Current Voices…For Days That Are Not Ordinary
These are not ordinary days. The sun shines, the clock ticks, but children are crying for their mothers and fathers in buildings and tents on the border of the United States of America. And to shut them up, they are being given injections of drugs. Wow. My pediatricians never prescribed a medication without evaluating my child and thus our knowing how she might respond. And in the United States, some person who is probably not medically licensed, is shooting up kids.
Margareta Larsson writes in the LA TIMES: Over 50 years ago, when I was a 14-month-old -toddler, I was involuntarily separated from my parents. I was so young that I have no memories of those 11 days in a children’s hospital. But deep down I carry the ineradicable sadness of that experience to this day.
Larsson was hospitalized at time when it was common practice in Swedish hospitals to forbid parents from visiting their sick children. Caring for the physical was believed to be all that was necessary and staff were directed to ignore emotional needs. But the charting reveals the effects: on admittance, “Margareta was lively and active who can say just two words, mama and papa.” On discharge, it was charted: “markably reserved, distrustful and anxious.”
EYE SURGERY
I went through a similar, but not as frightening an experience, when at five I had eye surgery. I wrote about it in my post FIVE DAYS BLIND. Here is my description of how I felt being without my mother in a hospital AND I KNEW WHERE SHE WAS. The children at the U.S. border do not know where Mama and Papa are. They have been abandoned. Or their parents are in jail. Or they might be dead.
I lay in that hospital bed from Monday night through Sunday. Five full days. My mother had my brothers to care for… no child visitors were allowed. She came to visit me but could do so only during visiting hours. I learned to listen for her footsteps echoing down the marble hallway. Sometimes the footsteps would end up in my room and it wasn’t my mother, but Sister Frances who worked at the hospital. I remember she brought me a box of chocolates shaped like Dutch wooden shoes. I also remember that one day MY MOTHER COULDN’T COME.
Someone had to feed me. At night things were even worse. I had to sleep on my back and to make sure I didn’t move, they put sandbags on either side of my head and they put a cardboard cuff around each elbow so that I wouldn’t reach up during my sleep and mess with my bandages.
I got through this time in my life, but my memory of those days is as clear as any in my lifetime. Children don’t forget. The children at the border will have deep and lasting scars. They will be fearful, angry. If our government fears the formation of gangs, they are contributing to that every hour these children are away from love and soft voices, hugs and tender care.
ATTACHMENT THEORY
But within medicine, thank God, someone usually comes up with a theory that will further the understanding concerning how to care for children. John Bowlby and James Robertson are credited with advancements in this area. They brought about changes in the way children were cared for in hospitals and other institutions.
Bowlby was the scientist who developed classic theories about maternal separation. Robertson focused his research on separation of mother and child due to hospital admission. Between the two of them, they derived a classic theory about the phases of ‘protest’, ‘despair’ and ‘denial’ (Bowlby called this last stage ‘detachment’) through which small children pass when isolated from their mothers for a length of time. But I’m betting that the Department of Homeland Security does not give a damn about this research. I’ll go further–they have never even heard of it. Note: Margareta Larsson also mentions in her article a scream chart. When she accessed her records, the hospital staff had recoded “my crying and their routine administration of sleeping pills.” Sound familiar?
A FEW POSITIVES
Larsson does report that during this last week thousands of mental health professionals (again God bless them) sent the Trump administration a petition saying:“To pretend that separated children do not grow up with the shrapnel of this traumatic experience embedded in their minds is to disregard everything we know about child development, the brain and trauma.” YES YES. And Larsson pleads as I do: It is not the 1950s. We now know that separating children from parents causes irreparable damage and that the passage of time renders that trauma ALL THE MORE SEVERE. A moral urgency attends the task of reuniting detained children with their parents and ending this brazen and destructive assault on migrant families.
MORE ECHOES FROM THE PAST...
Josie Levey Martin of Santa Barbara was taken from her parents during WW II. She writes: ...I am the least resilient person among my friends. I have never trusted fully–not my parents while they were alive, nor significant others who had never given me cause for distrust. “Never again” has become an empty promise.
Gene Czap of LA was raise in a displaced persons camp after WW II. He writes: I suffered the terrible pain of not being able to be held or spoken to softly as only a mother could–a pain I carry to this day. Taking kids from their parents will affect them for the rest of their lives in ways we do not know.
LAST THOUGHTS
What are you doing during this crisis? I spoke to a father and his son in the grocery store, started a conversation. Ended up mentioning the children at the border and hugging the father. We need to reach out to one another. My husband and I spoke to two clergy at our church, protesting that during the Prayers of the Faithful, the children at the border were not mentioned. REALLY?
One other thought for today. I know some of you want to believe in fake news. Opinions are rampant. But look to your heart. And listen to what people have to say. I have to share this today. From the New York Times and Maureen Dowd. Yes, of course SHE would share this, but you, Reader, need to consider it…As a former top Trump administration official recently told me, “Donald Trump is the meanest man I’ve ever met.” Oh, I believe it. Thanks for reading.
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