A faithful family friend, Tia Dafne, was leaving for the hospital to bring home the mother and the new baby. Before she left, she walked into the bedroom where I sat arranging the baby's things. She took one last look at the second-hand cradle I'd just assembled and pushed against the wall. Its oaken slats were cushioned by clean ivory bumpers, and a clean teddy-bear sheet and a little stuffed bear awaited the arrival of the little one. The newly cleaned two-cabinet nightstand where we'd placed the donated clothes and diapers stood nearby. For the first time in my memory, that room felt clean and tranquil.
As I sat on the bed deciding which donated baby toys to keep, I watched pools of tears flood Tia Dafne's reddening eyes. "I look at this," she said in Spanish, "and I think of that new baby, so tender. And I think that nothing is going to change unless the mother changes. But she will not." She shook her head. "She will not."
I recognized Tia Dafne's feelings as my own. I saw stretching before me the years of neglect, derision, and sibling abuse that would almost certainly be this infant's life. He would grow up calcified and angry, like the others. But I could not cry like Tia Dafne. I was too tired.
I was too tired because I had spent three solid days feeding, clothing, and housing nine savage little children, savage because no one ever taught them to be otherwise. I was too tired because I had spent three solid days trying to bring order and sanitation to a rat's nest of a home, knowing that I had to do it while the mother was away or it would never be done and that it would all be undone the moment she came back. I was too tired because I had spent months worrying about how to solve a problem that has no solution, a conclusion that my perfectionist mind admits but has yet to accept.
I have never cried about this family. I have felt indigation toward the mother for raising children without love and without discipline; toward the father for drinking and dealing and hitting his children and getting himself deported again and again; toward both of them for bringing children into the world so utterly irresponsibly; toward the children for the unceasing stream of buffets and berating they give to one another, and for their wholely selfish existences; and toward myself because I cannot even keep the children from hitting and screaming for ten seconds, let alone help them obtain the great futures that I dream of for them. I don't know why I have never cried.
When the mother came home from the hospital with the baby yesterday, John and I were not there. We were sick with fevers and exhausted, and we had our own work to do. The mother called. We thought we'd hear thanks for the paragon of cleanliness and organization that was her apartment, and for taking charge of her nine children for three days when she herself had made no provisions for their care, apparently expecting the emotionally unstable 13-year-old to care for the other eight while she was gone.
Instead, she wanted to know where the socks were. We told her that since they had had about five thousand socks (I'm not exaggerating--it was three oversized garbage backs stuffed to the brim) whose presence had significantly impaired movement about the apartment, we had thrown away all the ones without matches. She got upset and said she was going to go check the dumpster to see if those orphan socks were still there.
We were somewhat traumatized by this, but not because she gave no thanks. We had not done it to get thanks. We simply could not have lived with ourselves if we had let her bring the baby home to the apartment as it was, filthy and crowded. We could not have lived with ourselves if we had left nine little children home alone for three days. This episode was upsetting because it cemented in my ever-hopeful husband's mind what he had not wanted to admit: the mother was mentally unstable. At the least, she has an obsessive-compulsive disorder. We hoped a clean home would be refreshing to her; instead, it was unsettling.
People can always change, but mental disorders compound the problem immeasurably. That means that the only real solution to the problem of this family is, for all intents and purposes, not available.
So we'll go on from day to day, one child at a time, doing what we can to put drops of affection and stability in the lives of these kids we love.
