Facedown in the grass

The last two days I have been in back to back mediations, which, while not especially unusual, has been more difficult than normal this week, because I seem to be feeling all the feelings more than I usually do these last few days.

The mediation today was tender in ways that I didn’t expect. With foster parents who were willing to take the time to sit down and talk to their foster child’s father about their love for his child and their hope for her future. With the father, who loves his child but recognizes he can’t be the parent she needs, being willing to not only give her up to these people who can be, but willing to tell the little girl that it’s okay for her to want to be with them and he will always love her.

And then I came back to the office, my hands full of files, and phones, and cups of water, and weighed down by computer bags, and purses, and lunches, and I see this doll lying facedown in the grass by the back door. And I just stopped. Because that doll represented so much more for me in that moment than just a dropped or discarded toy.

And I took the time to shuffle my things to one arm so that I could maneuver my phone to take this photo to remind me of what that doll represented in that moment.

It represented that little girl from today’s mediation, and all the things that she is feeling and has felt over the past 17 months she has been in our care. The abuse that brought her to us, the separation from her sister and two brothers, the abandonment by her mother as she went back and forth to jail over the past months, the getting to know a father she had never known because of the years he had spent in prison during her early life, her attachment to a loving family and desire to stay there but her guilt over leaving her family of birth. The thoughts and feelings and responsibilities that no 8 year old should ever have to feel.

And I thought how like that doll she was. Facedown in the grass, with no belongings of her own, left either intentionally or accidentally by the one who had at one point likely loved her very much. I wondered if the child who had dropped or thrown her down missed her. If they knew that she was lying in the grass, naked, probably now dirty, and subject to the rainy skies and the insects.

I went into the office to put my things down and go back and brush the doll off and bring it in to leave at the front desk. But as often happens, the second I walked through the door, people started telling me things and asking me questions. I finally made it to my office to drop off my things and to hook up my computer and to check in with my legal liaison and in the midst of all that activity, I forgot about the doll. Finally, about 20 minutes later, I remembered her and so I went back outside to pick her up, but she was gone.

It’s my hope that her owner came back to retrieve her, in relief that she was finally found. Or that one of my workers picked her up and brushed her off and put her in safekeeping until such time she returned home. I walked back into the building, and back to my office, with just a bit of sadness. That as important as that doll was in that first moment that I saw her, it took so little time for me to forget the image of her abandoned there in the grass.

And I prayed that the images of the broken and abandoned children I work with each day don’t leave my mind and my heart so easily.

That as long as I do this job it will always be my mission to return these broken and abandoned children to people who love them. And until that time, that no matter how many things I am carrying, or how many people need my time, that it will be my priority to pick them up, and clean off the dirt, and wipe away the grass and the ants, and make sure they have clean clothes and a bed of their own. And people to love and cherish them the way that they deserve to be loved and cherished. As precious children of a loving God. Who weeps as she looks down to see her precious babies in need, lying facedown in the grass, waiting for someone who cares to step in and save them.