The past year had become crazy. I had to step away from the crazy of them and focus on my own family. My own five children. My youngest had been diagnosed with severe food allergies and it was all I could do to find anything that she could eat that wouldn’t make her sick. Between visits to the pediatrician, the Emergency Room, her allergist, etc., it felt like more than I could handle.
Then we had what I call, the literal week from hell.
In a span of one week, I spent four days in the Emergency Room, one in a delivery room, and one at the vet with a dying pet. I had had as much as I could possibly handle. The final straw was my youngest ending up in the ER for the second time that week. She had taken a serious fall into an anthill and split her head open. Badly. Tests, drugs, and 17 staples later, we were finally home.
For the next three weeks, she would not sleep in her own bed. She would wake up screaming in the middle of the night that the ants were all over her and to get them off.
By now, my niece was 14 months old.
And then the unthinkable happened.
It started with a hysterical phone call. She said that they had been fighting and he was higher than he’d ever been. Of course, she denied any drug use. She said he’d pushed her out of a moving truck and had taken off with my niece.
I did the only thing I knew to do; I called the police. I told them the story. I waited.
One of our friends was a police officer. When he saw my name, he came out to speak to me and help in any way that he could.
I was terrified. All I could think about was my niece; but in the back of my head, his words echoed,
“You are going to take her with you and take care of her until I ask you to bring her back. You will not call anyone, or tell anyone anything. You will not try and take her away from me. If you do, I will take your children away from you and kill them all.”
I waited and waited.
Finally, my brother called me. He said the police had been out. That the neighbors had called because of the fighting. The police didn’t do anything.
The next day, I received another phone call. This time, from his jail cell. He was asking me to go pick her up. Said he’d been taken to jail; and that my niece was at the apartment with her alone. He asked me to make the call. So I did.
I met the police at the apartment. I can still see it clearly in my head to this day.
There was no furniture.
There were no beautiful clothes that I had passed on.
There was no food.
There was nothing.
It was dark. There was human feces scattered around on the carpet because one of them refused to use a toilet. It was filthy. Disgusting.
My niece lay asleep on the carpet next to a bottle of curdled milk. Her dirty diaper was sagging. She didn’t even have a blanket. She was filthy. Her hair a mess. Her mom a mess, sobbing that she needed help.
Every stitch of everything they owned had been sold or given away.
The police officer put my niece in an infant car seat; too small for her. I watched, stunned, as her took her away to protective services. I turned around to her mother, and said, “Ok, when is the last time you had any food?”
We went to the store and loaded up on groceries for her for the next week. Next, we went to protective services where we were questioned over and over. I would go through fingerprinting, background checks, etc. Finally, hours later, I was able to see my niece.
I was taken into a room, where she was sitting in a high chair, void of any emotion. I picked her up, walked out, and took her home with me.
How do you comfort the uncomfortable? How do you fix the broken?
How does one help end the suffering?
Fourteen years later…and I’m still trying to figure it out.
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