For Children Who Were Broken...

For Children Who Were Broken

It is very hard to mend…

Our pain was rarely spoken

And we hid from the truth

And from the people who truly loved us.

People said they loved us,

But they didn’t act that way.

They broke our bodies, our heart

and stole our worth.

with the things that they would say.

We wanted them to love us,

We didn’t know what we did

To make them yell at us and hit us

And some days we wish that we weren’t alive,

They’d beat us up and scream at us

And blame us for their lives.

Then they’d hold us close inside

Their arms

And tell us confusing lies,

Of how they really loved us---

Even though it was OUR fault they hit us,

Our fault that they were mad.

When days were just beginning,

We sometimes prayed for them to just end right away,

And when the pain kept coming,

We learned to just pretend

That we were good

And so were they

And this was just one of those days.

Tomorrow we’d be friends

We had to believe it so,

We had nowhere else to go,

Each day that we pretended

We replaced reality with lies or dreams

Or angry schemes,

In search of our dignity and peace…

Until our lies

Got bigger than the truth and we had no one real to be

Our bodies were forsaken

With no safe place to hide,

We learned to stop hearing and feeling what they

Did to our outsides.

We tried to make them love us,

Till we hated ourselves instead,

And we couldn’t see a way out,

And we wished we were dead,

We scared ourselves by thinking that,

And scared ourselves to know,

That we were acting just like them, and might

ever be so.

To be half the size of a grown-up and trapped

inside their pain…

To every day, lose everything,

With no savior or refrain….

To wonder how it’s possible

That God could forget

The worthy child you knew you once were,

When you had not been damaged yet.

To figure out on your fingers that

The years till you’d be grown

Enough to leave the torment

And survive away from this hell that I am

imprisoned in

Were more than you could count to,

Or more than you could bear

Was the reality we lived in,

And we knew it wasn’t fair.

We who grew up broken are somewhat out of time,

Struggling to mend our childhood

When our peers are at their prime.

Where others find love and contentment,

We still often have to strive

To remember we are worthy,

Or that we are heroes just to be alive.

Some of us are healing,

Some are stealing.

Most are passing this on.

Some give their lives away to drugs

Or the promise of the like beyond.

Some still hide from society,

Some struggle to belong.

But all of us, all of us just wish

That the past would not hold on so long,

There’s a lot of digging down for us to still do.

To find a child within,

To love away the ugly pain

And feel innocence again,

There is forgiveness,

Worthy of angel’s wings

For remembering those at all,

Who abused our childhood?

And programmed us to always fail.

To seek, to understand them,

And how their pain became our own,

Is to risk the very ground we stand on,

To climb the mountain home.

The journey is not as lonely as in the past, it has

been

More of us are strong enough,

To let the growth begin.

But while we are trekking,

Up the mountain,

We need everything we’ve got to face the

adults we have become,

And all that we are not.

So when you see us weary from the day’s

internal climb,

When we find fault with our best efforts,

Or treat imperfection as a purposeful crime,

When you see our quick defenses,

Our efforts to control,

Our readiness to form a plan of unrealistic goals,

When we run into a conflict and fight to the

bitter end,

Remember…

We think that winning means,

We won’t be hurt again.

When we abandon OUR thoughts and feelings,

To be what we believe YOU want us to be,

Or look at the trouble we’re having and want to

blame it all on you…

When life calls for new beginnings, and we fear

they’re doomed to end,

Remember…

Wounded trust is like a wounded knee—

It is very hard to bend.

Please remember this when we are out of sorts,

Tell us the truth and be our friend.

For children who were broken,

We are very hard to mend.