Remembering the Children

In a report released on January 25 of this year, The National Center For Missing & Exploited Children has announced that missing children reports in 2001 declined to the lowest total in a decade. NCMEC President Ernie Allen stated, "After nearly twenty years of increases, this is a very hopeful sign." Click here: "The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children's Home Page"

Yet, 2,000 children are reported missing every day. Our children are our treasures and should be cherished and protected as such.

It is a sad fact of life these days that there are many times when parents wish to be with their children, they can't. The responsibilities of work, maintaining the home and the car take up many hours of an adult's life. It is often the child care workers in day care centers and in people's homes that get to see the first step, the loss of the first tooth. Some parents come home in time to tuck their kids into bed. They are missing a lot.

My Mom took care of a quite few kids while their parents were off to make a living. These parents loved their children very much and regretfully dropped them off each morning. But, there was a part of their home life that drifted over to our home that would often disturb me. We took one four-year-old boy to the park to play on the swings and to run around like a maniac. As we packed up the car to head home, he became very upset; he was almost in tears. We had tracked some sand into the car. He said his daddy would be very upset and found a little broom we had in the car and insisted on sweeping it out before we left. Only when the car passed a stringent inspection were we able to leave. We would see this kind of behavior in him frequently. When he should have been busy being a kid, he was already trying to be a grown-up.

Another little boy we took care from infancy until he was four. He had been born prematurely and had a heart monitor for a few months in the beginning. We handled him so carefully because he was so small and seemed so fragile. We were happy to discover he liked to play just like other babies. As time passed, we all grew more confident of his physical abilities and there was no doubt of his mental capabilities. When he was dropped off in the morning he would make a b-line for my door. I'd hear him pounding on it calling out "Jen-4, Jen-4, wake up!" Thus, my adopted nickname. When it was time to potty train him, he had quite a few words for us on the subject. When it was potty time, he'd say to my Mom "Just go watch your TV, Karen." He'd tell me, "Just go read your book!" When I took him on a small trampoline I had, I noticed he would jump with only one leg. When we took him outside we saw that he couldn't run well. His parents soon found out that he had Cerebral Palsy. His father was devastated. He'd wanted his son to be a football star. When it became apparent that that wasn't going to happen, his interest in this beautiful, bright boy diminished rapidly. And the boy knew it. He'd become clingy and wanted to be held constantly. When the family had to move away, we were deeply saddened.

Sometimes, when a family is in crisis, the adults can get so caught up in their own turmoil; the children end up suffering in silence. At six-years-old another golden-haired little boy had parents in the midst of a messy breakup. He was carted across the country will his mother tried to sort her life out. There is no doubt of the love both parents had for this child, but he bore the brunt of their problems. For the time that I knew him, he was offered no stability, no schooling and was shuttled from house to house. He loved to play with his Batman figures, but he had no kids to play with and he ate sporadically at best. The night he and his mother stayed at my house, he and his Mom curled up on the floor in a sleeping bag. She wrapped her arms tightly around him and they both slept. It wasn't long before I heard what apparently could be heard every night. He ground his teeth. It was so loud you could hear it throughout the house. He woke up and unpeeled his mother's arms from around him. When he
saw that I was awake, he came over and crawled into my bed on the couch. I held him as he went back to sleep. This time, no teeth grinding. His mother eventually took him back to Oklahoma. When the divorce case went before the judge, he removed custody from both parents. He now lives with his grandparents, goes to school and gets to be a kid, again.

Today, as I write this, a group of children have gone before a Milwaukee judge after beating a man to death. On the opposite end of the scale, we see the effects of parents missing in action. "It's Little Beirut," says a nineteen year old in the neighborhood. Two of the boy's parents didn't even show up in court. We can look further at the school system, police and the neighbors themselves if we want to affix blame. But, in the end, the youngest of those children shouldn't have been out there on their own. Where were their parents?

I see kids smacked in stores, I see kids on missing person fliers, and I see kids in horrible headlines. We all need to remember a very simple thing. Our children are our treasures and should be cherished and protected as such.

Jennifer Jordan