Key Issues

Not a Happy Ending, Not Yet

Once upon a time there lived a little girl whose father died when she was only eight years old.

Her mother had many troubles afterwards, and consequently, the little girl ended up spending the following two years in foster care. After that, she bounced around with various family members until she was old enough to go out on her own.

Maybe she wanted to make more of herself. (Maybe she wanted someone else to fix the problems.)

She married a man twenty years her senior, whose life-long ambition was to stretch the disability check far enough to keep the two of them sufficiently drugged out of their minds.

(Maybe an old, trashy single-wide trailer looks like Cinderella's palace in that state of mind.)

When everyone else was stressing out about Y2K, she was conceiving a child. The lifestyle did not change after he was born.

She was visited by the same system in the same county that had taken her in years earlier. She was warned that she would be visited again a few weeks later. If there was any evidence of drug use, she would lose her son.

Three weeks later she tested positive for crack. At 5'6" in height, she weighed in at less than 100 pounds. Thanks to extensive methamphetamine usage (and poor oral hygiene), she has no teeth.

Her son is almost four years old. He hasn't been potty-trained, he's never heard of ABC's, and judging from his porcelain white skin, he's never seen the light of day.

The past two days I've been calming irrational fears of the potty monster by day, making up excuses for wayward parents by night, and spending the moments after he falls asleep wondering where he'll be six months from now...

(...part of my chaos defined.)