I came about as close to child abuse as I am every likely to come a few weeks ago. We were baking Christmas cookies with my husband’s soon to be ex-sister-in-law and her two year old was a little wildebeest all day. In fact, I’m pretty sure wildebeests are better behaved. He ran round the house, he messed with things he wasn’t supposed to mess with, he swung a bag of balls around until he beaned himself, he wanted everything until the moment he had it and then he wanted everything else. I was this close {} to locking the little bugger in the closet (which is the extent of my physical abuse.) I was so angry at the kid it didn’t matter that I knew why he was acting the way he was (father walked out, parents divorcing, Christmas) and it didn’t matter than he was only two, I wanted to kill him.

And I think that’s what most people think of as child abuse. Parental discipline that gets out of control and goes too far. My grandfather used to steal my mother’s and uncles’ saved money and go drinking and when he came home, he would wake them up to find it and when they couldn’t he would beat them for losing the money, but he was drunk and not in his right mind. Around the time ‘child abuse’ started being used as a term the show Emergency did a sub-plot dealing with a little boy with some very suspicious injuries. It turned out that the mother had inflicted the injuries, but she’d gotten a concussion in an accident that caused a change in her personality. In each of these cases we want to believe that child abuse is something that isn’t planned, isn’t malicious, isn’t something done by a sober adult.

Except that David’s mother did plan, was malicious and had to be sober part of the time. And David’s father stood by and watched helplessly.

About the time that episode of Emergency aired in 1975 David’s mother singled him out to torture. She would refuse to give him food for days (up to ten,) she made him sleep in the garage, she wouldn’t allow him to even eat the leftovers from dinner. And she planned tortures for him like making him lay in a slowly draining tub of cold water for hours and locking him in the bathroom with a mixture of bleach and ammonia. She also once stabbed him and refused to take him in for treatment. She was drunk when she stabbed him, but she wasn’t drunk for the entire time he was healing and when she stabbed him she was threatening him with the knife. Would you threaten your kid with a knife? I didn’t even want to threaten Alex with physical harm, I just wanted to lock him in a closet.

Did I mention that David was 7 when this started? Did I mention that David’s father kept promising to help him only to stand aside and watch when his mother forced David to eat his own vomit which she’d forced out of him as proof that he was stealing food because she wouldn’t feed him? Did I mention that David had four brothers who she didn’t treat this way?

This book is both an easy and shatteringly difficult read. Easy because it takes a very short time to read, I accomplished it in two days at work. If I had been home and uninterrupted I would have finished it in about 4 hours. Shatteringly difficult because it takes apart everything we would like to believe about child abuse. It is not only done by stupid people, David’s mother was a nurse before quitting to raise her family. Up until he started first grade she was a loving, involved mother. David’s father was a firefighter, saved people for a living, but wouldn’t save his own son from his wife. It is not always just an overestimation of force. Sure it was an accident when she stabbed him, but it was no accident when she beat him with a dog chain. And it isn’t always an altered state of consciousness. She drank and she drank a lot, but she took care of her other four boys and she wasn’t drunk constantly for five years.

That’s how long this continued. David was starting fifth grade when the school decided enough was enough. Too many things were funny, too many stories didn’t jibe. He was taken out of his parents home and placed in foster care. It’s with that story the book starts. I haven’t yet decided if that’s a good thing or not. It is nice to know, while reading the book, that the horror will end, but at the same time when you get to the end of the book it doesn’t feel like it’s ended without rereading the opening chapter of the book.

I recommend it with a caveat. Read it in the morning when you will not be seeing your children for hours. You may frighten them with your emotional response to the story of this poor little boy. And if you find yourself wondering why someone didn’t stop her sooner remember, ‘child abuse’ became an accepted term in 1973 and everyone associated it with Sybil, whose seriously crazy mother tortured her so much that she had 27 separate personalities. Teachers were not held responsible for reporting suspected child abuse until the 80’s, before then it was ‘discipline’ and you had no right to poke into a family’s private business like that. And when I was in college in the early 90’s I met up with a girl from the neighboring town who told me her brothers forbid her to date boys from my home town because they were known to beat their girlfriends and wives.* Up to and including one of my cousins whose wife got herself together while he was in jail (I have a really checkered family) and for all we know she beats him now. This stuff all still happens, accidentally and pathologically planned. It’s our responsibility to be aware of that little kid who always seems to have a black eye or a bruise in the shape of a hand on his arm and that husband or wife who seems afraid of their spouse.


*If you're curious go to http://www.brookfieldpd.org/radiocalls.html and you will find two domestic calls. One is labeled man beating woman in street, the other involves a man kicking out the windows of a cruiser after being arrested for violating a restraining order. The train trestle call is pretty funny if you need a lift after the other 2.


Recommended: Yes