“But, you’re making up for lost time, Martin. Rosie’s doing quite well. Lizie goes on and on about how happy the child is, how lovely she looks, what a good job you’re doing with her. She says it’s, actually, a delight to see that ’glow’ people refer to in pregnant women. Only in this case, it’s a child. It won’t be much longer before she delivers, will it? And, everybody’s betting on whether it’s a boy or girl. I guess you know the nursing home’s got a pool going. Those folks have a lot invested in the children. Instead of the money going to whoever guesses correctly, it’s going to you and Rosie—and the baby, of course. They plan to present it to you one Sunday during service . . . whenever you think the two of them are ready to attend. Does Rosie have a preference?”
“She may, but she doesn’t mention it. She knows how I feel. Whether it’s a boy or girl, we’re going to love it all the same. I think she’s quite right with that.”
“Have you heard anything lately from Rosie’s
mother? Does she give you any indication as to what she expects to happen after the infant’s born? How much time do you think she’s going to give you before she starts insisting the two return to her?”
“She says she expects to be at the hospital for the birth. She says Rosie will need her mother to be there. I, personally, don’t think it’s a good idea at all, but how can I keep her away. And, she says Marlon has already offered to help her carry all the things back to the house. All the things Rosie and I have prepared—the furniture, books, pictures . . . everything. She’s pretty much planned everything, but the attorney tells me, as you know, if my wife takes Rosie and baby, it will be very briefly. I myself am hoping that never comes to pass. It would be the worst thing that could happen to Rosie.”
“I believe you’re right.” agreed Martin’s pastor.
“The wheels of justice move slowly too often.” Martin’s pastor agreed.
“It doesn’t help any that Marlon is the real father. I fear for Rosie—having to go back, live under the same roof with him, even for the shortest time. But, I’ve followed your and our attorney’s advice: I’ve said absolutely nothing to Rosie about all that, except to say that she and the baby may, very briefly, have to go back with her mother. I feel it’s only fair to tell her something, not to wait till the last minute and spring it on her. My little girl started crying. She begged me not to make her go, as though I have any say in the matter. Other than that, we go about our daily lives as usual, enjoying the moments God gives us.”
“I’ll tell you what. There may be a thing or two we can do if she has to go back. I’ll speak to a couple of pastors I know in your wife’s town, let them know the circumstances, see if they can check up on Rosie and the baby, periodically. Maybe, even, take some other members of the churches along, make some visits in the house. The judge might, even, stipulate to such. You could talk to your counselor about it. At least, Rosie wouldn’t feel so abandoned and alone. Would that meet with your approval?”
Martin gratefully agreed with his pastor.
He watches his beloved daughter when she’s unaware. Maybe she’s washing the dishes or pulling weeds or visiting the residents at the nursing home. And, what he sees moving through space and time with him is a lovely and delicate, broken tea cup of great price . . . so much like those he’s seen resting on glass shelves in expensive gift shops with lights shining down. They sparkle and glisten in their cases under the lights, affordable to just a few, so easily toppled. And, that’s his Rosie. She’s mended, but how well? And, what will another break do? Only time can tell; time neither he nor Rosie can afford.
23
Maggie has long since believed child abuse causes changes, aberrations, if you will, to brain chemistry. Her reasoning has been: how else can such heinous social departures as cannibalism in humans and the phenomenon of serial killers occur? How else could a human being enjoy the taste of human flesh, especially when we consider that most animals—sharks and tigers and bears . . . oh my!—turn their noses up at human flesh.
She considers a certain African tribe who lived under the conviction that causing head trauma to their young made them smarter. If one lived with and acted out on that belief, it would stand to reason the more significant the blow, the more intelligent the child would grow.
{“Maggie could well conceive a cartoon with the child walking through life as loopy as a long-necked goose.”}
This is where experts in brain development and childhood trauma plug into Margaret Katherine O’Casey’s personal understandings, Meggie coming to her conclusions purely as a caring and concerned Christian observer of human nature, a person who has over the
years become acutely aware of behavior patterns and cause and effect, especially as they concern children and the adults who take care of them. Experts and professionals in children’s mental health express their views a bit differently from Meggie. Their research and practice led them to recognize that traumatic events in childhood change the biology of the brain.
Maggie’s reasoning was that living beings are greatly electrical . . . electricity conveyed via nerves, neurons, ganglia and this electricity is, somehow . . .
{“I did mention Margaret hadn’t excelled in the higher high school sciences, didn’t I?”}
. . . converted into chemicals and back, again. Since the brain is so much about nerves, neurons and ganglia, information conveyed by and converted into chemicals, then, it stands to reason that brain chemistry is what changes when huge assaults occur to a child. It is the same whether assaults are physical or mental. Maggie is, also, quite certain most ADD/ADHD is the result of alterations in brain chemistry.
While specialists’ ideas suggest an actual change in the shape and size of the brain—the “physical-ness”, Margaret’s theory has to do with the chemicals that feed the brain and wash the nerves. She sees hope in this in that chemistry can be altered, yet, again, and most carefully to effect positive changes, whereas the actual physical nature of the brain, in all possibility, could not. And, too, prevention—not letting the trauma occur in the first place—is the only acceptable answer to a frayed and frazzled executive function. Since she has witnessed drastic
changes in abused children, aberrations wrought upon normal chemistry are the only way she sees that those behavioral changes could be wrought—as with the use of electric or insulin shock.
“And, that, my dear child,” Maggie said to Carlie, “is how God brought you around to loving your husband, a man who desperately needed love, that desperation evidenced by his total lack of or the inability to give it to such a lovely and worthy human being as yourself.”
“Yes. I was, simply, a type of woman he didn’t know how to respect.” Carlie mused out loud. “That’s why it was such a travesty when my parents didn’t respect my instincts before the marriage took place.”
“Your brain had gone through a vicious onslaught of mononucleosis. The doctor told you he thought the infection had inflamed your brain. Viruses are greatly chemical . . . that’s practically all they are—a hodge-podge of chemicals that somehow . . .
{“I did mention Margaret hadn’t excelled in the higher high school sciences, didn’t I?”}
. . . have a brain of their own, a primitive, predacious brain that seeks and destroys, that can so craftily plug into a healthy normal cell, decimate its brain and take over normal activities, altering them to their will.”
{“Sounds like my worst nightmare . . .” Mr. Bill
wants you to know. “. . . like a science fiction horror story.”}
“All that man does,” Clarence inserted, “merely mirrors what God has already done. Think about it . . . picture the fierce and bloody act of one organism entering and taking over another, annihilating it to the point that it can’t think for itself. Those folks living under the effects of cancer or some other horrendous disease have a promontory view of that battle and the toxins p
roduced. The only reason we don’t remain in a state of perpetual fear and dread is that those organisms are too tiny to see and, in God’s awesome way, He has implanted within us the ability to fend off and heal. Sometimes, we need help—a doctor, his prescriptions, alternative medicine . . . all blessings from God to enable us to handle those deadly creatures.”
{“Nobody writes horror like God,” pronounces Mr. Bill.}
“That was all part and parcel of the ‘knowledge’ Satan promised Adam and Eve when he urged them to eat of the forbidden Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil,” Clarence continued to counsel. “You know . . . there was a very well-respected biologist named Linus Pauling who decided there’s really only one virus . . . only one virus that mutates, or to use a more politically correct term, adapts to the individual in whose body it finds itself. In other words—one virus that turns into cancer in one individual, herpes in another, depending on that organism’s particular strengths and weaknesses, his chemical makeup.”
Mr. Bill finds that just about the most remarkable thing he’s ever heard. He doesn’t go around proclaiming it to be fact, but he does think Mr. Pauling knew a bit more than he does on the subject.
“And, you know the yeast infection you’ve met on a personal basis that thrives in the moist, dark places of your private inner parts? That nasty, pesky, weepy, smelly creature that procreates so abundantly and survives all the doctors’ prescriptions . . .” Maggie couldn’t help weighing in on the subject. “As awful as it is, it may compete so successfully for your private places that it keeps other more deadly organisms from taking hold. One of our Lord’s unexpected blessings, the yin and yang of the matter . . . how God turns evil into good.
“What, exactly, made you open to Carey’s finger talk when other boys hadn’t moved you? What, exactly, made you love him? What, exactly, finally, made you detest him—all chemical. Happenstance triggered emotions within you which, in turn, activated chemicals—hormones. Do we really have control over the emergence of hormones? I doubt it, greatly. However, we are responsible for the way we act upon those urges . . . anyone passed God’s age of accountability is responsible for his and her own actions: not their mom or their pop or their Great-aunt Theo. To the best of my understanding, that’s around the age of eight . . . give or take a bit. A time of grace which Jehovah gives us . . . a time to develop and mature a functioning conscience.”
“And, too,” Carlie recalled, “Carey always smelled so good. All those months at college my math class followed a roomful of male students. It was winter; the
professor kept the windows shut. Those guys must have never showered or washed their clothes or changed the bed linens, ’cause the smell they left behind along with the headaches I was getting every morning was nearly more than I could take. I asked one of the other girls in my class if she noticed the peculiar odor. She said she didn’t, so I guess it was the mono making me so sensitive. Carey’d take a bath before leaving his mom and dad’s house to pick me up for a date. He smelled so wonderful
—Irish Spring, or something. And, his mom had a lady do their washing and ironing. Carey always had fresh, clean clothes on.”
*
Maggie’s observations and conclusions about altered brain chemistry took on an interesting aspect: she has long recognized most serial murderers to be Caucasian . . . a unique, questionable and puzzling achievement in the race.
{Mr. Bill puts it another way, “Nobody goes crazy like a white boy.” Only Mr. Bill could get away with that.}
She pondered in her little head, “Either there’s an inborn, innate proclivity in the white race toward that aberration or there’s a difference in the way Caucasian parents torment their young as compared to, say, the Japanese, the Black, Hispanic, Italian life-groups” . . . for she’s seen proof positive of torture in those groups, as well. “In spite of the best energies extended in those latter folks to have everyone believe there are no
distinctions between body types, physical examinations prove otherwise. If the skin types, muscle types vary from race to race, it stands to reason chemical and electrical differences exist as well.”
She really has no desire to prove one way or the other as to which would be the overruling factor although she suspects it’s got a lot to do with the “alone” quotient. She thinks that,
“While, say, black children are tortured, abused, tormented, neglected, there is some space left to them in which they can escape, at least for a while. These spaces are sex and the streets. Whereas, white children are greatly isolated; they have no escape except and unless they conceive of it in their minds. This mental escape for girls manifests itself in multiple personalities, ADD, perhaps a smidgeon of ADHD, and even bipolar personalities; in boys, serial murderers, ADHD with a small bit of bipolar.”
Graphically expressed, the brain fractures and splinters. And, how does that happen? Maggie’s theory would swing the balance in favor of electrical and chemical changes . . . changes that send a normal brain spinning off into altered orbits.”
What she knows as fact that must be addressed is that there are children who are facing extreme horrors alone and these horrors go on all day long, every day and throughout the night. And, while it’s true that children are amazingly resilient and flexible, it would be a huge mistake on adults’ part to take that God-given moment in time for granted, thinking they can afford any abuse at all.
Experts in children’s mental health and Maggie have come to somewhat similar conclusions. They’ve garnered many professional awards, been consulted on many high-profile occurrences such as the shootings at Columbine High School, the Oklahoma City bombing, the Branch Davidian siege. Margaret has the love of her husband, sons and friends. Clarence for many years told Maggie and their boys that good parenting isn’t learned in the university classroom; it doesn’t take a college diploma to parent well. It just takes the Holy Spirit’s wooing ways, God’s Presence, Christ’s words and examples and a receptive heart. That’s all.
The amazing thing that blows Mr. Bill’s mind is that God can make all the adjustments and tweaking necessary, even in a fractured mind.
{“Well, He is the Great Creator!”}
So, when Maggie told her Sunday School class she prays for serial killers, they gasped, wanting to know,
“Why would you pray for them?!”
She tells them, “It’s not so much that I pray for them—the adult—but for the baby they once were when they needed help so desperately and no one came. If anyone should understand, we ladies should, having been steeped in God’s Word, since Christ said it Himself . . . and we read the scriptures over and over. He said He did not come for the healthy, but for the sick. He said the well have no need of a doctor. And, so many of His miracles were in healing the sick. You, of all people, should know that God will do what He wills to do. If I pray for a killer,
no harm is done. God will place it to my account and, ultimately, do what He chooses to do so that His ways and means are fulfilled.
“Now, for some of you that’s going to sound like God is awfully willful and selfish. Haven’t you read?! He admits He is a jealous God. He makes no bones about it. No one and nothing is before Him.
“It’s like Ann Heche says in the movie with Harrison Ford: when the chips are down, she wants her man mean and armed. God can do ‘mean’ and He has a huge arsenal ready for deployment.”
*
A wonderful little, five-year-old girl came to Margaret’s Vacation Bible School. She had been chattering, interrupting the teacher so much that the lady asked Margaret if she’d take the child aside for a little while. The little girl had a huge skin graft on one hand. The hand, while useable, remained mostly quiet and less than serviceable. Meggie perceived that the hand was capable of doing more than the child permitted, probably out of fear to put it to the test after having been so imposed upon.
Margaret squatted before the g
irl seated in one of the small primary chairs, took the limp hand in hers and tenderly commented on the obvious,
“That was quite a burn.”
{“Maggie, also, believes putrescence must be upturned and exposed to the light for proper healing, be it physical or emotional.”}
She gently turned the hand over where the grafting continued.
The little girl said, “My mommy made me hold a cigarette.”
{“The truth is always a good place to start. Someone has begun the necessary remedial effort,” Mr. Bill deduced.}
Margaret, however, puzzled over the child’s explanation since the burn took up most of the hand on both sides. Either the event had occurred when she was much younger or the instrument had been much larger . . . not cigarette, at all. Margaret continued to speak quietly to the child, spoke about God’s desires for our lives, ending their short talk together saying,
“Jesus loves you.”
The little girl, suddenly, interjected with conviction,
“Jesus is dead.”
Maggie was stunned with the child’s lack of understanding as to Christ’s relationship to humans. As far as this little girl knew, Christ ended on the cross.
Margaret could only think to say, “No! He’s safe.
He’s safe.”
Camp Matigua: The Lost And Forgotten Page 13
