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The strangest thing is, for all the many, many, many moves, for all the thousands of miles traveled, for all the years in storage, within this disarrayed collection of my mother’s papers, letters and photographs I am going through, I found my mother’s and my senior high school pictures  — having been somehow brought together at some point in time so that they were stored as I found them this week — laying face to face.

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*1943 – Mildred Ann Cahill Lloyd – Senior High School Picture

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*Age 17 – Linda’s Senior High School Picture 1969

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I do not like the look of my mother’s eyes.  I do not like the look in my mother’s eyes.  Those readers who were exposed to the insanity of violent rage attacks against them by an adult when they were children no doubt KNOW that look that comes into the face of such an attacker.

I didn’t think about it when I was a child, but when I was 20 I took my young daughter and returned home to visit my family where they were living in Tucson at the time.  I won’t describe the details of what happened there right now, but I saw that look — again — come into my mother’s eyes and I was able to think to myself, “That woman looks like she is possessed.  She looks like a demon has taken over her body!”  The visit did not go well, and I and my daughter escaped.  I never again returned to my parents’ home.

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Mother Teresa’s Reaching Out in Love: Stories Told by Mother Teresa by Edward Le Joly and Jaya Chaliha, 1998 (page 66)

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I KNOW no child should ever look this sad.  Yet compared to other abused and neglected children, I had it good.

I grew up in a culture that 100%  supported what my mother did to me for 18 years.  I grew up in a culture that 100% supported my father’s enabling of my mother’s abuse of me.  How do I know this to be true?  Because nobody — ever — not one single solitary TIME – EVER looked into my eyes, saw my suffering, and so much as said a word.  Not once did anybody question.  Not once did they blink an eye.  Obviously they were in support!

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Click here to listen:

STEVIE NICKS “NIGHTBIRD” LIVE WITH LORI NICKS 1983

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Nightbird Lyrics

“…And when I call
Will you walk gently
Thru my shadow
The ones who sing at night
The ones who sing at night
The ones you dream of
The ones who walk away
Capes pulled around them tight
Cryin’ for the night
Cry for the nightbird tonite

And the darkened eyes
Thru the net of the lace
In the darkness
It’s hard to see her face
Pulls back the net
And you feel the touch
Of her fingers
And you see she turns the eyes
And you see the eyes of a nightbird
The ones you dream of
Finally the nightbird
Finally the nightbird
Tonite”

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This post is dedicated to the nightbirds, to every child who has ever cringed in terror, screamed through tortures, sobbed silently in the darkness of the night without anyone there to hear, to care, or to save them.  It is dedicated to all the adult nightbirds who suffer the same as grownups because of what happened to them THEN still happens to them NOW.

It is not singing for these nightbirds that we need to do, though.  We need to pay attention, look into their sorrow filled eyes, and DO SOMETHING to help them.

I have though long and hard about my next statement:  There are times when a child or children in a family cannot be loved by their parents.  These children, when abuse, violation, violence, and severe neglect is present, need to be permanently removed from their home of origin and placed into families where love is truly present, where safe and secure attachments can be formed, where damage done to these children can hopefully begin to be rectified, and where hope for a better life can be born.

Nobody can ever make anybody love anyone.  It is not humanly possible.  If a parent does not love a child it is because they cannot.  We, as a society, are 100% supportive participants in any abuse that happens to children if we refuse to face this fact and take action on behalf of unloved children.

Children are not objects.  They are not possessions.  Children do not belong to their parents as if they were.  Parents do not own their children.  In my book, children’s rights to get their basic needs met and their rights to be loved and cherished in a safe and securely attached environment completely outweigh the rights of any parent to abuse and neglect them.

That we have an incompetent and inadequate system to care for the needs of unloved children is the problem that needs to be addressed.  No child should ever have to suffer because of adult lack of preparedness.  It is every adult in a society that fails an abused, neglected and unloved child, not just the parents.

I can claim all I want to that I would not have forgone growing up with my siblings.  I can say in the end it was all O.K. with me because I was able to meet, greet and fall in love with the wilderness of our homestead.  At the same time I can see the truth.  It was no kind of childhood at all to be a little one who had only a cold stone snow shrouded distant and remote mountain peak that was the only source I had of comfort and connection.  I needed caring humans.  I needed to be loved.

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We can do nothing now about what happened to us when we were children.  We can try to learn how to parent our own offspring better.  We can try to help other children now.  We can learn as much as we can about what our deepest needs for love and attachment were as children, and still are.  I do not wish to leave the information contained in these links behind as I continue with my posting.  Please consider them for your study:

• *Attachment Simplified – Our Infant Attachment Systems Organize our Brain-Body-Mind-Self
• *Attachment Simplified – Secure Attachment (Organized)
• *Attachment Simplified – Organized Insecure Attachment – Avoidant-Dismissive
• *Attachment Simplified – Organized Insecure Attachment – Preoccupied-Ambivalent
• *Attachment Simplified – Disorganized Insecure Attachment – Disorganized-Disoriented
• *Attachment Simplified – Organized Secure Attachment – Earned Secure
• *Attachment Simplified – Attachments in Therapy
• *Attachment Simplified – The More Complicated Yet CRITICAL Information
• *Attachment Simplified – Still More Complicated Information Including ‘Feeling Felt’ and ‘Healing in Solitude’

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