Regina Louise - Someone Has Led This Child to Believe

Table of Contents

Also by Regina Louise

Somebodys Someone

Copyright 2018 by Regina Louise

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without express written permission from the publisher.

Illustration on page 38: subidubi/Shutterstock.com

Photo on page 97: Reeed/Shutterstock.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Louise, Regina, author.

Title: Someone has led this child to believe: a memoir / Regina Louise.

Description: Chicago: Bolden, [2018]

Identifiers: LCCN 2018017046 (print) | LCCN 2018019321 (ebook) | ISBN 9781572848153 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Louise, Regina. | Foster children--United States--Biography. | Abused children--United States--Biography.

Classification: LCC HV881 (ebook) | LCC HV881 .L64 2018 (print) | DDC 362.73/3092 [B] --dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018017046

First printing: July 2018

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 18 19 20 21 22

Bolden Books is an imprint of Agate Publishing. Agate books are available in bulk at discount prices. For more information, visit agatepublishing.com.

For my sister, Cynthie, and her son, Timothy, and his sister,

Sherry, and the innocence we all unwittingly lost.

For my mother, M.A.W., Ive never stopped thinking about you,

but I had to stop wanting you.

For my two brothers, wherever you may be.

Contents

Throughout my journey, I have met thousands of children and youth whore biding their childhoods away in out-of-home care, and foster care, wondering what will become of them and wanting to know how to traverse the course theyre on. From group homes to fictive kin homes, from transitional housing programs to emancipated young people with no place to land, these children are doing what they can to just get through another day. Some seem to thrive more than others, while there have been many whove felt they cant afford to dream beyond an inch of their breath.

This is the task of anyone who carries the burden of his or her own unworthiness: to learn to give ones own self merciful favor while standing in the blistering heat of a primal wound; to seek refuge within ones own heart; and to wipe someone elses fatalistic narrative of what their life will be from their conscious, hand it back to the disbeliever, and say: I believe this belongs to you.

Even now, I am sometimes impervious to the jab meant to silence, demean, or deny the connection I seek. I give too much, too quickly, turn the other cheek, habitually terrified Ill be rejected, once again, marked for being too big, or too mouthy, or just more than anyone will ever want anything to do with, want to be around.

Shes just too much.

I allow others to sidestep, push back, even obliterate my personal borders because Im afraid that if I stand up for myself, if I defend against the limiting beliefs of who or what I should be, given the gender, race, class, and unforeseen circumstances I was born into, then somehow, still, I will sabotage my efforts to fit in, to stay put, to belong to anyone willing to take a chance and associate with me.

She makes it so aint nobody wants to see her coming.

In this now life, the one where I am sometimes a lover, an on-and-off-again friend, a voice for the unclaimed, a fictive sister to more folks than I can keep count, I tend to be overly concerned that these alliances, too, will cast me off and out. Sometimes I hear that I am too therapized, and I imagine what is left unspoken is that my once being feral, and now rehabilitated, equals hypervigilance for the tiniest infractions. I have a high appreciation for keeping things just and evenhanded.

So, as if fueled by an unnatural impulse to gratify, I easily mete out yes when I mean to say no. I take up far too much space providing, allowing, and accepting, then backpedal the moment I sense I am vulnerable to rejection.

I charge trauma as the cause of these actions, the triumphant instigator that has no clemency for the destruction it detonates. Some traumas have the effect of deregulating the bodys natural defense mechanisms. Sometimes I:

Freeze when I should fight;

Run when I should freeze;

Stay when I should take flight.

Trauma and its co-conspiratorsshock, denial, shame, anxiety, anger, hopelessness, the inability to cope with daily life, and (the granddaddy of them all) post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) join forces to prevent our God-given personalities to come into their own. Much is required to stay stuck, frozen in a state of brokenness that demands a certain tending to, a sacrificing that gives nothing back but more of the same emptiness and inability to live this one life to its fullest. It begs for our complete devastation, trauma does, at times, and in many cases, takes nothing less. This is how abandonment lives in me.

Its in relationships where we get wounded, Gina, and it is in relationships where we get healed, my therapist, Lainey, told me back in 1998 while I sat in her cozy San Francisco corner office. The J Church streetcar clanged its bell at half past six, switching tracks, changing lanes, consistently signaling my time was nearly up. I wore anxiety the way a monk wears a robe. Devotedly.

Id shelled out $120 for fifty minutes of talk therapy; I frantically chewed up our time together hoping to save, retrieve, or gather up what was left of my raggedy sense of self. Nearly two decades past emancipation from foster care, I was still confounded by the weight I carried, the baggage of feeling unwanted, unavailableto myself. My emotional malaise had a choke hold on the little bit of hope I was suddenly dying to hold on to. Although, at that time, I had no idea what constituted a self, something inside of me consistently rerouted my desire for self-destruction. No, not this time, a voice would say, hang on, because God never gives you more than you can handle. I wished I couldve paid God to trade places with me.

Back in that roomwhere I now imagine the dcor was designed to promote a stable sense of interior experienceeverything from dolls as diversified as the United Nations, to animated figurines, sand trays, and Laineys easy chair were all situated neatly, alongside perfectly shelved books to guide her quest to untangle dysfunctional worldviews. The well-worn sofa held me like I wished my daddy would have, the cushions worn threadbare, all velvety and warm. I burrowed down and in, my feet planted firmly on the ground in front of me. My hands rested on my thighs palm-side up, and only the Lord knew that Id come begging for a blessing that day, something to make it feel like mine was a life worth living. Saving.