Love Is the Sponge

Last week someone in my family got into a lot of trouble. I do not view it inappropriate to write about it because it made the front page of our local news paper. Surely my readership of a handful does not compare to the number of relatives, friends, and acquaintances who saw the story in the paper. I don't think it would be appropriate to write about anything else this week, although I am sickened by what has taken place, and I feel an oppressive sense of disgrace and sadness. I am not going to go into the details of what happened. It is not my intention to rehash what the BDN has already reported. 


I got a call from my Dad early Tuesday that we had some sad family news. He gave some information and suggested that I check out the article online, which I did a few hours later when my girls were napping. As I was searching  for the article, scanning the headlines, I noticed two other stories that caused me to feel intensely disturbed. One was about an infant who had been mauled by a dog, as its mother lay passed out, and the other about a mother who had been intentionally breaking the bones of her 20 day old baby. I can barely stand to type the words out as I sit here tonight. I chose not to read those articles in full, partly because there was another I needed to find first, and partly because I simply do not have the emotional disconnection necessary to read a story about child abuse and neglect so severe since becoming a mother myself.  


Merely reading those two headlines had nauseated my stomach and darkened my heart. By the time I found  the article I was searching for, the tears came easily.What I found out was that a family member, who has been teetering on the edge of stability for many years, had finally stumbled and fallen hard into a very dangerous abyss. Her face was pictured beneath the article. The image was at once, familiar and frightening. I saw eyes that were once a lively green, blank. The complexity and tragedy of the situation is largely lost in my vagueness here, and there is much that I am choosing to leave out. This picture is painted well enough in broad strokes- it is an incredibly painful one for many people.


I closed the laptop and went upstairs to where my six month old was sleeping, not frightened, not in pain, but sleeping peacefully. I scooped her up from her cradle and held her to my chest as I laid down on my bed and curled into a ball. She smelled milky and made little noises as she slept which comforted my queasy stomach and I felt thankful  that she was not awake to witness that she was taking care of me in that moment.  


Sometimes the pain of the world seems so overwhelming- mothers who abuse and neglect their helpless babies, loved ones who waste and disgrace their lives. I feel as though I need to hide from it, to close my eyes and hold my hands over my ears. Sometimes pain finds the cracks of our lives and seeps in slowly, pooling in the depressions of our hearts.  Other times tragedy is a flood that plows through our weakest levies. Laying there holding my own precious child, I realized that love is the sponge that soaks up the sadness. Loving my children, my fellow human beings, and even the disgraced among us is the only way we can, as individuals confront the suffering we encounter all around us. We must find ways to love, small and grand, each day, so that the sponge never gets too full to absorb the hurt of the world.


It may sound trite, but it helps me in times of despair to hold on to the notion that our own loving actions toward others will somehow make a difference in the vast interconnectedness of  humanity. I am not sure how I can act lovingly toward my family member right now in the midst of my feelings of fury, disbelief, and sadness towards her. But, as I called her mother, later that same day to offer a few words of support, on my way to work, a woman flagged me to the side of the road. She was missing front teeth, smoking a cigarette, her hair, greasy. "It's so hot today. Do you have some money for a drink?" She asked me. I decided not to  question how she bought the cigarette in her hand, and fished out a couple bucks and gave them to her saying, "Go get some water, it's really hot today," just as a voice said hello on the other end of the line. My spirit was elevated just a bit from having put a small token of love back out into the world. Maybe it will grow and grow into something that will one day truly help those people I read about in the paper that day.