On Abuse and Fallen Paladins
The unfortunate reality of child abuse is that it never stops. Even once the angry blows, the evil words, and harshly empty neglect are replaced by a newer and more loving environment, the crippling sting of the old wounds just continues to throb under the surface. Abused children grow up fast, and somewhat paradoxically never leave that hurt and scared little child behind.
If you’ve never seen child abuse first hand, please take a moment to be thankful of that fact. I’ve not been so fortunate, and while nothing ever measures up to even ten percent of what the abused feels, I can assure you that things are never pleasant for the witnesses either. You beat yourself up because you didn’t stop things sooner, because you didn’t read the warning signs, because you didn’t protect the innocent life that couldn’t protect itself.
One moment in my life is forever burned in my mind. It is one of the few things in life that genuinely makes me rage. An abusive mother tending to a two-year-old child in the next room. Angry terrible words that my mind shields me from remembering. The sound of a belt being whipped off of her pants in blind hate. The sound of leather on the cloth of the bedspread with enough force to break a small child’s fragile bones. I was on my feet immediately, my mother beside me, ready to right the wrong, ready to be the righteous paladin, ready to rescue the innocent and punish the wicked.
More than ten years later, you just sit back and wish it were different. God help you, you wish that you were two seconds slower to get up so that maybe she would have actually hit him right there in front of you. You dream of actually getting to hit that evil bitch and feeling that satisfying smack of idiot under your fists even though you’ve never been a violent person. In comparison to such terrible moments, everything else seems grey. Nothing else seems quite so evil. Real moments don’t have that easy contrast of black and white, good and evil. In that moment, there’s no concern for whether you’re motivated by a kind-hearted desire to save a child or a cold-blooded vengeance because in that terrible frozen moment they’re the same fucking thing.
And in the calm of moments many years removed, you remember your inner Buddha nature, that spark of God that we Christians refer to as the Holy Spirit. You can see the whole beautiful picture and why you shouldn’t hate anyone—least of all someone so ignorant as to perpetuate the abuse they suffered as a child. But the wounds always resurface in the abused, new crippling wounds brought about because of the layers of emotional scars, and it brings you right back to those monstrous guttural moments that stagger you even now. And you vow that you’ll never let it happen again to anyone else, an empty threat to empty air approximately an eternity too late to matter.
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