not been humane.

They have devoured lives; they have taken treasure and precious things. Ezekiel 22:25

It doesn’t matter to me in this moment whether my children’s parents meant to do it or not, because they did it. And every parent between that first parent and me, the last one, did it too. I have children who were rejected more than once by adults who signed on to do the job of a parent and then thought better of it. Parents who quit their jobs. Parents who were fired as parents. And every single time a parent took off, something inside that child was devoured. Some precious thing lost.

This morning on the way to school, one of my children whose wounds I have worked at healing for six years now showed us all, once again, just how wounded she is. Just how orphaned. Just how she carries around this goneness of the treasure and this spiritual and emotional bankruptcy. And my beloved, always wanted, always cherished daughters watched it all, wide-eyed. And their family is not middle-class American normal. Their family is not Normal Rockwell normal. Their mother is in tears as she pulls up in front of the school. Their mother wants to bash in the faces of the asshole parents who did this to them. This mother wants to tear her hair. I want to tear my hair and wail, and roll on the ground with grief and horror over what has been done to my children.

They get out of the vehicle. They wear their plaid skirts into their private school but they are not like the other girls and boys, whose mothers are merely burdened with the regular, tedious, predictable passing of time marked by paying bills, buying groceries, taking the children to school, vacuuming, walking the dog.

Where are my children’s precious things? I want to demand. Where is their treasure? Who gave you the right to take their lives like that?

You might have done something different. But you didn’t. Instead, you were like those ancient peoples who put their children through the fire, who sacrificed their own offspring to pagan gods, your nostrils filled with the smell of your own child burning. And you turned away and went on with your life. What did you think? That she would bounce back? That she would recover, given enough time and peanut butter sandwiches and trips to the mall with her Adoptive Mother?

Well, she didn’t. She didn’t recover. She isn’t recovered at all. And I carry the weight of her devoured life every single day. We all do. Everyone in our family. And because our family has many children whose lives were devoured, whose precious things were taken, it’s a heavy burden. Sometimes I stagger under the load. Sometimes my heart breaks (it breaks every day).

And I wonder. I wonder about myself. I wonder what kind of a fool and idiot I must be, to think I can do this. Who do you think you are?

I wonder if I will be able to stand before God and give a good account of my life, some day, when I explain why I was just like my children’s first parents, because I too put my children through the fire. I sacrificed them to a pagan god whose name I cannot recall. I put the children I birthed through the fire, and their childhoods were consumed by my trying to heal and save their siblings.

Am I so different, then, from their first parents? Today, I’m not so sure. Today, as I sit here with a heavy heart and my eyes filled with tears, I really am not so sure. I am not sure at all that I’ve done a good thing, not sure at all that anyone besides God is ever able to help anyone else, to heal, to soften the blows, to bathe the wounds and dress them.