What is this Kinship of Which You Speak? Pt. 2
David Antrobus Posted on Friday, March 9, 2012 at 3:22PM Part Two of a longer post. Part One is here.
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Over time, we became street fixtures ourselves, and this is where trouble can start.
First, it is easy to begin to over-identify with the street lifestyle and see the "normal" world as the enemy, as a cold, insouciant planet of hypocrisy-peddlers from manicured suburbs or hostile downtown business owners clearing their precious doorways, customers with wallets relentlessly prioritized over these troublesome urchins.
And second, it's even easier to bond with the youth themselves. For all their outward bravado and feral smarts, street kids are still kids, and once they trust you, their loyalty is fierce, as it must be in return if we were to be effective. For they have first survived and often been further hurt by a system that regularly ignores their specific needs, or that judges them unfairly, or that contains workers who once genuinely believed in "helping others" now turned cynical by a job that shackles them to a desk and forces them to fill out endless forms largely designed to protect their supervisors from lawsuits.
So when—as happened in my final year in the job—you lose two boys and one girl, all to some dire yet sly breed of violence, you tend to take it badly. And when the system is so broken that I am double-teamed by my own supervisor and a child protection worker and instructed to ignore a local 13-year-old girl—who is right now claiming physical and sexual abuse in another city—for the sole reason that she is now in an adjoining province and therefore no longer "our problem"; while that same week I'm thwarted by numerous drug rehab centres—after an 18-year-old girl finally relents and asks for help for her crack habit—on the grounds that she is too old for the youth facilities and yet won't qualify for the adult detox centres, it can all come to a head very quickly and very starkly. So when that third child, a 14-year-old girl this time, was found hanging in her basement by her 10 year-old brother, I simply walked away. Ostensibly a medical/stress leave, but I knew I wouldn't be going back.
Now, I'm not saying this was entirely the work. There was some stuff of my own I'd been carrying for far too long and which needed lancing before it ended up seriously ruining me—and that's not hyperbole—stuff that would take at least another decade to work through, but basically, I had begun a career which was not sustainable over the long term, and unlike other acknowledged high-stress occupations, there would be no twenty-year pension for me. No gold watch. No one to recall your deeds, heroic or otherwise. Nobody quite spells out to you at the beginning of all this heartache how truly corrosive to your happiness this work can be. No one mentions the eleven-year-old daughter of newly arrived Central American immigrants performing fellatio on a sick old man in the back of a local limousine. Or warns you about the fatal overdose in an alley on "Welfare Wednesday" that won't even make the local newspaper. Or prepares you for the rage of a twelve year old boy with a Christian cross seared into his torso from throat to navel by, presumably, some glowing and righteous cigarettes.
So, now we're at the point where I realised that world was gone from me, perhaps forever. A couple of confirmations by mental health types that I was suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and clinical depression (wonderful how they always like to hit you with two diagnoses, as if you're not reeling enough) later, and I entered 2001 on antidepressants. Which explains why I felt nothing and to this day remember almost as little of the first half of that year. I think I hiked in the mountains a lot.
It was some time during the summer that the idea of the road trip occurred to me. It became an idea I couldn't shake, and the combination of an understanding family and conveniently located friends along the potential route from near Vancouver, BC to New York City, made it not only possible but feasible. Late August, and a thought appeared unbidden: "I want to leave on a Tuesday". No idea why now. Could be it was the day my Employment Insurance cheque arrived. But however I arrived at it, "Road Trip" was entered on the calendar next to Tuesday, September 11, and I waited.
Monday, September 10, 2001: My bags were packed: camping gear, cassette tapes (yes, my '91 Civic only had a tape deck), clothes to last a few weeks. The drive itself would take at least a week each way unless I drove like something being pursued—not out of the question given the odd fluttery feelings drifting through me like eels through kelp, that might well have been me trying to wean myself from the Celexa—but I would also want to explore as much of New York City as I could, having never visited before. So I was estimating at least three weeks, perhaps as much as a month.
Which brings us to where the story begins. The story in my book. Perhaps many other stories. Those harrowing moments everyone can recall with pinpoint accuracy. For us, it went like this: I woke very early to a beautiful clear dawn. My partner told me something strange was happening, and a certain tone in her voice made me sit up and pay attention. I heard something on the radio that turned out to be inaccurate: "Up to nine planes are currently unaccounted for." We turned on the TV and watched the second plane hit the South Tower. Shortly after, we saw jumpers. I don't think the news people even knew what they were showing at first. We watched the buildings fall. We walked our son to his elementary school. I said "I can't go on my road trip." My partner said "first, find out how your friend in New York is doing". Nobody could phone New York. But I found him online. He said "everyone is leaving, it feels like a war zone. If you can, please still visit." I talked to my partner and watched the TV all day, the appalling endless loop. My son came home from school. I talked to my family and they were okay with me going. In the immediate future, at least, the United States border was closed, so Winnipeg became my new destination. I left late afternoon and barely even recall the eight hour drive that found me in Canmore, Alberta by midnight.
I know this was a familiar media refrain, but it felt like everything had utterly and irrevocably changed and would never go back to what it had been. And that the potential for that to be a good thing hung in the deceptively still Rocky Mountain air that night the world inhaled and awaited its next breath.
So, the kinship of which I speak? It's us. Ours. To make of it what we will.
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David Antrobus also writes for Indies Unlimited and BlergPop. Be sure to check out his work there if you like what you read here.
Reader Comments (10)
I have no words. Just tears.
Aw, thanks, Laurie. Not that I mean to upset anyone, but emotional reactions do show I've written this stuff down properly, as basic as that sounds.
I have been sitting here for an hour trying to string together some magic words to convey what I want to say. Those words are not coming. So I will cut to the chase and speak from the heart.
I was one of those kids. Oh, I wasn't on the street - I was even more invisible. No one saw my horrors, no one spoke of them. They dared not, for fear of seeing themselves in my eyes. The eyes of a child that was raped at three and left for dead. The eyes of a child who wanted to scream, but was not allowed to. It didn't stop there. It never does. Years and years of unspeakable abuse, the kind no one even now wants to know about. Years and years of just wanting to be heard. To be seen. To not be invisible anymore.
You, David, allowed these kids to be seen. To be visible. You dared to look into their eyes and see THEM. I know the pain you felt by doing that. It is the pain of a child, the heartache, gut-wrenching KNOWING what they endured. But you looked anyway. I wish I could convey to you how MUCH that means to an invisible child. I wish it didn't hurt you to look, but the fact that it DID hurt to look says volumes about YOU.
Even now, for me, just knowing that there are people who WILL look at the invisible ones brings great peace to me.
Please know that you gave those kids the greatest gift there is.
At a time when the words "Invisible Children" are part of a huge viral internet meme, it's good to be reminded that there are invisible children literally everywhere, and that they all deserve to be made visible. Responses like yours, Anon, make me feel writing itself is actually worthwhile, and second only to the witnessing we achieved on the streets.
And what you went through could so easily have led you to those same streets. There are some scary stats that show something like 98% of underage girls involved in the sex trade were sexually abused as children. Figures for boys, incidentally, are even more blurry, due to a lack of reporting.
And another thing that rings true about your comment: no one wants to know. We took this information, these stories, from the mouths of our communities' kids, and we repeated them everywhere we thought might make an impact... and aside from lip service, most people didn't want to know. One of our local communities stages an anti-abortion rally every year, for which tens of thousands show up. We organized rallies for sexually exploited kids... and managed to attract maybe 50 or 60 people. So, what's the message? Defend the fetus until it becomes a living, breathing human being, after which we'll drop it like a hot brick if it has the misfortune to be born into poverty, abuse, dysfunction, addiction?
Do these people actually think babies choose where they're born, and under what circumstances?
(Yes, I am leaving my name out of this)
People are not...comfortable... around those of us who were sexually abused. Hell, most people aren't comfortable knowing that their parents had sex. Try being a girl who was sexually abused by her own mother. It's not a popular conversation topic.
I'm not surprised by the lack of support for your rallies. You can SEE kids - you can't SEE a fetus. It's the same with the homeless. They jump in to give to the food banks (that mostly only let homeless use once a month) and think they've done some great deed. And as soon as a homeless person has a home - POOF! No more help. I guess if you're indoors, you have no more problems.
I probably shouldn't have called them invisible kids with all the hoopla going on right now, but what else can one call a child no one wants to see?
I admire your guts for posting this blog post. And I hope you hold no shame for walking away from that. One can only stare into the abyss for so long.
I know more about what you're talking about than I can really say here, but feel free to email.
Do you know Andrew Vachss? His work with kids or his writing? He calls CSA survivors Children of the Secret which is similar to "invisible kids" with one difference... they are not invisible to each other... or sadly, to predators.
I could talk about this at length, but email would probably be better, but only if you were comfortable. If not, I completely understand.
You know, I do feel some guilt for walking away. I try to give myself a break, but those kids downtown didn't have the option.
David - thank you for posting these and providing context on how your journey & book came into being.
I believe that the most powerful thing we can do is to stand witness to another person's pain. Sometimes there aren't words that will take the hurt away or salve the wounds. In that act of listening and truly hearing, truly being with another person, we share that pain and that journey. It conveys "you are not alone" more than anything that can be uttered aloud. And though many of us are loners, all of us (I believe) fear living an unheard life.
In your work, you were a part of so many lives, so many life stories. To do that work well meant it had to affect you. Ongoing grief, the betrayal of continuing injustice - that was part of it too, wasn't it?
In human resources, in social services, anywhere really where there will be difficult (tame word for some of the circumstances & stories) situations, we always talk about boundaries. Remember boundaries. Yet, our human spirit cannot always pay attention to those boundaries, and not always follow them when they are recognized.
The other thing that I want to say is that your writing is beautiful. I hope you'll know what I mean. Now, I need to go back and read these posts again. And again.
Jo, you are so spot on with that observation about being a witness. I have seen kids get through horror shows of a life if they've had one adult who stands in their corner, doesn't judge and is there if needed. In a way, we were paid to be that adult, a role sometimes filled by an uncle or aunt, a cousin, you know?
Thank you so much for your comments, which also come with the stamp of experience, I can tell! I loved this: "And though many of us are loners, all of us (I believe) fear living an unheard life." At the risk of sounding like I'm trivializing it (I'm not), you should Tweet that!
i keep trying to think of what to write.. i can't seem to get anything out! I'm sorry. i don't know what to say. It is so sad what innocent kids go through, and while I feel like what I have been through was horrible, I know that it can be much worse. It always makes me so depressed to hear of things like this. I feel like I go into a black hole and it takes me weeks to climb out of it. Life can be so horrible.
MD, are you the same person as Anon? Either way, you are welcome to email me and talk that way. I know that takes a leap of trust, but I give my word I wouldn't hurt you in any way. I understand that it's not easy to trust, for obvious reasons, though. Life can be awful, it's true, but sometimes life has the capacity to surprise, and that's when it gets to all be worth it.