The Missing Assignment

i still don't want to write this which probably means i really need to.  It usually works that way.  i hadn't realized how much i had wanted to dodge this assignment.  That is further proof that Master knows what i need better than i do.  What i want and what i need are two entirely different things.  Master can tell which is which far better than i can.

Okay...

Other than all the usual things that have me perpetually upset, which may be encapsulated as feeling trapped in a life i hate, i was upset about an incident with my son.  He was angry that, in his opinion, there was nothing to eat for dinner and, still more so, that i refused to give him money for take-out.  That there were tons of dinner options was irrelevant.  That our budget is especially tight with the new mortgage payments on the house was of equally little interest to him.  

When s was small, he experienced deprivation in Ethiopia.  He came to us as a hoarder.  His tiny backpack, sent by us to him in Africa, was his only possession.  He arrived with it stuffed with everything he had been able to get his hands on in his travels to America.  It was packed with a variety or airline items, everything from magazines to a somehow purloined single shot sized bottle of vodka.  It contained hotel items from his journey including toilet paper.  

For weeks after he arrived, scared and skinny and without a word of English, he took that backpack and all he could fit in it everywhere he went.  If we left the house, that bag went with him stuffed with whatever he valued most at that moment.  He slept beside it.  It was his link to never again being without.  

He had learned in the children's center just how survival of the fittest works.  Those who were bigger and stronger took what they wanted from the little ones.  At six, he was one of the little ones still.  His first full day in America, we went to the park.  He marched up to a toddler, yanked a lollypop from the toddler's hand, and popped it into his own mouth entirely unaware he had done anything wrong.  He was simply behaving in the only way he knew, using the skills to survive that he had honed back in Africa.

For years and even still today at times, he has hoarded food.  At first we would find any food items at all in and under his bed, stolen and hidden in case he was ever left orphaned and starving again.  Over time, he became more selective in what he hoarded but the underlying emotion was always the same.  Now fifteen and with more of his life spent here in the United States than in his home country, some part of him still can not believe that food truly will be available to him always.

The rational and empathetic part of me knows all these things and aches for what s endured.  i love him and wish i could heal him.  i wish even more that i could have spared him the many traumas he endured, deprivation being only one of them.  i despise myself to the core for overestimating myself and my own abilities to cope.  

i am a horrible parent, one that doesn't deserve children and should never have adopted them.  My intentions were good.  i never set out to hurt them.  But i have.  And i hate myself for it daily.  i took two children who had been traumatized and added to their trauma.  In my inability to parent, i victimized them all over again.  The inward directed anger i feel settles here.  There's a place for me in hell that awaits, a place for those who mean well but act out evil.  After all, Hitler believed he was helping too.

It is with that background that i move forward in explaining my anger on the night Master wanted me to write about.  S was angry and his slightest irritation terrifies and, yes, infuriates me.  In his nine years in the Unites States, he has destroyed any semblance of sanity i had and any possible normalcy in my life.  i have spent so many hours, sometimes days on end, planning my own demise and, though fleetingly, envisioning his as well.  Evil.

i can't rationalize my adult experiences in comparison to those of a child, orphaned in a third world country, one who watched his father gunned down in cold blood in the streets, one who hid with his little brother under a bed in fear for his own life, one who was abandoned by other relatives and believes it was because he was bad, one who suffered atrocities that i am only now coming to know and many that i will likely never know.  What he experienced is beyond my imaginings.  His suffering as a small boy, while i understand it intellectually, will embed itself in my soul as it has in his.  i can hurt for him, and i do, but i can never fully comprehend the magnitude of his wounds.

So it is with great guilt that i go about describing my own wounds, seemingly inconsequential pittances next to his.  Since s has been my son, he has stripped a lamp of its shade and burned me with the bare light bulb.  He has lunged at my husband behind the wheel of our car and run us off the road, grabbing the wheel and gaining temporary control of the vehicle.  He has held a knife in his hand and threatened to kill me in my sleep.  He has hit and punched and kicked and bitten me.  One of his punches to j, ruptured j's eardrum.  He has grown from tiny and easily restrained to far larger and stronger than i am.  He has hurt people and destroyed property.

Today, when s gets angry, i don't think about that terrified little boy hiding his little brother under a bed, hungry and confused.  My own body reacts with automaticity.  My muscles tense and the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.  i tremble and play out scenarios in my head, sure that this will be the time it escalates too quickly for help to arrive, that this will be the day i die at his hands.  i grab a phone in my shaking hand, sometimes dialing the nine and the first one and waiting, just waiting for ample cause to finish the emergency call.

i hide in my room, not even a room for it has no actual walls or door.  i don't leave because leaving would mean crossing his path and i don't dare risk it.  i may need to use the bathroom.  i don't.  i may be hungry.  i stay where i am.  i just wait for the storm to pass or to escalate, wondering if this will be the final one, the one that kills me.

And no one understands this.  j says afterward that s stayed in physical control, shouting and cursing but doing little more than that.  This time.  It makes no difference to me any longer.  Any time s gets angry ---ANY time--- i am absolutely petrified of what route his anger will take and what will happen before it either subsides or he is again dragged off me, handcuffed, and taken to the hospital.  What state will i be in if he does get his hands on me again, now stronger than the last time?  Instead of just bruises, will i have broken bones?  Will i even be alive?

But no one wants to hear that i can't live with s.  They tell me how well he is doing.  How can we have him removed from the house for getting angry.  Everyone gets angry, don't they?  And they do.  i know this.  It's normal.  Yet very little about s or my learned response to him is normal.  

i made a promise to be his mother, to care for him, to love him unconditionally and always... i broke it.  i can't do any more.  i resent that he has taken nearly a decade of my life.  i hate him as much as i love him and sometimes more.  i fail to see that tiny traumatized child and see only the monstrous side of him.  And i hate myself for being able to do not better.

THAT is why i was angry the other night.