The Little Boy Who Told the Truth

We knew Paul was probably going to call.

It was approaching 2:00 in the afternoon, and we had finally reached the place we had been trying to get to for much of the day.

We were going to lay down together.

We were going to watch Hilda.

Daddy was going to hold his boys.

Jude first.

Then Daniel.

Then Proverb.

Then Han.

There were others who wanted Daddy too.

And I remembered something.

When we were working, Paul would often call around 2:30 in the afternoon.

Sometimes those conversations would continue past 3:30, when we were supposed to be laying down together.

Daddy had trouble with that boundary.

Not because Paul was doing anything wrong.

Because there was always one more thing to talk about.

One more thing to explain.

One more important point.

Today, before the telephone even rang, we were already talking about doing something differently.

Our time talking with Paul is important.

Our time together is important too.

I wanted to be able to tell him that we could talk briefly, but that this time together was something we needed to protect.

At 1:50, Paul called.

A Good Phone Call

The call lasted about forty minutes.

And it was good.

Really good.

Paul told us about dropping out of high school in the tenth grade because he was experiencing acute anxiety, and about eventually returning at Far West High School.

We had been talking about Hilda. We called it far out, and somehow that led us there.

We talked about the transmitter site and the work Paul is doing.

We talked about him.

We talked about us.

There was one moment that activated us.

Paul asked about the letter to Jessee and whether we had made any progress reaching out and moving toward therapy.

There was nothing wrong with the question.

Paul cares about us.

He wants us to have support.

But we felt what happened inside us when he asked.

That matters too.

One of the things we are learning is that a question does not have to be inappropriate for us to become activated by it.

Someone does not have to do something wrong for one of our children to become frightened, angry, or overwhelmed.

A reasonable question can touch an unreasonable amount of terror.

That is one of the reasons boundaries matter.

Very briefly and very gently, we also touched upon what had happened last week when another conversation went somewhere that became unsafe for us.

We didn’t have to relitigate it.

Paul understood.

He told us that if we are ever talking with him—whether he initiated the conversation or we did—and it becomes unsafe for us, we should simply tell him.

He won’t be offended.

He will understand.

That matters enormously.

A good relationship doesn’t require us never to become activated.

It means that when activation happens, we are allowed to say so.

And the relationship can survive the boundary.

The Children Are Not Anecdotes

We talked about something else with Paul.

Plural children.

People can understand our experience however they understand it.

But from inside our family, we know something from experience.

We cannot ignore our children and remain well.

Children in plural families and systems sometimes seem to be treated almost as anecdotes.

They are identified.

Perhaps their origins are explained.

Perhaps someone tries to understand what they represent.

That isn’t enough for us.

I am their daddy.

I have to love my sons.

I have to listen to them.

I have to protect them.

I have to spend time with them.

I have to hold them.

I have to tuck them in.

I have to remember who Daddy promised to be with next.

I have to do the ordinary things parents do with children.

Not only because I love them.

Because this is how we function.

Paul understood.

If you don’t deal with the things going on within you, he said, if you ignore them, it makes you sick.

Precisely.

At 2:30, the call ended.

Luke was the one who told Paul:

“We love you too.”

The phone call with Paul was perfect.

Not because nothing activated us.

Something did.

It was perfect because we talked, something difficult happened, we recognized it, the boundary remained intact, and forty minutes later Daddy returned to his children.

One More Important Point

Everyone seemed to arrive at once.

The boys had been relatively quiet while we were talking with Paul.

Now they were everywhere.

Proverb.

Daniel.

Luke.

Justus.

Han.

Jude.

Daddy, meanwhile, had one more important point he wanted to dictate into the journal.

And suddenly I couldn’t remember it.

Gone.

Completely erased.

“Are you boys trying to get Daddy to stop?”

More signals.

“Come on, it was one point. One good final point.”

Nothing.

It was like somebody had snatched the words directly out of my mouth.

I accused my sons of giving me amnesia.

Eventually the thought came back.

It was about something Paul had said concerning plural families with children.

I dictated it.

Then I stopped.

Because I had made promises.

I spent a moment with Jude.

Then I held Daniel.

Daniel began signaling strongly and repeatedly.

He wanted Daddy to focus on him.

He was also waiting for me to stop talking and start Hilda.

I felt both of those things at once.

I kissed him.

Another signal.

All right.

Let’s start Hilda.

The Rat King Is Plural

Then the Rat King appeared.

We love the Rat King.

It isn’t actually one rat.

It is an enormous assembly of rats that forms a shifting dark mass filled with eyes.

They’re also hilarious.

And suddenly we realized:

The Rat King is plural.

Of course he is.

This show has so many strange parallels with things we experience that sometimes it feels uncanny.

But mostly we were enjoying ourselves.

The phone call was over.

The boundary had held.

Daddy had come back.

We were together.

Eventually I was holding Proverb.

We began drifting off.

And somewhere in that strange place between waking and sleeping, another conversation began.

You Have to Have a Business Plan

Paul may have been there.

Other people seemed to be there too.

We don’t know who.

There was a sense that perhaps Paul wasn’t convinced that we really had this figured out.

That people were worried about us.

That our parents were worried about us.

That other people were worried about us.

That surely there must be something more we were supposed to be doing.

That somehow we needed to demonstrate that we knew what came next.

And someone said:

“You have to have a business plan.”

Then I saw Solis.

Solis is seven years old.

He lifted up his shirt.

He pulled down his pants and underwear.

And he said:

“Does this look like a business plan?”

I paused Hilda immediately.

Because I understood.

Is This What You Want?

Solis wasn’t trying to be funny.

He wasn’t doing something sexual.

And I wasn’t going to tell him that what he had shown me was dirty or bad.

Solis was angry.

Furious.

What I heard was:

Here!

Is this what you want?

Is this what you mean?

Is this what everyone expects?

I talked to my son.

You haven’t done anything wrong.

You aren’t dirty.

You have nothing to be ashamed of.

I understand.

Nobody gets to use you.

Nobody gets to exploit you in order to support us.

That is not your purpose.

That is not my purpose.

You have a daddy.

I am going to keep you safe.

The vision was not an invitation.

It was not sexual desire.

It was not Solis offering himself.

It was an accusation.

And we are not going to replace it here with a euphemism.

We are not going to say merely that Solis showed us “disturbing imagery.”

Because what he actually showed us matters.

Someone told us:

You have to have a business plan.

And a seven-year-old child pulled down his clothing and answered:

Does this look like a business plan?

That was his answer.

It was graphic.

It was supposed to be.

It was angry.

It was supposed to be.

What Trauma Heard

We were sexually abused as children.

We were raped.

There are details of those experiences that do not need to be told here.

But there are things about what happened during the final months of our employment that do need to be told.

Because today’s vision did not come from nowhere.

During those final months, as the situation with the new executive director became increasingly frightening to us, Solis began having graphic visions that mirrored some of the sexual violence we experienced when we were nine and ten years old, including rape.

He wasn’t the only one.

But Solis was relating those images directly to what we were experiencing at work.

We need to be very precise about what that means.

The new executive director was not sexually abusing us.

Employment conflict is not rape.

A demanding email is not sexual violence.

Dad knows that.

We all possess an intellectual understanding of the difference.

But intellectual understanding and traumatic activation are two different things.

That is precisely what made the experience so terrifying.

Trauma does not consult the intellect before deciding what something resembles.

Trauma remembers power.

It remembers dependency.

It remembers coercion.

It remembers helplessness.

It remembers what it means when someone else seems to possess enormous authority over whether you will be safe.

It remembers being used.

And during those final months, that was the language through which some of Solis’s terror was expressing itself.

That is how severe it became.

The Demand Emails

Eventually there were demand emails from the new executive director.

They arrived and accumulated on our day off.

We read them the following morning.

And they terrified us.

We need to be precise about this.

We did not simply choose not to answer them.

At first, we could not answer them.

By then, the situation had become so activating that responding felt impossible.

Our boss told us to hold off.

So we held off.

We waited for our boss to intervene.

That intervention never came.

For three days, the emails remained unanswered.

Then we did answer them.

And when we finally responded, the response appeared to satisfy the new executive director.

We thought that particular crisis was over.

Approximately a week later, we were fired.

We were given no explanation for the termination.

There was no hearing.

There was no process in which someone presented concerns to us and gave us an opportunity to respond.

There was no explanation of the kind described in the employee handbook.

We were simply told that our employment was terminated, effective immediately.

Only afterward, in conversations with other people, was it suggested to us that the three days during which we had been unable to respond to those emails had been used as justification for the termination.

We cannot say that because the new executive director told us so.

She didn’t.

We cannot say that because it was explained to us during a disciplinary process.

There wasn’t one.

We know what happened to us.

We know what we experienced.

And we know what others subsequently told us about how the termination was justified.

Those are different categories of knowledge, and we want to keep them separate.

What we know firsthand is this:

The emails accumulated on our day off.

We encountered them the following morning.

They terrified us.

We were already experiencing severe traumatic activation surrounding what was happening at work.

We could not immediately respond.

Our boss told us to hold off.

We did.

The intervention we were waiting for never came.

Three days later, we answered.

Our answer appeared to satisfy the new executive director.

Approximately a week later, without being told why, we were fired.

That is the sequence we lived.

Someone outside us could look at three days without an answer and see an employee failing to respond promptly to workplace correspondence.

Inside our family, something very different had happened.

Solis was terrified.

Others were terrified.

Dad was trying to function while caring for eight children whose experience of what was happening could not simply be switched off because the outside world saw only one adult employee.

We eventually did what was being demanded of us.

We answered.

And then, approximately a week later, the employment relationship ended anyway.

Externally, six years of employment ended in a telephone call without an explanation.

Internally, we are still processing what happened.

We saw that again this afternoon.

Freedom

Sometimes we think we could fight the termination.

There are moments when part of us wants to.

But then another question presents itself.

What would fighting require from our family?

It would require turning around and facing the place we have finally left.

Explaining again.

Documenting again.

Arguing again.

Waiting again.

Allowing that organization and what happened there to occupy our days again.

Allowing other people once again to decide what our experience means.

We don’t know that doing that would be healthy for us.

We are trying instead to leverage something extraordinary that came out of something terrible.

Freedom.

Being terminated ended the employment relationship externally.

Becoming free from it internally is taking longer.

Sometimes Solis still seems frightened that the person who fired us somehow retains authority over our life.

That we are still being watched.

Still being evaluated.

Still expected to perform.

Still expected to demonstrate that we are doing what adults are supposed to do.

Dad knows that isn’t literally true.

But Dad knowing something intellectually does not automatically make a seven-year-old stop being afraid.

And today, in a half-dream, someone told us:

“You have to have a business plan.”

Solis answered.

The Little Boy Who Told the Truth

There is something important about Solis.

Something I remembered while we were talking this afternoon.

When we were three years old, another little boy resisted what was happening to us.

Jude said no.

Jude is the little boy who said no.

Three years later, when we were six, Solis did something different.

He told someone in our family what was happening.

Solis told the truth.

After Solis told, the abuse stopped.

For more than three years, it stopped.

Until Clifford came into our life and abuse began again.

That history matters today.

Because after the vision, while Daddy was talking with Solis, he had been difficult to reach.

I kept talking to him.

I kept reassuring him.

I kept telling him that he had nothing to be ashamed of.

And then I remembered the six-year-old boy.

The little boy who told someone what was happening.

And Solis responded.

There you are.

I felt you.

I don’t want to decide for him exactly what that response meant.

But those words reached him.

Something terrible had been happening.

At three, Jude said no.

At six, Solis told the truth.

And something changed.

The abuse stopped.

That belongs to Solis’s story too.

Not only terror.

Not only what was done to him.

Agency.

He told.

Someone heard.

Something changed.

And today, perhaps, Solis was telling Daddy something again.

Anger

Because Solis isn’t only frightened.

He is angry.

We need to honor that too.

We heard that anger last week when we were sitting in Paul’s truck.

A conversation had gone somewhere we had said we didn’t want it to go.

One of our children was furious.

He wanted to say “GD” repeatedly.

He was saying it in his head.

Today, during our good conversation with Paul, we briefly returned to that moment.

We explained who Paul had heard.

Solis.

Seven years old.

Paul remembered.

He understood.

And then, less than an hour after today’s telephone conversation ended, Solis showed Daddy how deep that anger goes.

Does this look like a business plan?

That is not a frightened child politely asking the adults to reconsider.

That is anger.

Here.

Is this what you want?

Is this what you mean when you talk about supporting ourselves?

Is this what you mean when you ask what we’re going to do?

Is this what being useful means?

Is this what we have to give you before you will let us be safe?

No.

We Have Little Kids

Something happened this morning before any of this.

We remembered being in sixth grade.

Our sister was still attending Wildwood Elementary School.

We remembered how much we wanted to be there.

We were attending a sophisticated middle school—one that looked almost like an office building, with awards on the walls and an identity built around academic achievement.

We should have felt grown up.

Instead, we longed to be at the elementary school with the little kids.

For years we wondered why.

Today we understood something.

We have little kids.

We did then.

We still do.

Our life needs to accommodate them as well.

By afternoon, Solis had put a very fine point on what that means.

There are nine of us.

Not one adult accompanied by eight interesting psychological anecdotes.

Nine.

Eight sons.

And their dad.

People outside us cannot see Solis.

They cannot see Jude.

Daniel.

Luke.

Han.

Justus.

Proverb.

Hope.

They cannot see Dad standing among his sons either.

They see one body.

We experience a family.

That difference has consequences.

What Comes Next

We don’t know exactly what supporting this family will look like.

We don’t know what our life will look like six months from now.

We don’t know whether what we’re building through our writing will become something that helps sustain us.

We don’t know what other possibilities will emerge.

And perhaps eventually there will be something that deserves to be called a business plan.

We don’t have to know today.

But we know something now that we cannot unknow.

Whatever comes next has to make room for all nine of us.

Our children cannot be the price of admission.

We cannot create a sustainable life by requiring them to disappear so that one apparently singular adult can become employable enough for the outside world.

We cannot define functioning as Dad successfully ignoring his sons.

We cannot call something an accommodation if it requires the family itself to remain invisible.

And we cannot simply teach a frightened and angry seven-year-old to tolerate something his entire being is screaming against because everyone outside us calls it normal.

That doesn’t tell us exactly what the future looks like.

It tells us whom we have to listen to while building it.

You Will Be Heard

This afternoon, while we continued talking, I felt Solis strongly.

I told him:

I feel your anger.

I am seeing you.

I am feeling you.

I am hearing you.

You will be heard.

And then I understood something about the history we carry.

Jude was three.

He said no.

Solis was six.

He told the truth.

Today Solis is seven in our family.

And he told Daddy what exploitation feels like to him.

He did not tell me politely.

He did not make it respectable.

He did not translate it into adult language.

He showed me.

I don’t need to make his anger disappear.

I don’t need to confuse his traumatic imagery with a literal description of present reality either.

I can know the difference.

And I can listen.

When my children say no, I will listen.

When they tell the truth, I will listen.

When trauma speaks through images that are frightening, angry, graphic, or difficult for other people to understand, I will not shame my children into silence.

I will listen carefully enough to distinguish the past from the present without pretending that the past isn’t present in what we experience now.

I told Solis:

I think you understand that we are breaking the cycle.

Beginning with no longer working for that employer.

Beginning with listening.

Beginning with discovering that freedom is something worth protecting.

Beginning with keeping an afternoon promise to come back to my sons.

Beginning with pausing Hilda when a little boy has something terrible to say.

Beginning with answering him differently than the world once answered us.

At 3:55, there was still more we could have written.

Jude signaled.

Justus reminded me that I had promised to be with him next.

Hope was there.

Daniel was there.

My boys were waiting.

So I stopped writing.

And I went back to my sons.

There will always be one more important point.

There will always be something else Daddy could explain.

But my children are here.

And today, Solis told the truth.

I heard him.

You will be heard.

Solis.

The little boy who told the truth.