The Wrong Kind of Children
The snow is falling, and the world has gone cold. A little boy sits in my living room watching Sesame Street and sucking his fingers while other little boys who look just like him sit inside detention centers all across this country. I sit by my phone, waiting for it to ring. I have been waiting since Tuesday, since she was born. Another baby in search of safety, another baby who will need so much more than her mother or this country is willing to provide. I wonder where she is and who is caring for her. I wonder if she is being fed or held. The little boy toddles over to me and hands me a plastic microphone. I sing into it and hand it back. Smiling, he echoes my notes, then wanders away. I wonder for a moment if anyone is singing to that little girl or any of the other disregarded children stuck inside jail cells or piles of I’ll-get-to-it-later paperwork, but I already know the answer.
Puppets sing “The Wheels on the Bus” in the background. It fits this morning that has followed a long and worrisome weekend. It fits this year that has followed a decade of chaos. The sadness and joy goes round and round, the cycle repeating itself every so often, reminding me that nothing ever really changes. But still, we hope for change; we plead for it to the tired ears of whoever happened to pick up the phone this time, some fresh-faced caseworker who has never had to care for the children who are forgotten while other calls get answered. Sometimes we plead into ears that listen, but whose hands are always tied putting out other fires. Someone is always waiting on someone else to get back to them. Someone else is always to blame for these children who fall into the gaping holes our government has left for them, but it never seems to be the person on the other end of the line.
The snow is picking up now on this frozen Monday, right alongside my nagging fear. No one can tell me if baby girl is safe, only that she has left the hospital, another child sent off into the wild, another child no one is legislated to love now that it’s breathing the frigid Midwestern air. To be the one who sees it all coming, to be the one who watches and waits and prays this time will be different, is a recurring nightmare. There is no village waiting to save her mother. There is no one praying for her safety or well-being once that baby arrives, not even me. I used up those prayers long ago. The only thing that supports her and her child now are black and white policies dictating what a CPS worker is to do once a report is filed. There are boxes to check and voicemails to leave and an order in which everything must be done. And on a Friday afternoon, folks are packing it up for the weekend, so best of luck to that baby and her mother when it’s time for discharge.
Over the years, I’ve struggled to know what to do with all of the frustration stitched up inside the child welfare system. I’ve tried to patch the cracks along the way, stretch my body out as far as it can go. I’ve watched others do the same, caseworkers and licensors, GALs and CPS staff, but mostly, it’s the foster moms, the grandmas or aunties or teachers or neighbors who break themselves apart to shore up a child’s crumbling foundation. These are always the ones who come running when the distress signal goes out.
As the hours tick by on this Monday morning, though, there is no one left to call. I’ve dialed every number I have to beg for someone, anyone, to protect this child. And this is just one child. There are so many children, too many children. But these must be the wrong kind of children; the politicians and tech-billionaires wouldn’t be screaming about falling birth rates and pushing Great Replacement propaganda if these children were of any value, these children who no one is willing to even pick up a phone for on a Friday afternoon to make sure they survive the weekend.
These people, who swear God’s will is for women’s wombs to stay full while her pocketbook empties, vote to drain money from the safety net that barely keeps these families afloat. They siphon from the Medicaid these children rely on for well-baby checks and ear infections, for the x-rays that find their broken bones when calls go unanswered too long. These “pro-lifers” threaten the nutrition programs that put formula and cereal into hungry bellies. They gut public education and protections for kids who enter school ten steps behind their own children, and they pay bonuses to the agents who stalk this wrong-kind-of-child on his way home from school. They rejoice as grant funding is stripped for the counselors who will be tasked with helping heal the trauma these children endure, counselors who are already too few. Their phones will go unanswered, too, because the waitlist to care for the children this country already has is far too long, but billionaires and politicians don’t tend to get caught up in the details.
They leave those details to people like me, people who wake in the night filled with worry for a baby no one is praying for now that she’s here. People who live in the details, who reorganize their bedrooms to put up a bassinet, rebuilding one tiny section of the safety net our government unravels faster than the people can patch it. People who gather sleepers and bottles and formula, then drop them at my doorstep, people who refuse to let another child be sacrificed to our collective bias and selfishness. People who pick up the phone again and again to see if someone on the other end will answer the call this time.
It is people, not politicians or their prayers or their bureaucratic systems, that will save America’s children. It is an average mom like me who will prioritize the safety of this one child on a snowy day in February, born in the dead middle of a country whose leaders swear to value the sanctity of life, so long as we promise to never hold them to it. It is a constituent like you who picks up your phone to finally demand that these politicians protect all of America’s children, who demand that little boys in blue bunny hats are returned home, little boys who look just like the little boy on my living room floor, children this country pushes aside, sweeps under the rug and out of sight, in order to make this place great again.
Ashley, Woman of a Certain Rage