There was a story in the Milwaukee paper yesterday about a little boy who took an axe to his dad's head because his dad was beating up his mom. (Dad survived with a gash that was able to be stitched up.) I emailed it to a friend in Minneapolis who is a child abuse advocate, and she told me about a 10-year-old boy there who stabbed his dad to death with a kitchen knife. Neighbors heard him screaming to hurt him but not his mom and sibs.

It has made me think of the times I had to get between my parents, who were holding knives at each other's throats, the times I tried to call the cops on my dad for what he was doing to me but chickened out and hung up. It makes me unbearably sad, for those kids but for myself too. No wonder I'm such a freakin' wreck!

Last time I was inpatient (a few years ago), in one of our groups we had this worksheet to do that spelled out something or other and we had to pick a word we related to and talk about how we dealt with it. I picked pain, because I'm a cutter, and that's how I deal with anger. When I told the group about my parents taking knives to each other, everyone in the group AND the therapist gasped, loudly. I was stunned, because even at 30-something years old, it didn't occur to me that that was unusual or bad or weird. It's just the way it was.

I guess it's progress that now I'm able to see it for as warped and disordered as it was, but I wish recognizing that hadn't come at the expense of having to feel grief for two innocent little kids I don't even know.

(((((((((((hugs)))))))) for all of us here....

Candy