Love Canal

I was once at a kids' basketball game, and a mother sat in a lawn chair near me on the sidelines. My kids are not particularly into sports, except for one who adores softball, and so the basketball game was more for the sake of exercise. Afterall, my child at the time was all of 5. He couldn't dribble. He couldn't do a lay-up. He could maybe get the ball from point A to point B without dropping it and it rolling away. And that was great. Except this mother . . . she screamed at her son the whole time. "You loser." "You better get that ball, you lazy bum." SCREAMING at the top of her lungs. I sat there and wondered if I could call the police for emotional abuse, but I was already working in the foster care system and knew, frankly, the police had more to worry about than a toxic mom. They wouldn't DO anything. And it was my little angel, my darling girl, who was four, who came up to me and said, "How can that mother expect her son to have any self-esteem if she screams at him like that?" Before anyone wonders about the truth of this story, my kids have really high vocabularies, so yes, she was that young, and yes, she had that line of thinking. And the mother heard. And it shut her up. But I knew it wasn't over for poor little Bradley on the baseketball court. He had to go home with the mother equivalent of Love Canal.

You see, there is overt evil in life. There are people who ooze evil. There are gang members wearing their colors, murderers carrying weapons, people you might cross to the other side of the street when you see them. Our prisons are full and overcrowded. You don't have to look far to find darkness.

But there's another kind of darkness--and it's what I am striving for in my work in progress. It's Love Canal. It seeps out underground, over time. No one can see it, smell it, or taste it in the water, but it's there like a cancer. In alcoholic homes, for instance, often the family pulls together in an effort to make it appear, from the outside, that they are "perfect" when in fact every night after work, Dad drinks himself into oblivion and then gets nasty. There are millions of girls and boys across the globe being sexually abused, but putting up the front that they are okay, even as the damage is hurting their soul day by awful day. There are whole churches that have hid sexual scandals, schools that somehow have let predators into the classroom. That's the evil I am exploring right now. In my book, it's the mother who has torn apart her daughter every day until the poor girl can't believe she's worth anything. But the mother is on magazine covers. She's respected in her field.

Love Canal . . . .

Thoughts?