duality

Sometimes I imagine that life at the shelter is like one of those sitcoms or Disney Channel movies where there’s an alternate universe, a mirror image of the real world. The hero gets trapped in the mirror world, but eventually they escape back into their own reality, newly appreciative of the family and friends they’d taken for granted.

In this world, the real world, Fran is a sweet, pretty woman in love with her baby and her boyfriend. She likes practicing her English and has been known to sweet-talk me into watching action movies with her. She laughs at everything – fart jokes, Blue’s pursed lips and wiggling legs, the way her shirt is instantly soaked in breast milk whenever she hears a crying baby. She cradles Blue’s furry head in her hand and brings him close to kiss, kiss, kiss his squashy face.

Sally is a silly teenager with a penchant for pulling faces. She calls Pippi “sister” and scolds her incessantly for real and imagined offenses, from skipping a shower to having a visible bra strap. She brings us presents, mostly absurd quantities of things she’s nicked from the kitchen – a gallon of homemade dishwashing soap, a bag of cane sugar as heavy as a toddler. She sets aside food for us when we’re late to meals. She asks Pippi for candy and ice cream whenever Pippi comes back from the city, and Pippi almost always has something for her. She’s a good kid.

The kids are imps and scoundrels who enjoy rubbing their jam-covered, sand-caked hands all over my face, hair and last clean shirt. They sit on my knee and twine both their legs around one of mine, distractedly pressing their toes into my calf. The boys climb into my lap like big spiky-haired kittens, pulling my hands to their mouths to kiss and sometimes bite. The two-year-old girls, Duckie and Polly, are inseparable and always up to something, whether they’re flinging themselves off the table or demanding to be picked up and dangled backward.

In the other world, the dark mirror world, things are different.

In that world, Fran is a Burmese refugee without papers, naively trusting in the good heart of some douchebag tourist who won’t give her his phone number and usually doesn’t respond to her emails. Due to some complicated red tape, her baby can’t receive Thai citizenship unless the father confirms his own identity and nationality, which he most likely won’t, because that would create an irreversible link between himself and his child and he’d much rather disappear back into his comfortable European life. So Fran and Blue will be like so many other families here: undocumented, constantly afraid of being discovered and deported.

In that world, Sally was raped when she was thirteen. When her family discovered that she was pregnant, they threw her out, and she lived in the forest outside her village for several days before she was discovered by a teacher and sent to the shelter. She doesn’t want her baby, even hates it on some level. She was sent to the hospital with labor pains a couple days ago. Pippi went with her and witnessed Sally completely losing it, moaning and sobbing for hours, ripping at her hair. “I want to go home,” she begged, over and over again, in the few words of Thai that she and Pippi both know. “Sister, please, I want to go home.” She refused to let the doctors examine her and tried desperately to hold her hospital gown closed over her breasts. Pippi was temporarily kicked out of the room, and Sally stood next to the bed, facing down the doctors and nurses like a wild animal backed into a corner, screaming for Pippi and then, horribly, her mother.

In that world, the kids have been pulled from abusive homes, the slums, the gutter. Some of them live in fear of their mothers’ infrequent but furious beatings. Little Duckie’s mother disappeared a few months ago. She calls sometimes, promising to come back for Duckie but saying she doesn’t have the money yet. If she doesn’t come back, Duckie will probably have to go to an orphanage. You can’t blame her mother too much; like Sally, she got pregnant at just thirteen.

So there you have it: both sides of the coin. They’re both true, of course, but you knew that already. There is no mirror world, no dark reflection of a gentle and carefree reality. Life here and everywhere is funny and sad and bleak and heartbreaking and bright, all at once. These kids aren’t the worm-swollen toddlers you see on the news, defined by their misery and need, and the women aren’t the hollow-eyed rape victims you see in photo essays in Newsweek, utterly destroyed by the hand that life has dealt them. Those images are symbols of tragedy, and they tell a story that makes you hurt and then encourages you to forget, to push away that awful pain, because otherwise the weight of it all would be intolerable. In the end, you do nothing, because it’s all too much. You can’t fix every country’s government. You can’t convince all the warring factions to lay down their arms and go back to their families. You can’t adopt each and every starving orphan, and even if you could, they’re probably too damaged to ever live normal lives. You can’t save the world, and there are some things you can never change.

I’m here to tell you that is bullshit. I didn’t write about those stupid “two worlds” as a kind of Very Special Episode, an exposé about the dark side of life at a women’s shelter. I was trying, in my ham-handed way, to show you that there is always a spark of joy, even in the midst of horror. There is always laughter. There is always hope.

You can’t do everything, but you can do something. Volunteer somewhere, anywhere. Look up the wish list of a local women’s shelter and consider donating a couple items, maybe something you’ve already got that’s been collecting dust in a cupboard. Learn about what’s going on in the world – even just one country, even just one town. Do your research. Write your senator. Run for senator. Raise money. Raise awareness. Save the world.

Do it now. Not tomorrow. Don’t wait until things calm down at work, or you’ve lost that pesky holiday weight, or for some magical day when you have more time or money or energy. It’s so much easier than you think. All you have to do is start.

Happy New Year.