Inkchanger

4: Lost & Found

They don't tell you how it's going to be when you get there. They want you to go expecting the very best - pancake breakfasts and trips to the zoo with adoring grownups who buy you everything you ask for. Sure, there are whispers from old hands, the ones who were passed over and are rotting in the guts of the system. They say it with their eyes, too afraid to open their cracked mouths. "Run away," they beg you. "You will die here." But you don't believe it - not at first.

You want to think that you're special, different, unique, just like your dead mommy always told you you were. That you're immune to the disintegration of spirit and degradation of self that's poisoned every child before you. That it won't happen to you because you're perfect.

But it does happen to you. It happens to all of us.

They smile and nod sympathetically when the soft-hearted social worker drops you off in the strangers' doily-and-landscape-oil-paintings living room. They offer you cookies and milk. Show you your new room. Introduce you to your new siblings, your new dog, your new fish. The too-big dress they bought you as a welcome gift. They laugh nervously and say you'll grow into it, knowing the promise they're making. You don't laugh when they say they'd like it very much if you would call them Mom and Dad. They do take you to the zoo, though, to the movies, to restaurants you never dreamed existed.

They adore you because they feel sorry for you.

And the instant you don't reciprocate, the moment you refuse to come out of the rose-pink room because you can't bear to see the light of another day where you are alone with strangers and afraid of living... Fretful phone calls to head office. Google searches for "troubled teen therapists."

Or.

The friendly social worker's van pulls away and suddenly it's time for bed at 3pm. There is no new room or pretty dress or trip to the zoo. There's only knuckle-abrading chores and a barely-clean corner of the basement. There's only a pair of leathered hands in the dark, touching secret places. You pray every day and every afternoon and every night for someone to hear your telepathic pleas for intervention.

Eventually, someone with densely-written papers and a pair of handcuffs does come. But they always come too late.
And then.

Back into the hopper with another set of strangers who only see a sad orphan girl who's been prescribed three anti-psychotics and draws freakishly well on anything you give her and is not a real person because how could she be with so many years of foster care under her belt?

Time after time, home after home, you pry open your heart, choosing again and again through sheer hard-headedness to dare hope this mom will understand, this dad will keep his hands to himself, these strangers can be a family. That someone will keep you close to their heart without abandoning you in a matter of months. Or will know you are your own property, not theirs.

It happens to all of us.

It happened to me.

All I have ever wanted, since I was ten years old and couldn't want easy things anymore, like a pony or to go to Disneyland with my (dead) mom and (dead) dad and (dead) brother, is for someone to see me for who I am and to love me without having to pay for it with my tears or my sweat or my body. To not be eviscerated when I inch open the lead-lined doors sealing up my heart. To be happy without being tainted by the fear of "how long?" To have a Technicolor roller coaster of emotions instead of this broken grey carousel of anger and guilt and shame.