Reading
about children being separated from their families at U.S. borders, I
was stunned to learn that the U.S. was the only country in the United
Nations who had not ratified the Convention on the Rights of the
Child. This was noted by the spokesperson for the Office of the
United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Ravina Shamdasani,
when she was interviewed on that commission's criticism of the U.S.'s
recent actions.
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Other
articles told of the numbers of children already moved to Michigan
and Chicago where they were to be given to foster parents. The other
night, I saw network news coverage of a temporary holding building where,
for some reason, the faces of the children and their caregivers could
not be photographed.
The
United States maintained that there might be false claims of
parentage, that some adults were using children in order to gain
entrance into the U.S. I couldn't understand why DNA tests weren't
administered before a child was forcibly taken and admitted to a plan
for food, shelter, transportation, and foster care. An individual can
obtain a paternity test for about $70. At any rate, if the child was
taken by an adult that wasn't its parent, then the child is someone
else's, not the possession of the U.S.
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In
a country where children are afraid of sitting in schools because of
violence, and where abuse by foster parents is a real factor, this
all seems pretty atrocious.
The
United States probably has had the highest statistics for their own
children being separated from parents because of divorce and foster
care. Whatever the advantage of this contemporary shift, the fact of
separation remains. Perhaps people in the U.S. are in a routine of
callousness towards the feelings of children.
Children are separated
from parents when foster care is the decision. This seems premature
if a child was indeed kidnapped, and without looking for their real
parent or parents.
I
fail to understand why the U.S. does not work with other nations in
establishing the identities of people seeking entrance into the U.S.
Because those people lived somewhere else, it would seem that the
native nation should be involved.
My
book Tug of the Wishbone, set out to explore the longterm
affects of divorce for its protagonist and how they changed
perceptions about relationships and family life. An adult book, the
first chapters centered on specific events, skipping time from one
chapter to the next, until Maureen was a teenager. I did not want to
dwell on her childhood, but to give enough of it for an underpinning
to the main story.
In
one early chapter, Maureen refers to scenes of separation from her
father. Because I wanted to show how a child of divorce survives,
I didn't want to milk the trauma. This
was because of my own feelings about child characters in an adult
novel. I attempted to write her into the story as the character she
really was. The problems were adult so I chose to concentrate on the
active scenes with her family at the outset. The fact is, a younger
child has little power and is usually not the hinge of the family
scene, especially when larger issues reign. Such a child might not be
thinking of themselves. They don't know what to think.
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I
preferred a Dickens handling of the child in an adult novel. Although
I wrote from Maureen's point-of-view, I depicted the family and
neighborhood scenes in a dramatic way instead of a narrative way.
This fit with the idea of the novel, to show a child-of-divorce in
relationship. When Maureen thought like an adult, the book shifted
into her individual story with more of her interior. If there
was a lasting trauma from divorce, then I decided to explore how
that came out later on.
Life
goes on. The story of child separation is gripping and the scenes
important. The next problem is that children get past trauma and they
survive as they can. They won't be coddled because of a past
experience with agony, and they might deal with expectations that
cannot be tailored for them as individuals, especially with
displacement. Lucky children have parents who plan for them and
provide an undisputed home. Unlucky children have to be heroic, too
often, in order to be happy.
