Child abuse survivors are everywhere. They are teachers, drug addicts, heads of corporations, blue-collar workers, and artists. They can be shy, boisterous, studious or lively. So why is it that despite seeming normalcy, and even success, that some surviving adults—including those who’ve worked hard to get “over it”—still feel substantially different from their peers?

There are at least four long-term or permanent consequences to child abuse that are rarely discussed :

Brain Damage – Higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol are found in infants and young children who have been neglected or abused. Permanent damage includes death to nerve cells in key areas of the brain and, depending on the extent of abuse and neglect, impaired brain development. There are higher mortality rates throughout the lifespan of a neglected child, as well as marked social and behavioral differences.

Hypervigilance – A child who has an abusive parent or caregiver learns very early on to be on the lookout for possible threats. They become “wired” to be overly sensitive to everything in their environment, including the body language, words, and moods of other people; noise; crowds; and movement. This wiring, which began as circumstantial, is not likely to end with age, or with the end of the threats. It becomes, instead, a “natural” part of a person’s sensory package. To unlearn it would be the equivalent of a non-abused person learning not to see, hear, taste, or smell.

Anxiety & Social Disorders – Abused children may grow up and look like everyone else, but if their differing brains and responses to environmental stimuli aren’t obvious, their high level of anxiety and other social differences might be. Adults who were abused as children are more likely to have difficulty with relationships, eating disorders, chronic depression, insomnia; panic attacks, sexual dysfunction, substance abuse, suicidal ideation and more.

Experience ­– Although we live in a culture of convenient ideologies (get over it; pick yourself up by the bootstraps; it’s not what happens to you, it’s how you feel about it), the fact is that the totality of experience matters, mentally, emotionally, and physically. A person does not have to exhibit the obvious dysfunctions of Harlow’s monkeys or the deprived children of Romanian orphanages in order to be changed by childhood abuse and neglect—yet it is a common assumption that if someone looks and acts “normal” then they are, or should be, capable of being unaffected. In practice, this assumption only increases the anxiety that many survivors feel. While in the process of healing what they can heal for their own benefit and mental health, survivors may also feel charged with the task of negating their life experiences, or at least hiding the affects from them, in order to fit in and make other people feel more comfortable.

Unfortunately, the affects of child abuse don’t end when a survivor leaves home or reaches some magical age. There are real and long-term consequences that, contrary to popular belief, have nothing to do with a “victim mentality”, or a desire to wallow in the pain of past events, or even (as I’ve heard it suggested many times by hardnosed critics) a need to feel “special” and gather sympathy.

In fact, most survivors would wish less for sympathy than for understanding. Sympathy tends to be temporary and fleeting—it’s what we express at funerals and when we read horrible news stories—whereas understanding promises a more lasting, more inclusive, level of acceptance for differing life experiences and outcomes.

Perhaps a daydream or the feel of sun on my skin
provoked the smile that you questioned.
Perhaps, too, there was no reason at all
except that I’m human & sometimes
that’s reason enough for happiness.

It’s true, too, that I startle easily
& that if you move your hands too quickly
or too close to my face, I will flinch.

I’ll also reach for your hand in crowds of strangers
& jump at loud booming noises
& respond too viscerally to surprises

& when it comes to conflict,
I’ll have to argue myself out of running
while at the same time braving an argument with you.

You asked me why I was smiling
& I tell you it’s for the same reason
that I bury my head in your shoulder
when lightning strikes.

Like you, like everyone else,
I am the sum total of all my experiences.

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My daughter cried on the phone. She felt guilty for not being there in his final moments. “He was proud,” I told her. “He probably would not have wanted your last memory of him to be as a frail man in a hospital bed.”

“I loved him,” she said. I told her I know she did and that her grandpa knew it, too. In my mind, though, I thought of the Norman Edwards she didn’t know. My daughter had only gotten to know Norman well in his 70’s, and while he wasn’t a changed man he was much weaker and probably much more lonely. She enjoyed his brash and crusty conversation—she found him funny. They bonded over the military: he retired from the Navy after 27 years; she was a flight medic in the Air Force.

He wasn’t really my father, but I didn’t get solid confirmation of that until I was well into my 30’s. Lying was a paramount requirement of being part of the Edwards’ family, especially for me. I was not to ask why I looked so different than my two older sisters, or why the sparse amount of parental care in the house was never directed at me. “You’re bad,” my mother told me. “Get out of my way, nigger lips,” Norman said.

When I was little, somewhere between a toddler and kindergarten, I believed I was from Mars. The people from Mars weren’t green and little, they were tan and strong. I used to meet them near a ditch by our house. We’d make mud pie babies and then set them free in the brackish water. I didn’t know the story of Moses then, but I was sure the mud pie babies would be saved and find good homes. I wanted to find a good home, too. I wanted nothing more than to escape.

“She’s breathing too hard again,” my sister Dianne complained in our Fallon, Nevada living room. “I can’t hear the TV.”

“Stop breathing,” my mother yelled from the kitchen. And I tried to quiet the rumble in my lungs, but shallow breathing only made it worse and I began gasping for breath.

“God damn you,” my mother screamed as she grabbed my arm. “Why do you always have to cause trouble?” She dragged me to my room, threw me on the bed, and pummeled me with her fists.

This was to be my job in the family—to be the whipping girl—but I didn’t know it then. I only knew that I was despised. Nigger lips, liver lips, ingrate, troublemaker, piece of shit, a monster, a pig.

One of my first memories of Norman was when my mother got us all up early one morning to go meet him at an airport. I was about three, so my sisters must have been about six and eight. We wore white dresses and hats and had memorized a song to sing to him. He walked down the terminal, an imposing figure in a black uniform. Like good girls, we stood in line and waited to be greeted. He reached down to pat the backs of my two older sisters and ignored me. Tears welled up in my eyes. This was my dad? Why didn’t he see me? I swallowed my tears and sang the song. As we were walking to the car, I tried to hold his hand. He brushed my hand away and put it in his pocket.

I remember when my baby sister was brought home. I was so excited because I thought she’d be mine, the same way that my two older sisters belonged to each other. I was determined to be the best big sister ever. I would rock her and sing to her and teach her about the Martians. As the car pulled up to the house, I stood outside eagerly. Norman exited first, with the baby in his arms. I stood on my tiptoes and begged to see her. “Keep your filthy hands away from her,” Norman ordered. Eventually I did see my sister—I was surprised to see that she had a shock of black hair and almond eyes like me. As she grew, her skin was even darker than mine.

(As an adult, Deborah did manage to figure out who her real father was. He was, I believe, an American Samoan who was once friends with Norman. By the time she was born, it appears that my parents had reconciled to the fact that they both had affairs, my mother’s resulting in two births—one a twisted surprise and the other just a simple fact. Neither believed in divorce, so they stayed miserably married but kept separate bedrooms after Deborah was born. Perhaps because of this understanding between them, Deborah was accepted into the Edwards fold. That acceptance never did extend to me. I was the original shame—the one my mother failed to pass off as her husband’s.)

Norman did his best to ignore me but sometimes he couldn’t. Sometimes my mother’s hands would tire of beating me and she’d tell him he had to take over. He did so with methodical efficiency. Sometimes I made the mistake of walking in front of his precious television set and blocking his view. He’d jump out of his recliner, red faced and angry, and slap me to the ground.

At nine, I was a quarter short of being able to go to a Saturday matinee with my friend Carol and her family. I begged Norman, and he told me I’d have to earn it by washing his car.  He kept coming out to inspect it and finding flaws. The matinee came and went. I kept cleaning the car, inside and out. I cleaned the vents with a toothbrush and shined the wheels. He found lint on the windows left behind by a paper towel. He found bugs I had failed to get out of the grill. Finally, eight hours after I began, at 6:00 at night, he begrudgingly handed me a quarter.

Whenever I needed money after that I would beg the neighbors for odd jobs. I began babysitting early and often, and discovered that other people’s houses were nothing like mine: That most children didn’t leave the house as soon as they could in the mornings and return as late as possible at night. Most kids liked being home, or at least close to home. I avoided mine whenever I could, learning to innertube down the Truckee river to downtown Reno. I learned how to take buses, and to walk or bike ride for miles. Being away from home was the only time I could imagine being some other girl, belonging to other people, belonging even to a brightly lit city, a field of sagebrush, or a swift green body of water.

When I broke a basement window at 10 and my parents sent me off to be molested by strangers for the summer, I could not tell them. I came home a changed girl, but no one seemed to notice. We had company that winter and my bed was offered to them. I was to sleep in Norman’s bed. When he entered the room and took off his robe, I began to shake and cry. “Are you….are you going to….make love to me?” I asked. They were the only words I knew for what happened to me that weren’t cuss words.

“What the hell are you?” Norman boomed. “Some kind of pervert? Get the hell out of my room.” I went to the couch, but I didn’t sleep. I laid awake all night worried that I had let my secret out and would be punished. The subject was never brought up again.

When I was 14, I spent all day in the bathroom getting ready for my first date. When the doorbell rang and I was getting ready to leave, Norman told me I looked like a slut. I met Gilbert at the door with wet eyes I blamed on allergies.

I have one good memory of Norman. When I was 16, he inexplicably sold me his 1970 Datsun 2000 for $200. It was a sporty looking convertible, British racing green with black leather interior. Sometimes it ran and sometimes it didn’t. I spent whole paychecks from my jobs making repairs that never seemed to stick, but when it ran I loved that car. I loved putting it in 5th gear and cruising up and down I-80, pretending I was one of those girls from Reno High School who ran track and who were invited to proms, and not the girl with the GED who worked 40 hours a week so she could afford her own clothes and pay rent to her mother.

I left home five months after getting the car. I took a bus, found work in the Silicon Valley and rented a run down studio apartment.  I lived there a little over a year and then returned to Nevada.

I visited my parents when my maternal grandmother, who had Alzheimers, came to live with them. It was a horrifying scene. My mother wanted her dead—she called it an act of mercy—and kept giving her too much or not enough of the several medications she took. There was a lock on the bedroom door so Nana could not get out. When she was out, Norman was violent with her. He pushed her when she moved too slow and yelled at her when she was confused. One night she struggled to get her 4’10” body out of depth of couch cushions. He was trying to watch television, and her movements aggravated him so much that he got up and threw her across the room.  My mother did nothing—she just sat in her matching recliner. I comforted my Nana as best I could. I gave her a bath and put her to bed. In the morning I called Social Services. Nana was moved to an extended care facility shortly after that.

No one tried to kill my mother when she was dying of bone cancer. No one threw Norman across the room when he got old. That’s the way it should be, even if they were short on mercy themselves, but I wonder if on their deathbeds they ever asked for forgiveness. I wonder if they ever gave any thought at all to the lies they told, the abuses they meted out, and the damages they caused. My guess is that they did not. My guess is that like many people they rewrote their own versions of history and cast themselves as people who “did the best they could”. That was one of my mother’s favorite lines, but it was also a lie. I don’t recall her ever stopping in the middle of an outburst or beating to consider what she was doing. And when she knew she was dying, she didn’t offer up any apologies or needed truths. She promised me once that she would tell me who my father was before she died. When the time came to tell me, she said no—it didn’t matter. She held the one truth I ever needed from her hostage. She used it as a weapon, and managed to get one more shot in before she died in 1996.

It had been about two decades since I’d spoken with Norman. He went to his death, from what I’ve heard, fairly easily and without pain. He left no final words.

When I met up with one of my older sisters last year she said, “What does biology matter? He wasn’t a very good father to any of us, but at least we had one.” She does not have the same memories that I do, but she wasn’t the one that was despised and beaten. On that topic all she had to say was “well, you really pushed their buttons.”

My daughter has different memories, too. She did not know Norman as I knew him—when he still had strength and took out his bitter resentments with words and belts. She knew him as old, hard-nosed, and crusty in a way that made her giggle. I’m happy for that. I’m happy that my daughter was beautiful and worthy in his eyes, even if I was not.

But I can’t cry for him or about him. Those tears were spent years ago.

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At my neighborhood coffee shop, the young barista was crying as she wrote a Michael Jackson trivia question on the chalkboard.  She was upset that other people were not sharing her sense of loss.  “He wasn’t a child molester,” she said to me vehemently. “All those people, they just lied to get money. He was found innocent.”  Curious, I asked her how she would feel if a man in her neighborhood regularly invited pubescent boys to sleep in his bedroom — would she give the same benefit of the doubt to him?

She defended Jackson by citing his lost childhood, his purportedly abusive father, his inability to escape the chokehold of fame and its attending entourage of shady people.  My question wasn’t answered, but the implication was obvious — Michael Jackson wasn’t just a man, but an icon. A disfigured Peter Pan whose existence was warped in pain and wrapped in love.  Someone  so ethereal that he couldn’t possibly be expected to be bound by earthly rules.

I’ve known many adult survivors of childhood abuse, and even extreme poverty, who didn’t suffer the chokehold of fame, but rather the crush of invisibility.  Their lives as children, coming home to molesters and abusers, or rundown apartments with empty cupboards and absent parents, was surreal.  They watched the world as it existed outside their immediate boundaries, and couldn’t grasp the reasons for the disparity or the divide. They felt inferior, ashamed, and largely disconnected.

Most survivors entered adulthood with striking disadvantages, and far fewer resources than average, leaving them to hardscrabble their way through college or the workforce, expanding their sense of being set-apart. The gritty details of their childhoods were not memories they could casually share as others did. Instead of their feeling of  “difference” being lessened as an adult, it was heightened by the stories told by peers.  Happy tales of close families, holiday dinners, camping trips, and other fond memories can evoke a range of responses in those who were abused or neglected as children, but most often they hit a tender spot. . . an aching space left behind by the child whose prayers and wishes went unanswered, but who never stopped hoping.

Yet, unlike Michael, most survivors of childhood abuse and neglect could not build Neverland-like sanctuaries in an attempt to relive their childhoods, or to assuage the growing pains of adulthood. Some survivors, like Michael, had a difficult time being “normal” and were ostracized or labeled as freaks, adding more trauma to an already challenging life. Yet there were no walls they could hide behind — no team or staff they could call upon for protection — and most of all, there were no acceptable excuses.

Get over it, get on with it, leave the past behind, think positive, it’s not what others do to you it’s how you choose to feel about it, lift yourself up, be strong, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. . .

There are thousands of bromides spoken in the direction of everyday survivors, but there’s very little real interest or understanding shown in their lives, their struggles, or their sense of outsidedness.  The few stories told about their otherworldly existences are those that have big, splashy, feel-good endings.

Success-against-all-odds stories are popular, but in reality they are rare. Unfortunately, the pervasive messages in such stories leaves society with less understanding of lives on the periphery, not more.  And, of course, more bromides follow — if you want something bad enough it will be yours, if you try hard enough you will succeed, no one but you can stand in the way of your dreams.

The actual successes of most adult survivors tend to be much quieter, far less grand, more challenging, and many times more excruciating than the stories or the aphorisms tell.

Talent, charisma, opportunity, education, circumstances, looks, connections, resources, personality, geography — these are just a few of the factors that can effect any person’s success. Adult survivors often start at a deficit in a few different categories, and it can take years to catch up. For instance, I saw a young woman the other day, about 19, who had terrible teeth. The damage was so pervasive that it could only be attributed to years of childhood neglect.  I had a flashback to one boss of mine turning an otherwise qualified candidate away because of her mangled smile. He said, “if she can’t take care of her teeth, how can I expect her to take care of my business?”  I could only wonder about the number of social and employment opportunities this young woman would miss, and the vicious cycle she might face — the inability to get a higher paying job due to her appearance, leading to not being able to afford the dental work she needs to look more presentable.

Many such cycles exist, especially in poverty. The poor pay more for everything from their power deposits, to phones, to the car tires they have to put on buy here-pay here credit. A minor crisis, such as a broken arm or blown transmission, can set off a chain of events with months-long, even years-long, consequences.

I understand having sympathy for Michael Jackson –  not because he was an entertainer, but because he was a human being who was obviously troubled and in need of help he never received.  I believe his story speaks to so many things that should be more vigorously questioned than they are. Should public figures, especially when they are  minors, have the same right as non-public others to a reasonable amount of personal space — should California’s proposed “buffer zone” law be adopted nationally? Should sexual molestation cases involving children be allowed to be settled privately? How much non-material privilege should wealth be able to buy? Should parents of non-biological test-tube and surrogate babies be screened as adoptive parents are?

On a more personal level, what is to be said about parents who knowingly let their children sleep in the same room as an adult male because he was famous? What about America’s seemingly incessant hunger for sensational (and often untrue) tabloid stories?

Why is it that so many in society will extend empathy to the famous that they wouldn’t extend to others? Why do we so often scramble to make excuses or provide justification for the bad acts of celebrities when we wouldn’t do the same for our neighbors?

Michael Jackson will remain an icon, likely for decades after his death, just as Elvis Presley did. His albums are now topping the Billboard charts again, and his music and his style of dance will live on in many tributes, to be revered and copied by at least another generation.  He was, without question, an extraordinary talent.

My question is, how extraordinary are we as a society?  And if we’re not as outstanding as we know we should be — if we are not seeking to give our best thoughts, empathy, and support to every deserving human being, regardless of their wealth or fame — then shouldn’t we try a little harder?

This article is also on the Huffington Post for those who would like to comment.

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There’s no doubt that Suleman’s story is interesting, not only for its shock value, but because it opens up public debate on issues like parenting choices, child rearing, IVF, ethics, individual responsibility, and more.

I can’t help but wonder which horrific case of child abuse will open up the same kind of national debate.  How many tortured children, infant rapes, dead bodies, and light sentences will it take before the public demands substantial changes to child welfare, adoption, and foster care policies?

The U.S. Department of Health & Human Services estimated that in 2006, out of 48 reporting states, 1376 children were killed by abusive parents, relatives, and caregivers. (They estimate 1530 nationwide). In Florida, which ranks among the worst states for child abuse and welfare, 52 of the 140 children killed in 2006 had prior contact with “family preservation” (DCF) services.

Those are the children that died. 885,245 more were known to be victims of abuse in 2006 — a highly conservative estimate since many cases go unreported.

I’ve expressed my belief that child welfare agencies need a drastic overhaul before.   It is unconscionable to me that an advanced society still views children as chattel, and confers what amounts to child ownership on the basis of DNA.

“Preservation of the family” methods, such as anger management or parenting classes for abusive parents, largely fail.  The mentality of violent parents is not born of short-term frustrations.  Even though perpetrators may place the blame on any number of stressors, from job loss to drug use, the essential fact is that the ability to choke, beat, stab, burn, rape or poison another person, particularly a child, doesn’t come from stress, or even from mere ignorance, but from an ingrained mental or character defect.  Stress or lack of education does not cause people to throw helpless infants against the wall or immerse them in scalding water.  If this were the case, humankind would not have gotten as far as it is now.

There have always been violent people in society, and unfortunately they have never seemed to lack for partners.  One of the most appalling trends in child abuse has been pedicide caused by the live-in boyfriends of mothers. In many cases, women are choosing to live with men they’ve known only a brief time, and entrusting these men to care for their children.

Haleigh Marie Cain is only one of the many children brutalized by their mother’s boyfriend.   Haleigh died from massive injuries at the hands of Dennis Creamer, who was angered by Haleigh’s request for juice and cookies before bedtime.

A course in anger management or proper parenting is unlikely to change men like Creamer, or people like Kimberly Ann Trenor and Royce Zeigler, whose all day torture session of two year-old Riley Sawyers resulted in her death.

While America holds fast to the notion of parenting as a right rather than a privilege, it has yet to provide a national Bill of Rights for its most vulnerable citizens.  Individual states such as New Jersey, which recently introduced such a bill, come under fire primarily from conservative religious groups such as The Eagle Forum, which believes that giving rights to children “undermine(s) the sacred role of parental rights to direct the upbringing and education of their children“. The tone of dissent borders on hysteria that the State will interfere with the “rights” of parents to rear, educate, and control their children as they please, particularly when it comes to home-schooling.

One of the fundamental rights of children should be a well-rounded, quality education.  While thousands of homeschooling parents immerse themselves in providing this, and ensure that their children have varied academic as well as social opportunities, others are sorely unqualified, largely unmonitored, and use homeschooling as a way to control and isolate their children, rather than to enrich their experiences.

While many would disagree with the State of California, which recently upheld a law stating that homeschooling teachers must be credentialed, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to expect that parents who wish to teach at home show some qualification outside of a DNA relationship to do so.  Even the children-as-chattel mindset cannot do away with the fact that eventually children become adults.  There is no recourse for poorly educated, overly-sheltered children when they enter the world of adult work and responsibilities — if they enter the world at large at all.

Homeschooled children from religious cults, like those from the Yearning for Zion Ranch in Texas, are taught to fear the world outside of their sect. Most never attend school at all, and what little education they receive is from under-educated parents whose main concern is the indoctrination of their children into a set of cult beliefs and behaviors.

The call of neo-conservative religious groups to hold the rights of parents as “sacred” while denying children their own set of rights is transparent.  They want exclusive dominion over their offspring regardless of what society may deem harmful or contrary to the best interests of children.

Unfortunately, the rights of parents are largely put above the almost non-existent rights of children. Thousands of children spend years in the limbo of foster care, unable to be adopted into loving families, while abusive, neglectful, and otherwise unfit birth parents hold onto their legal parental rights.  Thousands more live unmonitored with people who have previously been convicted of violent crime such as rape, murder, assault, molestation, or child abuse.  Under present laws, custodial parents may live with whom they please, and non-custodial parents don’t even have the right to demand a background check on those who will be involved in the day-to-day parenting of their children.

Social services for children is a nightmare of red tape, inefficiency, and outdated, provincial policies.  Who was watching Donald Medsker, who was 26 years old in 1989 when he was granted custody of his 10 year-old half-sister?  He started sexually abusing her right away, making her quit school when she became pregnant at age 14.  Over the next 20 years Medsker’s sister, indoctrinated by him to believe that their relationship was normal, gave birth to six more children, two of whom were put up for adoption. Where were the social service follow-ups and the truant officers? How did a 10 year old child fall so completely through the cracks?  Was Medsker examined and found to be the best parenting choice or was this, again, a case where a DNA relationship outweighed consideration of the child’s best interests?

America could do so much more to prevent child abuse.  We could launch more comprehensive education and support programs for parents.  Schools could demand yearly physical exams as well as immunization records.  We could make it against the law for known violent offenders to live with children, at least without monitoring, and we could do much more for children living in isolation, such as those born into religious cults.  We could certainly rewrite the “preservation of family” standard that returns children to abusive homes.

However, as long as children are viewed as chattel, and a parent’s rights lawfully outweigh those of a child’s, we won’t.  We’ll just continue to be outraged — in the most empty way — because we’re not really willing or ready to give children a set of rights that would help ensure their dignity, education, or safety.

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This is one of the men who raped me when I was a teenager.  He was 19 then, he’s 51 now, and he is still a rapist.  I look at him and see a life gone wrong, but I feel no pity.  I imagine that at one time he was a little boy who liked action figures and riding his bike, but that something (or someone) terrible happened in his youth that robbed him of his innocence and his conscience.  Still, I feel no pity.  I wish him only a long life behind bars, where he will never again have the opportunity to lay his hands upon a child.

I feel guilty.  It would not have been safe for me then to tell my parents or authorities, so I told only my older sister, who earlier that day introduced me to him as her friend.  She didn’t tell, either.

I feel pride in the young girl who braved whatever circumstance she was in to tell her story to family, law enforcement, attorneys, and then in court.  Giving the details of a rape, over and over again, is uncomfortable for adult victims — for children it can be excruciating.  Whoever she is, she did something that likely saved other children from knowing the same kind of pain she experienced.   I wish I could have done that, but I suspect it wouldn’t have ended up the same way.  It was a different time and place.

I feel angry at the never-ending cycle of child abuse and neglect — at the society that helps perpetuate it through weak social services and laws — and at those who continue to bear children they don’t want, or can’t love and care for properly.  It is likely that this rapist, like so many others,  was sexually, physically, or otherwise abused as a child.  It may also be that he is a sociopath, and would have been one regardless of his upbringing.  In either case, it seems to me that there were opportunities to derail his sexually violent tendencies before he began victimizing children while he was still a teen himself.   The recidivism rate for molesters and rapists is extremely high, the cure rate near zero — but I can’t help but wonder what might happen if we turned more of our attention toward  preventing the causes.

I feel hopeless in a way.   We live in a time of such desensitization that child abuse and rape have become cliched topics.  The victims are getting younger and younger.  The rape of infants, once a horror story limited to third-world countries and sick child pornographers, is becoming more and more commonplace.  The sentences for child rape can range from one year to five to life in prison.  All rape is heinous, but those involving prepubescent children should be especially repugnant in a civilized nation, and there should be long mandatory sentences in place to protect society from poor judicial discretion and the plague of repeat offenders.

I feel gratefully far removed from the abuses in my own youth, but connected to those who are experiencing the same now.  I wish I could do more.  I wish I could change the laws, right all the wrongs, and make every child safe.  It’s an impossible task, but I’ll never stop talking about it, no matter how many people refuse to listen.

I feel relief knowing that, at least for now, a serial rapist who once affected my life is incarcerated.

I feel genuine joy for every child and woman left untouched by this crime.  I feel blessed for knowing that there’s innocence left in this world.

I feel strong, and alive, and lucky.

I feel like I can tell now, so I do.

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We live in a world of instant everything. Every human situation, it seems, comes attached with cliches, platitudes, bromides, stereotypes and parodies. There is, conceivably, a box to place every person in, and a label to slap them with. There are also socially created barriers that inform perception, determine response, and decide opportunity. As society evolves, so do these barriers.

In the 1970′s, for instance, it was not unusual for job applicants to lack college degrees. Today, four year degrees are required for almost every corporate position, including those that are considered entry-level.

Throughout history, but even more apparent in today’s political climate, the have-nots have born the brunt of social stereotypes, bootstrap philosophies, and feel-good bromides. They’ve been romanticized in songs and novels, damned by social critics, and sacrificed at the altars of law and politics.

The pride and strength of the working poor is legendary — their clothes are old, but never dirty*, their love for each other overcomes all, and they’re only poor if they choose to be* — because it’s love, and not money after all, that makes a person truly rich. They bear drudgery and ridicule with hearty stamina, and sing and dance their way through meager lives filled with hardship, always hoping, always praying, and never losing sight of what’s really important.

At the same time, there’s something wrong with those people — something inherently flawed about them, like their character, their ambition, or their intelligence. It can’t be about any of the “isms” because, as we’ve all come to learn through the example of the rare exception, the -ism’s don’t really exist. After all, if Loretta Lynn can work her way out of a coal mining town in Kentucky, and Oprah Winfrey can become a billionaire, then anyone can. It’s just a matter of really wanting to achieve, and working hard enough to find success. And since there’s no such thing as luck, unless you’re talking about the kind people make for themselves, there are no logical reasons for failure, only excuses.

Last night, engaged in a conversation with a new friend, I had cause to revisit some of my darkest days as a young single parent. My husband had managed to get a divorce from another state, with the Navy’s help no less, stating that he had no children. He left while I was pregnant and had a one year old daughter. His legal maneuver left him off the hook for child support but still gave him the legal rights of a father. There was no legal recourse for me since at the time my state, Nevada, did not cross jurisdictions. It took twelve years to find even the minor relief of terminating his rights. He never paid child support, and never saw or expressed interest in seeing the children.

I worked two jobs, while struggling to pay daycare and rent. One job wouldn’t cover both, much less buy groceries, and I was evicted twice, and had my power shut off several times. One of the lowest points I remember was a cold day in October, when I washed my cocktail waitress uniform out in a dark bathroom, with cold water, because I had no electricity. No heat, either, so the babies were bundled in snowsuits and covered with blankets. We had no food in the house to speak of, and when I woke up to go to work, my uniform was still wet. I had to hop a bus to daycare, then to a casino where a poker player fried my leg and my last pair of nylons with the tip of his cigar. I broke down crying, and was promptly fired.

In those dark days, hope was tinged with desperation and need, and I drove myself past exhaustion, while at the same time trying to be the kind of mother I always wanted. One who was essentially happy, loving, and present. It took years, an incredible amount of energy, and living through multiple traumas to make a life that wasn’t desperate, or teetering on the brink of disaster. It wasn’t even a middle class life — there was no home in the suburbs, 401K, or college fund — but it was a life that covered the essentials.

I know poverty because I’ve lived through its varied realities, from the grumbling hunger to the bone-chilling coldness; from the pain of infections I couldn’t afford antibiotics for, to being robbed because I lived in a bad neighborhood and was an easy target. I’ve suffered from the policies and punitive measures that steal hope, time, and money from those who can least afford to lose anything.

I know bootstraps and bromides. The romanticizing of poverty, and the damnation of the poor. In this series, we’ll discuss economic realities and policies, as well as the emotional cost of being poor in America, the richest country in the world.

Excerpted from songs:
*Stevie Wonder, Livin’ for the City
*Dolly Parton, Coat of Many Colors

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