Silent Voice

"I Won't Be Silent"

A note from the editor

When Claire Fields first arrived at a PosAutivity Network, she looked shy and withdrawn, clinging to the friends who had brought her there, afraid to stand on her own. She rarely looked up and seemed to fence herself in where she stood.

When I recognized her story from the news many years ago, it made sense. Claire is adopted, and her first family tried to kill her. When a parent of a disabled child attempts infanticide, the news is quick to tell the parent's story. Claire has volunteered her own side.

Her essay contains a lot of pain, and also a lot of hope and promise. Read it, if you can. It may just change your heart.

Amethyst Stein

"I Won't Be Silent"

For years afterwards, I grew up shadowed by the list of things I had done wrong.

I was a monster. A nightmare child. A changeling that had replaced the real, lovable daughter that my parents wanted. I was wild, uncontrollable, intolerable. I deserved everything that had happened to me.

After all, it was plastered all over the media. I heard it from my hospital bed. They listed off my behaviors, explained the inexplicable, so that the sensible moderates could write off the cruelty and pat themselves on the backs, and say there are two sides to every story.

It's funny that they think that, because whenever I look at those articles, I only see one side being told. And it's certainly not mine.

I was a little girl. I loved my mommy and my daddy. I gave them sticks and bugs and flowers as gifts. I liked clouds, stuffed animals, and the color purple. I ran to my parents for comfort when I was scared.

But none of that really mattered to them, because I was born autistic, and autism is something you just can't love.

They say I was difficult. That it was because of my screaming. Because of my inability to speak. Because of my attempts to run away. Because of the terror and erratic behavior that would later be diagnosed as a symptom of PTSD. That anyone with a child as difficult as me would naturally want to commit murder.

And I believed it. After the hospital stay, I was placed in the household of two married men, John and Patrick Fields, and I waited in terror for them to hurt me. I knew it was coming, because it was deserved. I was a bad child. If I was force-fed wasabi or sprayed with vinegar or screamed at or locked in the dark or pinned down while I cried, it was simply because I deserved it.

So when my new dads reached out to hug me, I flinched. When they offered food, I hoarded it, scared that I wouldn't be fed unless I completed my drills successfully. When they mentioned therapy for me, I screamed and screamed until my voice became hoarse.

It took a lot of time, and a lot of patience, for them to bring me out of my shell. Not because I was autistic, but because I had been abused, and I expected to be abused again at any minute.

My life is different now. My dads take me to grocery stores, restaurants, and department stores. They help me with my homework. They brush my hair, clip my nails, and prepare my food. They teach me skills like laundry and basic cooking. We get ice cream together, we watch movies at home, we pet-sit for my aunt, we do all kinds of fun things together.

What changed? I didn't become any less autistic. I just became more safe. I've started to learn that I can make mistakes without harsh punishment, that I can have meltdowns without being called a difficult child, that I can love and be loved without the threat of punishment hanging over me.

So now you know the story, the way I lived it. There are parents who complain that their children are too tearful and skittish, when their child is being physically abused by therapists. There are parents who complain that their child melts down too much, when they will trigger meltdowns by pushing the child into clearly stressful situations. For every parent who complains that their autistic child is horribly difficult, there is a frightened and lonely child who is suffering.

Abuse is not caused by the victim being too needy, too emotional, or too flawed. It is caused by someone choosing to abuse them. And while it may be controversial, I am not afraid to say it: what happened to me was wrong, and I did not deserve it.

Nobody deserves it.

Because we are all human, and we all have feelings, and each and every one of us is deserving of love.

Claire Fields