I'll Probably Just Write About It.

Raising Monsters.

As mentioned before! This blog is for a sneak peek into the living and breathing insides of my work! If you would prefer to try to put pieces together and come to conclusions on your own, I will put the link to each of my pieces above each blog entry so you can read it and take it apart on your own, then you can come back here and compare what you have pulled from the piece vs. what I put into it! Here is the link for today's Poem(s). "Raising Monsters" 

         ~~~

I wrote "Raising Monsters" around the summer of 2024. For some backstory, I am the bio-child of licensed foster parents (hence the poem, "Storks Don't Bring Perfect Babies" , which I wrote around the same time as "Raising Monsters").
Not only this, but I am the second oldest of the bio-kids, and the third oldest kid overall. My parents have taken in 20+ children in the span of 7 years, adopting 5. I am the oldest girl of all of these kids.

Growing up, "Sissy" became my role, my responsibility, and my identity. It became a short-cut to "third parent". It was my life, my name, my everything. "Sissy" was who I was.

Around 2024, two of my previous foster brothers went home. They were reunited with their mom, yay! That is good! They were reunified and had been for several months before my mom told me something that one of them had just done (I will not give details). It made me feel a little sick. See, this boy is autistic, and he has Reactive Attachment Disorder. The boy was, and still is, fairly young, not quite in his teens, and he had done something I didn't even think him capable of. It scared me, as a psychology and trauma student with a fascination with "The Body Keeps The Score" and "The Anatomy Of Evil" (real book by the way, very fascinating). I saw his life, and I heard his actions, and I knew he was on the path to becoming the very thing that had hurt him in the first place.

It is safe to say my heart was broken.

Holding a "motherly" and "big-sister" type of role, it made me think about all of the kids that I had helped raise. How many of them would become like those who hurt them, and how many would find healing? How many of them would break the cycle, and how many would expand it? My heart hurt to know I had loved these kids, so many of them, and someday they may become the same kind of people that I hated their parents for being.

Therefore, I felt the need to write. I wanted to get this feeling, this experience, into words.

The poem can be broken down into bits of my experience. Saying "I’ve seen a thousand monsters growing" gives this feeling of masses, many. I added this detail to emphasize how overwhelming it can be to have children come in and out of your house in matters of days, weeks, or months. New kids coming and "old" ones leaving. Especially put in a nurturing role at a young age, when you are in a developmental stage needing security and stability, it seems like so much more than it is. The numbers.

I did not start with raising them, rather with them growing, as that is such a huge thing, seeing the growth they experience in the home, but then there is the hit in the gut with "Reaching for something undefined / Impure, inevitable. I watch, knowing, / They’re reaching for something predefined."
They are growing! I am watching them grow! But the growth that they make, much of it comes from this reach they make. They are reaching for something undefined. This is a turning point, in a sense. At this point in the poem, they are reaching out for something they don't know yet. It is undefined. But the problem is, a trained eye can watch, and see -or know- what it is they are actually reaching for, and that is, often, impure or broken, and seems to be the inevitable or predefined path they have been given, because of their brokenness. It is "predefined" because it is the most likely; it was "undefined" because, despite their experience, there is always a choice. No matter how hard ...Right?

The rest of the poem begins to wrestle with the idea of loving the predator they become if they walk that "predefined" path. It wrestles with the idea of a "childlike innocence / of a predestined evil spirit / might leave room for indifference". This section tackles the feeling of indifference to the "evil" one commits because of the childishness or innocence they once held. It plays with the feeling of loving a predator because of the reality that the thing that created the predator was innocence. They were once the prey themselves, and now have become the predator. When you sit with the idea of this (at least when I do), I get uncomfortable thinking about how we, as humans, fall prey to our own kind, and we prey on each other. It is sick. But compassion can do a lot with it and twist your understanding of a person so deeply that you don't know whether to hate them or to love them.