For Children Who Are Broken                   For Children who are broken, it is very hard to mend....... Our pain was rarely spoken and we hid the truth from friends.                  Our parents said they loved us, but they did not act that way. They broke our hearts and stole our worth, with the things that they would say.              We wanted them to love us. We did not know what we did, to make them yell at us and hit us, and wish we were not their kids.                          They could beat us up and scream at us and blame us for their lives. Then they would hold us close inside their arms and tell us confusing lies -- even though We were BAD, and how it was OUR fault they hit us,                              OUR fault that they were mad. When days were just beginning, we sometimes prayed for them to end, and when the pain kept coming, we learned to just pretend, that we were good and so were they and this was just one of those days.... tomorrow we could be friends. We had to believe it so. We had nowhere else to go.        Each day that we pretended, we replaced reality with lies or dreams, or angry schemes, in search of dignity.... until our lies got bigger than the truth,            and we had no one real to be. Our bodies were forsaken. With no safe place to hide, we learned to stop hearing and feeling, what they did to our insides.                 We tried to make them love us, till we hated ourselves instead, and could not see a way out, and wished that they were dead.                  We scared ourselves by thinking that, and scared ourselves to know, that we were acting just like them--- and might ever more be so.   To be half the size of a grown-up and trapped inside their pain.... To everyday lose everything, with no saviour or refrain.... To wonder how it is possible that God could so forget the worthy child you knew you were, when you had not been damaged yet..   To figure on your fingers of the years till you would be grown enough to leave the torment and survive away from home, were more than you could count to, or more than you could bear, was the reality we lived in and we knew it wasn't fair.   We who grew up broken are somewhat out of time, struggling to mend our chilhood, when our peers are in their prime.   Where others find love and contentment, we still often have to strive to remember we are worthy, and heroes just to be alive.                          Some of us are healing, some are just not dealing. Some are passing the anger on. Some give their lives away to drugs, on the promise of life beyond.           Some still hide from society. Some still struggle to belong. But all of us are wishing, the past would not hold on.... so long.                          There is a lot of digging down to do to find the child within, to love away the ugly pain and feel innocence again.                          There is forgiveness worthy of Angels wings, for remembering those at all, who abused our sacred childhood and programmed us to fall.                          To seek to understand them, and how their pain became our own, is to risk the ground we stand on to climb the mountain home.                    The journey is not so lonely as in the past it has been.... More of us are strong enough to let the growth begin.                    But while we were trekking up the mountain, we need everything we have got, to face the adults we have become, and all that we are not.