I have 5 brothers. The government took 3 of us. Three of six. Two were already graduated and gone so we might as well say three of four. My two younger brothers and I were taken away. They genuinely love the other ones. But us...when it’s convenient for them to be there they might show up is the best I can come up with as an explanation for it. Actually, no, they don’t show up. At all. Their biological children...those two were and are treated very well. My adopted older brother is very loved. I never was. It was just never there. I was never good enough and nothing I did ever made them love me. Imagine what this does to a small child who has always known his own mother didn’t want him and that he didn’t really have a real family. The last thing they wrote in my baby book was that they wanted a South American baby. Well they got a Cuban baby. Nearly all Cubans are half European (or more.) That entry was written in 1988. There are no more entries after that one. Even at 35 that hurts me more than I can ever express because at four years old they had already given up on me. I’m not generally one to have much for emotions. I’ve been compared to a robot and King Kong so maybe it’s only a somewhat accurate depiction. Guess I just wasn’t dark enough for them to parade around as a charity baby. Hipsters love to show off their North Korean babies so we all know how not racist and super rich they are. Human trafficking isn’t cheap you know...
We must just be bad because even though people still to this day talk about how there were locks on the outside of our bedroom doors and all the bruises we had, and how three of us were taken, ending in two of us changing our last names...nobody ever wants to believe it. I still have random elderly people that knew me as a child comment on how I flinched when people reached out to me. Yet nobody wants to say it. I remember a day when a neighbor reached out to shake my hand and I flinched and suddenly realized that I flinched and that it was because I expected to be hit...because the adults in my life always hit me.
So because the government didn’t trust my adoptive parents to raise me without hurting me; they stuck me in a foster home. And another. And another. Eventually they couldn’t find any homes for a teenage boy (because they always want a teenage girl...ask yourself why) and just started sticking me in boot camps, group homes and then jail. No charges, no offenses, just locked me up. At all of them I suffered abuse, neglect and isolation. At all but one I was used for slave labor. I tried speaking out, and rarely for myself, but I was ignored or punished for it. No it can’t be true. The same government that attacked children with a tank and burned them alive just a few years ago would never put you in an abusive home. And yes, I knew that the government that sometimes fed and clothed me murdered those children at Waco. Have you ever lied awake at night annoyed that your foster sister was jumping on the bed and the squeaking was keeping you awake? ((SHE WASN’T JUMPING ON THE BED)) She’s dead now...hung herself at a boot camp in 1998. Sometimes I see kids that look like her. She was 13 when she took her own life. Another foster sister was convicted of murder after she killed her baby after giving birth at the YMCA in secret. As a teenage Hmong girl who was being forcibly raped by her cousin, she faced an honor killing. She doesn’t exist online or in any form that I can find leading me to assume she is no longer with us. I’ve often wondered what happened to her because we were good friends in middle school. Wonder is a strong and facetious word. I know she killed herself. I’ve never seen an obituary, but yeah, she would have had social media the moment it became a thing. She gone.
Child abuse?
No. Never could be that.
My family has watched me point out kids that are being abused. I’m always right. They always are being abused. I have a spotless record pointing it out. If it was a sport I would probably be the reigning champion.
I don’t forgive child abusers. I don’t forget the people that are too lazy or ignorant to investigate.
I’ll point this out to my “family” in light of what happened today.
I don’t ever forget. I might smile, be polite and pretend I like you, but I will not forget.
I don’t trust you.