Some names have been changed.
I got a call last night from my best friend, Grace. Grace and I have known each other our whole lives. Our families toted us to the same church when we were infants. We’ve been best friends since we were six and we endured the slings and arrows of elementary school together.
In many ways, Grace is like a sister. When I got thrown out of my home at 14, I moved into Grace’s house. In a very real way, although we’re not blood relations, we’re family. Last night, Grace had some family news to share. Another of our “sisters,” Cindy, had a baby. His name is Elijah.
Elijah is already a person, a precious individual. I don’t know him, but he’s been named and I know he’s a fighter. He’s bound to me not through genetics, but through all the inextricable ties of time and place. I suppose I’m his aunt. I suppose Grace is his aunt, too.
Elijah deserves to be happy. He deserves to be welcomed into the world with joy and laughter. He deserves to start his new life in the arms of people who love him and to be surrounded by care and kindness. Elijah will not be getting the life he deserves.
Elijah is 5 days old now. Grace did not call me sooner because Elijah’s arrival in this world was not greeted with joy, but some other emotion we cannot describe. The news of this new life brought me and Grace, his aunts, feelings of profound sadness, grief, and something akin to horror as well. Except there is love mixed in. I don’t know what to call love and caring absent the joy and hope. Perhaps this is despair.
Through no fault of his own, Elijah is a drug addict. He started his new life in intensive care on life-support. He was not expected to live, but he’s off the machines now and doing miraculously better. As I said, he’s a fighter.
It would be easy to hate his mother. While Elijah lies in the hospital fighting for his life, Cindy is already gone, out on the streets somewhere. Elijah is in one of the best hospitals in the world, getting the most modern and expensive medical care available. No one except social workers has gone to see him yet. Cindy is probably out somewhere right now, ingesting the drugs that Elijah is crying for.
It would be easy to hate his mother, except that I can’t and I won’t. I was 14 when Cindy was born. She came into this world in much the same way as Elijah. Because I was the other outsider in the house, I was beholden to fill the tasks no one wanted. I took care of Cindy.
Through no fault of her own, Cindy was a drug addict when she was born. Cindy’s mother was a prostitute, her father a junkie. It was tough when she was a baby, she cried so much, but she made up for it quickly. Cindy was one of those happy, sweet spirits.
She had a personality that was bigger than her. She made everyone smile. Cindy, too, deserved to be happy. She deserved to be greeted with joy and surrounded by love, just like Elijah does now. I really hated her mother.
Cindy is in some ways the same, sweet spirit now that she was then. Only now, it’s Elijah in the hospital and Cindy on the street. It would be so easy to hate her — Elijah’s her third. But I remember that sweet spirit. I think of her now and see that spirit still. But it’s stuck in an addicted body.
She sells her body to strangers so she can pay for the drugs it wants. That soft, warm little body I held in my arms all those years ago. It’s been through so much since then. It’s been sick, it’s been imprisoned, it’s been beaten.
She’s been so addicted, so used, you can barely look at her now. She’s lost all her teeth. The men who pay for her now are not buying her sweetness. The men who buy her now are attracted to her pain, to her damage. They usually hurt her some more.
No, I can’t hate Elijah’s mother when her pain is so real, so all-consuming, so heartbreaking. Even when I was 14, a selfish age, I was helpless in the face of Cindy’s pain. I’d gladly give up my sleep, my grades, going out with friends, to rock her in my arms and sing songs to her all night.
I wish I could fix it now, or at least make it better. If it was a matter of gathering her in my arms, holding her ravaged body, and singing her the songs from our past I would do it. I would fly there on the next plane. I’d clutch her to my breast. I’d sing all the songs I know.
But that won’t help so I stay put. She needs something I can’t give. She’s sick and she’s suffering, as surely as Elijah. When Elijah is released from the hospital, he’ll be released to the family and live in the house where I lived, his Aunt Grace lived, his other aunts and his mom, Cindy, lived. He will be the seventh drug-addicted “grandchild” born to two of the sweet girls from that house.
Elijah will have food, he’ll have clothes, he will not be physically abused at home, but I worry. Perhaps this fighting boy will be different. Perhaps he will have some extraordinary gift that will allow him to escape his circumstances and rise above his fate, but the odds are he’ll be normal, he’ll be average. The odds are he’ll be a regular human, perhaps even a sweet one, and not exceptional.
In that case, what will become of him? I’m too afraid to have hopes for Elijah. Hope is too painful, so I have prayers. It is my prayer for him that he gets some of the happiness and love that everyone in life deserves, that in this life, he will be shown the mercy his mother never had and cannot give.
It is my prayer for Elijah that if he’s a sweet boy and makes people smile, that the sweetness is never crushed out of him. I pray our society somehow becomes sane and will start taking care of the people who are here. That it will realize that drug treatment and contraception and compassion are the wiser, or at least the more cost-effective, course.
It is my most fervent prayer for Elijah that the little body the hospital is trying so hard to save will not one day have to be sold. I pray that if he ever triggers his addiction, he will be treated compassionately and not be turned into a criminal. I pray for his safety, his health, his mother. I pray he doesn’t learn to hate her.
And I pray that if one day Elijah ever has a baby, that our tears will all be of joy.
Cross-posted from Unbossed.