Saving Noah

by Lucinda Berry

“He stopped being my son when he raped those girls.”

He was like curling up on the couch with a blanket and stepping into my favorite book.

I expected the girls’ parents to have a measure of understanding and compassion since Noah was a kid and wasn’t even at the age of consent himself.

I never imagined he’d be arrested. Kids didn’t get arrested unless they committed horrible crimes, and I didn’t view what he’d done as a crime.

I fell in love with him instantly, marveling at his perfection and that I’d grown him cell by cell in my body. My feelings stemmed from the deepest parts of me, parts I didn’t know existed until I had him. He wasn’t a stranger when they placed him in my arms. It was like a missing piece of myself had been returned.

If you did everything right and it still turned out wrong, then what was the point?

How was I going to leave him alone in a building of sex offenders with kids who’d probably committed far worse crimes than him? Would predators devour him at night and steal his last shred of innocence?

“Noah has made a great client. You know that. We talk about it all the time, but there haven’t been any battles. None. It’s almost been too easy. I’m wondering if we missed something.”

He had a hard time whenever he didn’t perform like he wanted. When he was young, he cried when he didn’t come in first and his tears morphed into anger as a teenager if he didn’t come in first place.

“They’re six years old.”

I didn’t want to touch him. Didn’t want to be in the same room. I bit back the screams in my throat, the ones that wanted to yell at him to get out of my house and give me my son back. I couldn’t connect with the confessed child molester in front of me

You couldn’t blindly lump Noah into categories and classifications. Every school, college, and job for the next ten years would know he was a sex offender. He’d done his time, gone to treatment, and followed through on everything they’d asked him to do, but he was still being punished.

Shut the f up. Your son is not a victim

Time had dragged. Nobody told me time slowed down with tragedy and how each minute became excruciating when it was painful to merely exist. Just when I was gaining my footing, something would remind me of it and send me into an emotional tailspin. Most of the time it was the little things, like a college admission packet in the mail, an email about ordering hot lunches for the next month, or lyrics to a song he liked. The grief would pummel me, and I had no choice except to succumb to it until it passed.