Unnecessary truama
I talk a lot about trauma and children on this blog. I write even more about trauma and children for Adoption.com. It's a topic that is very important to me, because we live with the effects of how trauma can affect children every single day of our lives. We love our children dearly, but children who come from hard places can be challenging. This is through no fault of their own, but because of the trauma inflicted on them earlier in their lives which has consequently shaped their brains and affected how they process and react to their environment.
It is not pretty or easy to parent a child who has been abused and neglected and hurt that she disassociates at the least little potential of something negative. It is not pretty or easy to parent a child who is so fearful that he loses all control and rages and rages and rages. It is not pretty or easy to watch your child hurt so badly all because they were hurt. It is, in fact, painful and ugly.
Sometimes the trauma that children experience is unavoidable. Losing a parent to death, being in an accident, that type of thing, is a part of life. It's not a part of life we wish happened, but these things do. Other times trauma is a result of adults having their own issues, such as when a birth parent cannot parent a child and makes an adoption plan for that child. It is often done with the best interests of the child in mind, but it is still a trauma to the child to lose that connection. Being adopted into a new family and a new culture is also done with the best interests of the child in mind, yet it, too, is a trauma. I do not kid myself that bringing our children into our home was traumatizing. The best I can do is make our home a loving and healing place that can redeem the pain.
There is other trauma that just shouldn't happen. Abuse. Hunger. Neglect. Some of my children have experienced these and they live with the results. They should have never had to experience them. The adults who came in contact with them, and were charged with their care, should have protected them and kept them safe. I think we can all agree on that.
Because of the reality of my children's past and our family's present, I have a little experience in what trauma does to a child. This is also why I am angry, oh so angry, at the US government. There is no excuse for our government ripping children away from their parents and placing them in places that look eerily similar to less-than-wonderful orphanages. These are children who have parents. These are children who are being traumatized. THESE ARE CHILDREN.
The current rationale, as far as I can understand it (and I don't actually understand it in the least) is that ripping children from the arms of their parents is supposed to "be a lesson" to others approaching our border, to keep them away. So, we brutalize children because the current administration has a problem with brown skinned people wishing to come to our country. Yeah. That makes sense. (Please note the heavy irony in that last sentence.)
You know what? It's not going to work. I can tell you this definitely because I have a little first hand experience with refugees from Central America. Well, one refugee. Some of you will remember that a few years ago we hosted a young mother and her two children for 18 months. I could not share her story then, and I will only share broad details here, now. But it is important for you to understand some things. She was an illegal alien who left her country to flee the abusive situation she found herself in. Her story isn't pretty, and she herself was a child of trauma. A very hurt child. She saw running to the US to be the way to find a better life. She desperately wanted to be able to go to school and learn. (She was forced to drop out of school at a young age in her home country.) Those two things were her sole impetus... escape from abuse and an incredibly strong desire to learn.
What she didn't know was that it wasn't quite so easy as crossing the border and enrolling in school. She came from a very poor area of a very poor country. She had no knowledge of passports, much less of visas. She had no idea what awaited her here... hiding from border guards, living on the street, being abused here, not being able to enroll in school because she neither spoke the language nor had the money nor the documents. She did have an urge to work and learn to a degree that made me feel like a lazy slug in comparison.
So to say that anything that happened or is happening on the border would have had any bearing on her decision to reach the US is ludicrous. I am also 100% sure that her story is far more the norm than not. These are people trying to make a better life for themselves and their children, just as immigrants have done for the past 200+ years. We should be horrified and ashamed of ourselves at the horror we are inflicting on families and children. This is not making America great again. It is making America an embarrassment and a bully and an abuser.
I have often asked my children at various times to memorize the poem engraved on the bottom of the Statue of Liberty. At the rate we are going, someone will need to sandblast the words off, because they will have become laughable and wrong.
And honestly, along with the extreme anger, I am frightened. Very, very frightened.
It is not pretty or easy to parent a child who has been abused and neglected and hurt that she disassociates at the least little potential of something negative. It is not pretty or easy to parent a child who is so fearful that he loses all control and rages and rages and rages. It is not pretty or easy to watch your child hurt so badly all because they were hurt. It is, in fact, painful and ugly.
Sometimes the trauma that children experience is unavoidable. Losing a parent to death, being in an accident, that type of thing, is a part of life. It's not a part of life we wish happened, but these things do. Other times trauma is a result of adults having their own issues, such as when a birth parent cannot parent a child and makes an adoption plan for that child. It is often done with the best interests of the child in mind, but it is still a trauma to the child to lose that connection. Being adopted into a new family and a new culture is also done with the best interests of the child in mind, yet it, too, is a trauma. I do not kid myself that bringing our children into our home was traumatizing. The best I can do is make our home a loving and healing place that can redeem the pain.
There is other trauma that just shouldn't happen. Abuse. Hunger. Neglect. Some of my children have experienced these and they live with the results. They should have never had to experience them. The adults who came in contact with them, and were charged with their care, should have protected them and kept them safe. I think we can all agree on that.
Because of the reality of my children's past and our family's present, I have a little experience in what trauma does to a child. This is also why I am angry, oh so angry, at the US government. There is no excuse for our government ripping children away from their parents and placing them in places that look eerily similar to less-than-wonderful orphanages. These are children who have parents. These are children who are being traumatized. THESE ARE CHILDREN.
The current rationale, as far as I can understand it (and I don't actually understand it in the least) is that ripping children from the arms of their parents is supposed to "be a lesson" to others approaching our border, to keep them away. So, we brutalize children because the current administration has a problem with brown skinned people wishing to come to our country. Yeah. That makes sense. (Please note the heavy irony in that last sentence.)
You know what? It's not going to work. I can tell you this definitely because I have a little first hand experience with refugees from Central America. Well, one refugee. Some of you will remember that a few years ago we hosted a young mother and her two children for 18 months. I could not share her story then, and I will only share broad details here, now. But it is important for you to understand some things. She was an illegal alien who left her country to flee the abusive situation she found herself in. Her story isn't pretty, and she herself was a child of trauma. A very hurt child. She saw running to the US to be the way to find a better life. She desperately wanted to be able to go to school and learn. (She was forced to drop out of school at a young age in her home country.) Those two things were her sole impetus... escape from abuse and an incredibly strong desire to learn.
What she didn't know was that it wasn't quite so easy as crossing the border and enrolling in school. She came from a very poor area of a very poor country. She had no knowledge of passports, much less of visas. She had no idea what awaited her here... hiding from border guards, living on the street, being abused here, not being able to enroll in school because she neither spoke the language nor had the money nor the documents. She did have an urge to work and learn to a degree that made me feel like a lazy slug in comparison.
So to say that anything that happened or is happening on the border would have had any bearing on her decision to reach the US is ludicrous. I am also 100% sure that her story is far more the norm than not. These are people trying to make a better life for themselves and their children, just as immigrants have done for the past 200+ years. We should be horrified and ashamed of ourselves at the horror we are inflicting on families and children. This is not making America great again. It is making America an embarrassment and a bully and an abuser.
I have often asked my children at various times to memorize the poem engraved on the bottom of the Statue of Liberty. At the rate we are going, someone will need to sandblast the words off, because they will have become laughable and wrong.
And honestly, along with the extreme anger, I am frightened. Very, very frightened.
The New Colossus - Emma Lazarus
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door."
Comments
Britta
Oregons Sen Merkley was denied entrance to a "detention" center for children in Texas.
Our Gov. Inslee from Wa. state was with a delegation at Sea-Tac airport where there is a prison...oh to be politically correct one is to call it a detention center. Efforts are being made there to help the 176 women who are political refugees from several countries and whose children were removed from them...the youngest 6 yrs. old.
Tim Boyle, CEO of COLUMBIA SPORTSWEAR, in Portland,or. credits his Jewish mother with being allowed into the US as a child during WW2...His father was an "illegal" from Ireland.
Don't forget the USS ST. LOUIS , sent to cuba and then the US with 900 plus Jewish passengers in May,approx. 1943. The passengers were allowed visa applications that allowed them , after they were processed in Cuba, to enter the US..a week before the ships arrival, Cuba gov't
cancelled allowing the immigrants to their soil...no one told the immigrants on the ship however...Pres Roosevelt was appealed to, as the ship sat in the ocean in view of the Miami city lights.Roosevelt and whoever was responsible never allowed the USS ST LOUIS entry and 900 plus Jewish passengers were sent back to face what we now know were extermination camps but just like now, maybe called "detention centers"...So scary that some of history seems to be raising its ugly head and many Americans are turning a blind eye, just like during WW2.
mary m, age 72
vancouver,wa.