"Which to Bury, Us or the Hatchet?"

A week ago today, I was down in Tacoma for a family reunion of sorts. One of the girls that I work with through New Horizons invited me to come to her little brother’s 3rd birthday party. I’ve mentioned her before – we’ve been working together for about a year and a half now, and, though she is still repulsed by the thought of “becoming square,” she has grown so much from the time when I met her weeping on the side of Pac. Hwy. in the middle of a January night. Her experience has been littered with trauma – but there is a certain resilience in her that fights to dream and to hope.

She had the courage about two years ago now to stand against the man who was pimping her and consistently abusing her – he was put in prison for 10 years, but she is currently trying to earn the right through the courts to go visit him. She and I have been through some crazy adventures in the courts – in emergency shelters in the middle of the night – in telephone conversations at all hours. More than once, I’ve thought I lost touch with her for good as she seems to experience more cell phone tragedies than any three people I know. It was she that went down to Children of the Night in February (for the – was it 5th – time?) and returned less than two weeks later, overwhelmed by the structure, accountability, and authority. I was still sending letters to her for a few weeks after she’d returned – unaware that it hadn’t worked out. Time after time, she’s enrolled in various schools and transitional housing programs. Time after time, we’ve both had high hopes . . . but it hasn’t been easy. I’ve learned so much from her about boundaries – about patience and faithfulness – about culture and other-ness. And over time, she’s come to mean so much to me.

On Easter, she and I went to church together in Tacoma. She’d gotten out of the hospital a week before, where she’d had a severe injury to her throat after a man she’d been involved with attempted to choke her to death. She has hard time in large groups of (square) people; I think she came mostly for me, because she knew how much it would mean to me. But she ended up loving the service – feeling like she was meant to be there, like the pastor was speaking just to her – like Jesus was tracking her down. Seriously. So, she kept going back. In fact, a few weeks later, the pastor did speak directly to her, and she felt like she belonged. She got involved in a community group and she made a friend there. She shared a bit of her story, and it turns out there’s a girl there who reaches out to girls working in strip clubs. They had a commonality, and they hit it off.

Not only that, but the church found out she is passionate about writing. They want her to write her story – they want to publish it. (Jaded as I am, I’m a bit nervous about the opportunities for exploitation that present themselves in that promise, but I’ll try to lay aside my occasionally bitter understanding of church evangelistic glory.) Further, she’s decided to enroll in a Work Source program funded through the government in which she gets paid to finish her diploma, begin vocational training in a particular job arena, and then work. She’s decided that she wants to be a Criminal Investigator. However, that decision isn’t recent – it’s one of the few things that has remained stable in her life nearly the entire time I’ve known her. She’s got a dream, and she will have it.

I love her. For me, meeting her family felt so right. I’ve spent some time with her mom, step-dad, and little brother before – but this was family from all over the state. Literally. I felt like I understood her so much more. And I felt like I got another snap-shot into an American sub-culture that is so foreign to me. They see my foreign-ness, and they accept me – and I felt the same sense of belonging that she must have felt at church that day. We had a dance party in the living room . . . even her grandma joined in.

And before I drove away, she said to me, “Hannah, remember how we met? Can you believe how far we’ve come – how close we’ve gotten? It seems like that was a different world. I’m unna miss you – be safe in Athens.” (That’s my translation – but I’d say it’s pretty accurate.)
She called me two days ago so excited. “Hannah, guess where I just came from?! I went to an appointment with a Christian counselor at my church. He even gave me homework! I thought you’d be excited!”

As I said, she loves to write. She gave me her 5 most recent poems before I left – I told her I shared one of her poems with some friends (it was a while back) before, and she was so proud. She wanted me to share again . . . this is her favorite of the five.

Which To Bury, Us Or The Hatchet?

How can I look at you
And tell you its OK
When I can’t tell my own self that?
It’s not something I can believe

The complexity of the situation
Is so much deeper than you thought
Its way more than just smoke and mirrors
Than abuse, masks, an dying

In the core of my emotions
In the center of it all
Lies the ruins of an abused child
Who is stuck in emotional turmoil

As the child grows older,
An adult she becomes
The outside looks bigger
But the inside never grew

The masks are what I wear to function
In this sick and twisted world
Where the little girl inside me
Feels no safety, no comfort, no protection

I wish I could get over it
I wish it would go away
But since the path I choose
Had a snowball effect on shaping
The reality I live in, I am forced to cope
I propose to you a question
One to which you might know the answer
For the sanity of my soul
Is hanging in the balance waiting . . .

Tell me, when all hope has been lost
And everyone you know has told you
You are unlovable, and acted towards you
As if that were the truth,
How do you function in a society that
Tells you to get over it?

How do you erase the scars of the past,
The pain of abuse, the never ending cycle of stories
That replay scenes similar to those in a horror movie
In your head over and over and over.

Yes they are stories, but they are true stories
That have been shifted and molded, time tested,
Ingrained, shaped and fashioned into current reality

If you think about it ideologically and
In a philosophical manner, those stories were
Memories, those memories were events that happened, those events shaped,
Molded and defined me into the current me

If I were to ‘get over it’ and
‘let it go’ with what would I replace ‘it’ with? And what
Is ‘it’ that I am replacing? What would become of the past,
If not a distant memory, than a blank page, how many years of blank pages does one need to have?

Would you erase, get over and let go of your whole life?
Allow for a blank page to become your new life and tear down the mask that defines you?

You must understand,
That does mean the old you dies . . . right?
No more excuses, compulsiveness,
Obsessiveness,
Co-dependence,
Mind games, and unforgiveness.

Would you? Could you? Let it all go?
For the sake of getting over ‘it’ or is ‘it’
So painful and hard to let go of that
You choose to live in your sick world
With your coping mechanisms
And behind your own mask so that you
Don’t have to face yourself and your stories?

- Steph

Lord Jesus, forgive us for telling people to just "get over" their pain - and expecting them to move on like the trauma never happened. Teach us to suffer long beside our sisters and brothers - teach us to mourn. And thank You that we can trust You to heal.