I'll make more...

One of my students is doing her practicum in an inner city drug abuse recovery clinic. Everything about the place is depressing: stark buildings, ill pregnant women, smoke-filled institutional green rooms. It's a ramshackle building sitting at the edge of a vacant lot. There are lots of vacant lots in this particular city--it's a place with a dying economy. 60% of the city inhabitants are dependent on public assistance.

All the women have lost parental rights to their children because of their drug abuse. Some have turned a blind eye while their children were abused. Others were so busy cruising for drugs that they neglected their children. Some were cooking meth in their kitchens while their babies crawled around on squallid floors littered with unsheathed, contaminated syringes and needles. Breathing fumes of meth gives almost all children some sort of respiratory problem.
Did you know that it takes between $50,000 - 100,000 to rehabilitate and clean the environment of a house that has been a meth lab? All the workers who do this work wear white space suits with gas masks. And yet the babies who are removed from these homes have no protection.

So my student was telling me today about her experiences down in the clinic with these women. The apathy is palpable: vacant eyes stare back from the gaunt faces of these women. Some are in their early 20s and have already had 3-4 children removed from them. There appears to be nothing for them to live for: relationships are unattainable. Family members have abandoned them. They are emotionally and socially isolated from all but their dealers.
The shocking thing is that some of these women still have to pay child support for the children whom they don't get to see or hear about any more. It is their debt to society to help support them.

When she heard that, my student drew back in surprise. "It doesn't seem fair that you don't even get to see your babies!" The 24-year old mother of four children standing before her said flatly, "It's all right. I'll make more." She was about to lose her five-month-old baby and that's just how it was to be.

"I'll make more." As if having another child would make her forget the four little ones whom she will never see again. These nameless, faceless "more" babies she mentioned were for the purpose of getting back at "The Man." Not for the sake of bringing little, precious lives into the world to cherish and nurture.

All throughout my 30s I yearned for children. Pretty hard to have during those years as a single woman. I wasn't a hippie, and my morals prevented me from procreating with someone other than a husband or using sperm from an anonymous donor.
One day at the hospital I was recovering a post-angiogram patient in the outpatient unit. He was dozing but had on his TV to a PBS channel. It was a program that followed a first-time mother through childbirth. I remember standing at the side of his bed, up by his pillow where I could get a good angle on the TV screen--watching the woman go into labor. And all through the "Push! Push!" I was fine. But when the baby's head crowned and the baby slipped out, I burst into tears. It was such a beautiful miracle and the woman was so thrilled to have a lovely child. I desperately wanted a husband and children. But life was not to be the way I had planned.

"I'll make more."

Because my own arms have been empty for so many years, the woman's words make me almost ill. I've been preoccupied with the horror of her attitude all day.

One day in Heaven, there will be many, many children there without parents. I am banking on the fact that the love of God will, over the eons of eternity, love these "more" children into the likeness of God Himself. For now, we can only try to be God's hands, feet, and heart to these little ones, and to the women who are so hurt that they can only think of their children as the currency of vengeance.