No Way Out

I'm the poverty you hear about.  The poverty you never really have to see.  I'm here, I'm alive, and I'm sorry to ruin your day.

Most of you woke up this morning, shuffled around the house and got ready for work.  I woke up this morning terrified.  Terrified that what I have, what I am won't be enough to get me through the day.  I would love to get ready to go out, but I can't.  I've been cast aside, thrown out, deemed unworthy of respect and honor by those around me.  The minute I was hurt everybody walked away. Here I sit, alone and scared.  Afraid all my efforts. desires and hopes will go unnoticed by those who could really help if they wanted.  Oh, wait, I'm asking too much.  So sorry...let me crawl back under the rock you've relegated.  I'll try not to bother you again.

My sin - I broke my neck.  I fell into a trench holding my then infant daughter, and snapped my neck at the C-3 vertebrae.  I heard it.  Snapping your neck is a distinctively sickening sound.  One that happens right between your ears.  You can't pretend it didn't happen.

My second sin - I got up and walked away.  It doesn't happen often. Ask Christopher Reeve, Superman.  Oh yeah, he's dead.  My point exactly.  I didn't know I was supposed to be dead or paralyzed from the neck down.  My then husband picked up our daughter, went into the house and shut off all the lights.  Not before, however, telling me to "get my fat-ass up, and quite making a spectacle of myself."  I was left alone to deal with a tragedy.  This is a theme that plays itself out far too often in life.  The minute we can no longer produce we become expendable.  We don't count, and no longer matter.  We become the problem of somebody else.  The problem with this line of reasoning is who exactly is the "someone else?"

My then husband picked up our daughter and went in the house.  The doctor's I saw dismissed me as hysterical.  My family too.  Sad, very, very sad.  When you fall down in life somebody should be there to give you hand and help you back up.  It doesn't happen as much as we might like to think, but it should.  We live in a society that shows us when we're down we should stay down.  Don't get back up.  Don't heal.  Cease to want or need because we can't see you.  We don't want to see you.  Seeing might make us have to change the way we do things, and we do things perfectly.  Right?  Wrong...

I fell.  I got hurt.  My circumstance changed, but I didn't.  I'm intelligent, creative, loving and compassionate.  I'm still the same, but I sinned.  I needed to check out for a while to recover.  I needed a time-out in a world not meant for them.  In Detroit there's a t-shirt that reads "Detroit. Where the weak are killed and eaten."  I suspect the creator understood far more than this saying would indicate.  Refusing to acknowledge the needs of another doesn't make a problem go away.  It makes it worse - much, much worse. 

I'm the poverty you hear about.  I fell and I got back up.  I won't stay down, not for anybody.  I have a choice.  What about those who don't?