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I list the maladies that people talk to their therapists about. Being bullied, having parents who are never satisfied, feeling insecure, how one relationship descimated the soul.  Worse stuff: incest, physical abuse, alcoholism, drug use, rape....strands of thistle that wrap around each other until we are wearing our own crown of thorns. The pain keeps us from moving forward sometimes, or feeling inadequate, or being great at a relationship but terrible in career, or vice versa. So much of adult life is spent either letting the crown pinch harder or unwinding the strands and clearing the forehead. In any instance those times of childhood where our psyche is developing are dredged and examined. It's a clarifying and freeing process--been there, done that.

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But here I am, at that place again, where I am shamed by the luxury of shaping my person, cleaning off the thistly junk. Waking up cold and holding my arms as I dash across the house to up the heat, put on the kettle and get ready to go out and write. I worry about the chapter, the agent, the demands of the job, the performance. I also worry about who I am. Not in the insignificant ways of importance or status. Not in the more personal ways of family and tribe. But how I am built, inside.

I am not and have not been a child in this picture--not the child wrapped in the shroud lying by her sister; not the child crouched at the feet of the bodies. I am not the child who is blown to bits, burned up or fragmented, nor the one left after fathermotherbrothersauntsuncles have died. I am not the child who can't sleep because the earth is falling in or the one who feels the dirt inside her mouth is the only food or water she has had in three days. I am not the child who needs to rise from the dead and make the living accountable. 

How do these children manage their psyches? How do we in light of these massacres? I go in and out of a feeding frenzy where I read every word on information clearinghouse or look at every video on electronic intifada--then like a news bulimic I stop the binge, even if it's only momentarily. In the videos the wails are the most difficult to hear--the wounded and the involuntary soundtrack of burnedshotflaredsingeddecapitation, the grief struck and the emanations of disbelief, the wailing of the lost child or the one left. When i cannot bear the sounds any longer, i mute them and stare at the pictures--the weird oozy black inside out fragmented body parts--the soldier tapping the quiet ones to see if they are alive or dead, dead or alive.

I am picking through this debris of humanity for the one thing that will put it in frame for me, so i can say, look it's beyond what i know or have words for. 5 sisters, sons watching, men praying--women not seen. That's one of the images that will never leave me, that define this massacre for me. There are others, but i pick through bit by bit. 

But every time, no matter what the reason, mechanism or method, i go back to the children and try to see their experiences and witness their lives shaping. When someone wants to destroy you completely, how does the personality form?  When your identity is determined by politicians who are you then, how do you unwind your damage?

Imagine being brought up by sorrow.