Although everyone’s story of homelessness is different, the concept of “The Cart keeper” still felt like it needed to be written.
I am clearly not a poet but I wanted to write this, more than anything, because it opened my eyes to realize how much it means to my precious son to have someone in his life who cares.
You see me on the sidewalk
With bitter icy feet
You see me on the subway
In a hapless drunken stupor
You see me on the road
A working girl on a lonely beat
You see me in the city
With my cart, my house, all I own
Covered in dirt and strolling alone
Before your eyes is a mountain of clutter
But do you really see, do you really know
What it takes to live in the gutter?
A broken heart, an abandoned child
At birth they said, “Not worth-while”
No love from a mother, no, not even a dial
Just an inconvenient ugly record file
“Hopeless” and “pointless;” “just a big mess”
Nobody to believe I could be a success
Family tree unheard, unseen
Fostered out at seventeen
No next of kin to invite
No one in life to make things right
Forsaken, discarded, forlorn and disdained
The hope to be loved was a hope in vain
I kicked and I screamed at all who could hear
I lied and I stole to make the pain disappear
Selfish and wild I grew up to be
Wherever I go, I leave my debris
Twenty-two homes and no one could see
The sad, cursed truth: that I did not love me
Not wanted, not loved
How do you expect me to be more than what I know I am?
Untidy, unclean, the leper today
The broken black sheep gone far astray
The beggar, the bum, the waif at the door
Oh, what would it mean just to be human again?
Don’t misunderstand
I bury my wounds behind all that you heed
The booze, the drugs, the nervous obsessions
And the talking to trees
Somewhere in there is the real me
Pay attention, take note, buyer beware
My addictions come from living despair
They come from believing my life
Has no point on this earth
They come from lost hope to have any worth
The winter rain, the summer heat, it’s all mine to bare
And you look away, as if I’m not really here
But let me remind you that someone just needed to care
I really needed someone to just be there
Let me tell you again in case you’re unsure
It all comes from believing the lie
That is told in the unanswered cries
No one in life to reconcile
An abandon, hurt lonely child
With nobody there that’s who I became
Oh, who could I be if I had a name?
I want to encourage you to BE the someone who CARES in someone else’s life.
Read “You Have a Name” to understand my reference at the end.
Don’t. Ever. Stop. Caring. Never forget you are the difference between hope and hopelessness by caring.
Thousands of hours and millions of dollars year after year are spent researching the effects of abandonment. An observation was made in Europe on babies living in orphanages. The babies were not developing the way normal babies should develop (termed, “failure to thrive”). It was troubling to find that the babies were dangerously underweight, and some had appeared to even stop growing at times. There was no sign of brain damage, or disability, and their crude needs of food, water and diaper changes were taken care of in routine.
Perhaps, the most bone-chilling of all, was the silence. It’s normal for babies to cry and whine and fuss, or coo and babble. If you walked through any daycare in the United States, chances are, you’d find a number of babies crying and fussing. It’s what you’d expect to see. But a simple walk through the orphanages and it was like walking through a zombie zone. There could be 30 babies lined up in cribs, and no matter how hungry they were, or how dirty their diapers were, you would not hear a single sound from a single child.
Their need for basic survival would be taken care of: food, water and changing. What was missing?
The unconditional love that comes from someone who really truly cares for and loves them. When a baby typically cries, it means it is hoping to be comforted, held, loved, soothed, rocked, and of course, fed and changed. From the very beginning of our lives we cry with the hope in our hearts that we will be loved.
What had happened to these little babies? They were silent because they had given up any hope of ever being loved. Their little bodies were nearly self destructing because the unconditional love of a care taker was not there. There was no soothing, no rocking, no kisses, no hugs, no singing, holding, or even sweet-talking- nothing to build a foundation of trust, and nothing to say, “You are loved;” just food, water, and diaper changes. In not receiving even the basic need of love, these babies had lost all hope of ever being loved.
I wish I could say that it ends well for these babies. A shadowing threat lingers on each and every orphaned child. If nobody intervenes, these babies grow believing to the very core of who they are that they are unlovable.
Researchers continued to follow these “silent babies” into adulthood, and they discovered that the more unlovable the baby believed they were, the more self destructive they became. The babies whose bodies and minds developed enough to leave the orphanage at adulthood quickly fell into a life of drugs, gangs, prostitution, domestic violence, crime, prison and even death. This wasn’t something that happened all of a sudden once they reached adulthood; at the very beginning of their lives they had lost the simplest thing our hearts long for the most- hope of ever being loved, being lovable and having someone to trust. The hope to be loved, once lost, results in living a life as though barely alive at all. It’s inevitable that if we never experience love, we will never know how to give it away. We turn inward, trusting only ourselves, until we no longer care about anyone or anything.
We were born with a need to be loved, to be cared for, to have someone to trust and a need to love someone; anything less than what we were created for leaves us empty.
Author Anne Day 