Remember Little Boy Lost? Over the last few months things have taken a turn for the worse. Fires were started,property was damaged, arrests were made. He is in third grade. And my thoughts turn to another, different little boy and his brother.
These brothers are my boy’s best friends. Their parents are divorced; they live with their dad and stepmother but
spend weekends, summers, and workdays when school is out at their mother’s house, up the street from me. Actually, it’s the grandmother’s house, and three generations of the family live there, including three adult children, and three grandchildren.
This week, Houston schools are on Spring Break. And every day, all day, these boys are at my house. They are delightful and boyish. They get along with all of the kids and just hang out with our family. I can tease and joke with them and they are good natured. But, it is unusual for them to be over quite so much, from breakfast to past dinner. They race home for lunch and return in minutes.
I learned that their mother left. One day after Christmas, she just disappeared, cut off her cell phone, and they haven’t heard from her since. One boy’s birthday is coming up, and my Mr P told me that his friend is just sure that his mom will come to his birthday party. He’s having it at the same place as last year, so she’ll be able to find it.
My heart breaks.
Being unwanted, unloved, uncared for, forgotten by everybody, I think that is a much greater hunger, a much greater poverty than the person who has nothing to eat. ~Mother Teresa
Why are these mothers abandoning their children? Why has it become normal for fathers and mothers to just pack up and leave the little ones behind? Why do we tolerate this?
A friend of ours has done the same thing. Met someone new. Had an affair. Divorced, started a new life. New wife, new kids – and the old ones just left behind, barely a phone call once a year. I knew him when his boy was just a little thing. He loved his son then. Now? I don’t know. He doesn’t act like it as the precious years of boyhood and adolescence and early manhood slip past.
Do these parents know what treasure they have given up, when they abandoned their children?
And once I started to really ponder, I realized that I know many, many parents who have just walked away. And suffered no consequence (aside from, perhaps, court mandated child support).
They are not shamed at work. Their dating life doesn’t really suffer. Friendships aren’t broken over the matter. There’s no ding on the credit report. There should be, you know. A big fat asterisk with the footnote, This person shirks responsibility and thinks only of himself. He sold out his own child. Get collateral.
When did we, as a people, decide this was okay?
This is not God’s way. This is not the path to happiness.
Can a mother forget the baby at her breast and have no compassion on the child she has borne? Though she may forget, I will not forget you! ~ Isaiah 49:15
A mother abandoning her nursling? Unthinkable. Except that it happens every day, to people we know and love, by people we know and love.
What can we do, as individuals and societies, to turn this tide of abandoned children? I am not being trite, but love is the answer.
I cannot fix the world. But I can love these boys. It’s not their mother’s love, but I will give them all I have.
Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty. ~ Mother Teresa
What can you do today to comfort the sorrowful, counsel the doubtful, love the unloved? What will you do to lift someone from the poverty of their loneliness?
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{ 13 comments… read them below or add one }
That’s a terrible story.
But great timing. This morning I was reading my Magnificat (a day late as usual) and the Isaiah verse you quoted was one of the readings of the day yesterday.
I am so sorry to hear about this poor little family being torn apart by these horrible events. Unfortunately, this example is something that takes place in every city, every town, and every nook where humanity exists. The best thing you can do is pray, lead by example, and help people wherever you can. You might be one of the only people in the lives of those kids who is a good example, and might make a positive impact on their lives.
For whatever reason, God has planned this outcome for this family. And although we don’t understand the reason, there is a purpose. For some reason, they were meant to have a disconnect in their family, and for some reason you were meant to be there to spend some amount of time intervening a little in their lives. Maybe that short time they spend being around you and their family will have a tremendous impact on their destinies, and could be something so spectacular none of us could ever imagine what it might be.
I have had people like this come in and out of my life. It breaks my heart to see children suffer, because they are so innocent and it seems so wrong and unfair that they must be subjected to the selfish and complacent choices made by their parents. But I believe that in the end God is just and good and will call the righteous to him to join him in His Heavenly Kingdom. Some people just have to get there in the not-so-conventional way, and some of course won’t make it at all.
Even though I know not everyone is going to Heaven, that doesn’t stop me from saying a prayer as often as I can remember that somehow, some way, God will see fit to save everyone and bring them all to live with him in Paradise.
I love your blog, by the way. It’s really wonderful!
Aw, Raine, thanks for the compliment.
Isn’t that what makes it so hard? I know their time in our life is so very brief. They flit in and soon they’ll flit out – we’ll move, or they will. I can only hope that things improve for them, but I’ll never know.
Unfortunately, this happens all too often and as one of those children, I know that it is something that you never totally get past, and I’m in my mid-40′s, a wife, mother, and grandmother. Except for the grace of God, I could be a total mess as a result. Thank God for His mercy and to have given me the power to forgive my dad. I also seen members of my own family (moms and dads) walk away from their children and years later try to recapture the relationship and feel sorry for themselves because their kids don’t really want anything to do with them. Thank you for taking the time with these boys. They need the stability that of your home.
Raine, God does not plan evil things. These situations are the fault of adult human beings making choices that were never part of God’s plans. God’s plan is to pick up the pieces and draw what good is possible from the situation.
Welcome back, Abbey. But I won’t publish comments that slam people with ad hominem attacks and discuss my reproductive capabilities, which aren’t any of your business. Feel free to rephrase and post again!
Sorry, I never intended to state that God planned evil things, I simply said that whatever the outcome is, it is in God’s plan for the outcome to be what it is. Because God has supreme power over everything, he would not allow something to happen that wasn’t meant to occur.
Awesome article. You can’t save the world but you can make a difference to those around you. My dh teases me about mothering kids whose homes are disfunctional, but I feel like they need a safe place with people who will love them even if they screw up. My mother had an open door policy for kids and young people and so will we.
My neighborhood is overrun with little kids who during the summer seem to roam about totally unsupervised, grubby (not regular kid grubby but filthy grubby), and just left to their own devices. Quite a few of them end up in my home for several hours at a time playing with my boys though I discourage my kids from bringing friends home. I’m not fond of other kids traipsing in and out of my home while I’m working out or trying to catch some rest on the couch. Call it selfishness.
I’m generally impatient with other people’s kids. I like my home quiet and clean as much as possible, but this post made me think that it is within my power to make my home available and open to kids who might not have a safer place to go during the day…at least a little more often. I don’t plan on opening a home for wayward kids or anything, lol.
I know what you mean about not being able to catch up or get things done. But, I’m not called to have a perfect house. I am called to love my neighbor.
Oh, this post hurt, but thank-you for loving those boys as best you can. You know we have our own such little boys in our lives. I do not understand some people’s parents.
My husband and his sisters could relate- their mother walked out the door when he was a baby. My husband next saw her when he was ten, for a short two week visit.
His father, after leaving the kids home alone night after night while he bar-hopped, finally shipped the kids to Grandma and Grandpa.
My husband is 48. Something changed in the sixties and seventies. When my grandfather was alive, he said that when he was a young parent in the forties and fifties a parent who abandoned his or her children could be charged with a *crime,* punishable by a jail sentence even if they abandoned them to another spouse.
I think we have over the last two, perhaps three generations, raised children with too few responsibilities- that ‘let them be kids, they’re only kids such a short time’ mentality, and they cannot keep on doing the right thing when it’s ‘too hard.’
It’s wonderful to see that someone is willing to care about these kids, and that you’re doing what you can for them. There are indeed far too many children that get left behind, and it will be much worse before anyone will do anything about it. I admire what you’re doing here, and I look forward to seeing much more from you.
What gets me is that my father did this to our family and now, 35 years later, thinks that we have some relationship. I saw him 2 times a year for my entire childhood for just a few days. Am I responsible for him when he is elderly just because he produced two children before abandoning them?
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