Please, God, send them to me.

I was driving home after work this afternoon.

No, that isn’t right.

My heart aches. I don’t want to listen to the radio until the tempestuous news cycle is finished with this. In fact, I don’t even want to share it with you. I’m going to, though. A three-year-old boy went missing in Abuquerque. His mother confessed to burying his body in a playground. She did this after she had laid down with him on the play structure, placed her hand over his mouth and nose, and strangled him. She had second thoughts, and performed CPR on him, and revived him. Then, she strangled him again. The CNN news story is here.

The woman reportedly told police she didn’t want her son to grow up feeling unloved and alone.

So she killed him.

I cannot stop thinking about this woman and her little boy.

On the heels of the vitriolic rant posted here a couple of days ago, I am beginning to wonder…to seriously wonder what the hell is going on. What kind of hell do you have to be in to murder your baby? What kind of hell did she go through when she was a child to convince herself that her child’s death would save him from the horrors of a life she herself cannot endure. What kind of hell will she live through for the rest of her life?

The pictures in my head are vivid and horrible.

I don’t want to hear or read any comments about how the mother should be put to death or sterilised or tortured. I don’t, in fact, want to hear anything about this. I want to turn off the outside world right now, but I can’t unhear the report. I can’t unread what I’ve read …unknow what I know… This will be all over talk radio and newspapers and blogs in a few hours, if it isn’t already, and yes, I am contributing to that. I am contributing because my soul is shaken. Because maybe in writing about this, I can calm my thoughts.

What I want is …I want the mother to heal. I want her to be rehabilitated, not vilified. No, I’m not insinuating she’s not guilty, or shouldn’t go to prison if found guilty. No, I’m not saying that she oughtn’t be punished.

She will never know her son’s joyful, pure laughter. She will never kiss his soft cheek. She will never hold his hand in the park again. No first day of kindergarten. No bike rides. No splashing in puddles, no endless board game afternoons. No clutching hugs, and no little voice saying “I love you, Mummy”. She has taken the greatest gift, the greatest honour someone can be given, and she has destroyed it.

And I need to believe that she has done this thing because she honestly (however delusionally and mistakenly) believed she was protecting her baby. I need to believe that.

Two years ago, a frightened and messed-up young woman gave birth to a baby in the toilet in a local store. She left the baby in the toilet and left the store.

Another woman abandoned her baby on a -29 February morning in 2007. She waited and watched until she saw someone in the house of the doorstep she left her daughter on.

Please, God, send them to me. These broken spirits, these children whose mothers cannot bear them.

If I could be mother to the world, believe you me I would. If I could gather up each of these children in my arms, I would.

All alone I didn’t like the feeling
All alone I sat and cried
All alone I had to find some meaning
In the center of the pain I felt inside

All alone I came into this world
All alone I will someday die
Solid stone is just sand and water, baby
Sand and water, and a million years gone by

I will see you in the light of a thousand suns
I will hear you in the sound of the waves
I will know you when I come, as we all will come
Through the doors beyond the grave

All alone I heal this heart of sorrow
All alone I raise this child
Flesh and bone, he’s just
Bursting towards tomorrow
And his laughter fills my world and wears your smile

I will see you in the light of a thousand suns
I will hear you in the sound of the waves
I will know you when I come, as we all will come
Through the doors beyond the grave

All alone I came into this world
All alone I will someday die
Solid stone is just sand and water, baby
Sand and water and a million years gone by

-Beth Nielsen Chapman, “Sand and Water”


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4 responses to “Please, God, send them to me.”

  1. brielle128 Avatar
    brielle128

    i can’t stop crying. part of me hopes that the woman doesn’t ever have children again, only because in having them, she’ll know what she lost.
    still, i can’t stop crying. i know what gifts children are. i know how rich i feel when i get a tiny arm hug. i know the smell of a forehead kiss when they are sleeping. and nothing in the world ever compares.

  2. Parmeisan Avatar
    Parmeisan

    *hug*

  3. Silent Winged Coyote Avatar
    Silent Winged Coyote

    And that is how you change the world.

    We have no justice system. We lack the compassion to see how we have damaged and destroyed the fabric of our society. We have disolved and destroyed the connections that used to make us strong in the name of ‘indepenedence’ and ‘freedom’ to the point where everyone is a marginalized and battered minority. We all have no home.

    And why do I say we? Because we is our entirely society. Me, and Ceno, and that woman who must be suffering so very much, her dead child, and everyone. We made it this way and until we can include everyone, until we can love everyone without a qualifier, until everyone belongs and is home we’re going to keep doing this to ourselves.

    I’m having my own personal trial and while I’ve taken the first step towards knowing what I should do about it, I know that I’m doing the right thing by involving myself at all.

    Thanks Ceno.

  4. Jenn Avatar
    Jenn

    This post? The way you feel about that poor woman – *those* poor women….Yet another reason why I love you so much.

    I feel the same way. That mother, I hope she can heal, I hope she can carry on, I hope that she finds love, I hope that there are more than a couple of people in this world who can see and understand how much pain she must have been in to do what she did. I think…I think she deserves all those things, no matter how appalled I am by what she did.

    If I could, I would take them all too.

i make squee noises when you tell me stuff.

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