The Pain of Leaving

This is so damn hard. My heart and stomach are fluttering with the thought of leaving the girls again. This time it's for New Orleans, and only for 10 days, but it might as well be forever. This time is harder because I spent six months apart from them, living in D.C. and spending a week every month with them in California. I was aching to come back for good. The travel is not so bad. It's the leaving that kills me.

I have to go, that much is certain. Freelancing is tough and I need this trip to pump up my resume, get experience and hopefully make some money. I'm the breadwinner in this family, so it's crucial. Then there is the adventure. I don't know how I'm goint to get to New Orleans from where I'll be dropped off, where I'll sleep, how I'll carry everything, or how I'll get to Houston for my return flight (9/30- early). I'll also be traveling to the Balkans for a month at the end of October and am so excited. Still, the thought of leaving my girls is breaking my heart. Same goes for my husband.

I’m not alone: Mothers who have to go back to work after so little time with their babies that they leak breast milk around 11 a.m. Mothers and fathers who spend more hours at work than with their children, many at jobs that don't pay enough to do much more than survive month to month. Mothers (and fathers) from poor countries who leave their children behind while they seek work in the U.S.

Judy Woodruff, one of the highest paid journalists around, has three children, one of whom has been completely disabled (mind and body) since childhood. The first time I heard about it was in a documentary about women journalists shortly after she gained fame because of her multi-million dollar contract with CNN. My friend Sarah's 10-year-old son is autistic. He requires intense attention to keep him physically safe and to try to help him to some day live somewhat independently. She went to law school so she could make a better life for her two sons and grappled with her decision every day because it took so much of her attention away from Thomas and her older son, Mitchell. I heard about a women from New Orleans who was separated from two of her three children because she could only carry one during the evacuation. She carried the youngest, who couldn't swim. She's still searching for her babies.

So I'm lucky. My heartache is self-made. My daughters are healthy and joyful and support me, although they'd rather not be apart again. When I was commuting from D.C., an oppressive weight would begin to push down on us the closer it got to my departure date. Leaving again, the same lead is descending upon me. I can't find a good description for how it feels. George Orwell, the master of the metaphor, probably could but words fail me. Even though I can do literary tribute to others' pain, I can't name my feeling because I don't want to feel it. I know I'm not alone.

Death is a Force that Gives Us Meaning

Word just came: I’m heading to New Orleans on Monday. I was trying to get down there but the logistics just didn’t click until now. I’ll be reporting from New Orleans, nearby Covington, where Camp Casey folks have a relief station set up, and anywhere else I can get to.

A man I interned with at UPI – a New Orleans native – is there. He told me he was trying to pick up the pieces of his life scattered by Hurricane Katrina. Essential gear to bring: a tall pair of rubber boots and clothes I never want to wear again. That’s it. The media are pulling out, on to the next crisis. It’s a good time to fill in the gaps they’ll leave behind, although the market for Katrina stories is rapidly cooling. So it goes. The nature of the beast. But Katrina is far from over.

I visited Abed today. His health got even worse so he’s in the hospital now. I hope they can fix him. He is still ready to die but he found out about an experimental treatment that his idiotic doctors failed to tell him about. So, he’s hopeful.

The sick thing is that his invitation to mortality made me feel like my head got turned around in the right direction. Little distractions popped like the soap bubbles that children blow. That’s how 9/11 and Katrina felt, and how the war in Iraq probably feels to some people.

Chris Hedges wrote a book called “War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning.” Well, death is also a force that gives us meaning. Abed gave me a glimpse at a force more powerful than any other. Then he made me stare at it without romantic illusions. Abed hadn’t cowered and he didn’t let me either.

I think war is wrapped in romantic illusions for many because they don’t want to or have to face death head-on. Those who die, or rather their deaths, are shrouded in our national mythology of sacrifice and patriotism. I’ve heard it was like that in Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Israel, Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia, Germany and America (in WWII), and just about every other nation that rallied its people to fight for their country – and accept the death of those who died doing it. With few exceptions, they were really fighting for leaders who clung, with fat greedy paws, to power. When they recognize that truth (as in Vietnam or Serbia in 2000), they stop fighting.

Hedges was also right when he wrote that war gives meaning to lives of quiet desperation. The trip to New Orleans felt like that. Between Abed and Katrina, my life sure felt like it had meaning. I would be one of the people who participated in life, actually took a front-ring seat to history. I would see the destruction, smell the death, hear the desperation. Realizing my thoughts were getting warped into a war hero delusion, I took a step back to examine my motives. The reporting is supposed to be about working as an “early warning system,” as Amartya Sen put it. Not feeding myself on others’ misery.

It’s not like I want to be a tourist, visiting hell on earth just to see what it’s like. I lived through enough as a kid to get a taste. To be honest, it’s like another author wrote: “Her life was an urgent, desperate struggle to justify her life.” I wouldn’t use those adjectives in my case, but the struggle is about right.

The Legal Ringer

It’s all I can do to keep up with all the reporting about the Supreme Court that John Roberts’ nomination has unleashed. It’s like water gushing from an uncapped fire hydrant.

The detailed coverage keeps reminding me that the law doesn’t work like people think it does. The law is not about guilt versus innocence, or even justice. No wonder so many of us are baffled by court decisions. Lawyers and judges are talking law whereas we want to sort what we believe is right from wrong. We operate on a gut feeling; we want to assign blame and make the guilty pay. But law is all about precedence. That’s what the law is: precedence – a technical roadmap.

Journalism can be confusing like that, too. Recently, a story I was writing about incest ran smack up against a legal paradox. The story was about a woman who said her husband won custody of their two daughters six years after he molested the older one. It happened because of a law that slaps the hands of people who molest children in the household with therapy instead of jail time then expunges the molestation charges from their record after a time.

Ironically, after she had been through the ringer trying to keep her daughters away from him, she wasn’t looking like a great parent in the court’s eyes. She’s high-strung and angry, but it was trying to keep her daughters safe that molded her. In contrast, her husband’s record was clean. So the girls now live with him and she is allowed supervised visits only. That irony was the point of my story.

I got started on the story while working on a separate piece about sex offenders. It sounded like a good one, and the editor of a paper I sometimes write for gave me the green light. Dropping everything, I whipped out of the driveway in our white Dodge Caravan toward East Oakland where she lives. East Oakland is an intersection of middle-class and poor residents, industrial zone and war zone of drugs, violence and poverty.

What I thought would be a short interview turned into a three-hour therapy session for her. It was okay because I have personal experience with molestation after a series of step-fathers and deranged cousins.

There is nothing worse for a reporter than being taken for a ride. So I looked over the documents she brought of court decisions and child protective services. I quizzed her over and over. She held nothing back about her own contribution to the outcome. Still, I made some calls to people involved in the case. Also, after talking to acquaintances, I learned that her case was not exceptional. Happens all the time, as the saying goes.

It was one of those stories that recharge my batteries. But not so fast, Nellie Bly. The paper wouldn’t print the story for the very reason I had written it: a law that made no sense, to me anyways. I was stuck. It felt like being trapped inside the recycling symbol of two arrows chasing each other. The paper wouldn’t print it because there were no charges against him even though an ample paper trail still existed supporting the allegation and recommending he be prevented from having unsupervised visits let alone custody. There were no charges because the law mandated they be erased. His name wasn’t mentioned in the story, but he probably could have sued for libel, so the paper wouldn’t touch it with a 10-foot pole. Even an unsuccessful libel suit can be expensive and damaging to a paper, so many are timid.

No one wants to believe that parents or other household members could molest their children. Stepfathers are a little more palatable. But if it wasn’t happening, why would a law exist protecting them from harsh sentencing? Why would there be so many people behind a bill to change that (the bill, Senate Bill 33, cleared the California legislature and landed on Gov. Schwarzenegger’s desk last week)? Family members, caregivers and friends are responsible for some 90 percent of sexual abuse, according to the Department of Justice and sexual abuse reports and experts.

The woman sounded so deflated when I told her the story was probably unprintable without charges to back up the allegation. She had been put through the legal ringer again. If I could argue with the editor I would ask what she asked me about the current law during an interview:

“You’re trying to break the cycle of violence and they’re putting you back in it. Whose bright idea was that? How could they possibly think that would work?”

Peace Amid the Rubble

While the war in Iraq smolders, the country huddles together in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the White House ducks from its mistakes, Darfurians hunger for peace, and the other many calamities play themselves out, Abed is dying.

Abed Jaouni is a slight, Palestinian immigrant living in Berkeley, Calif. He's dying slowly and painfully from Colitis. Really, he is wasting away, suffering the pain of a slow, petty disease - a disease that makes bowel functions public and undignified.

It's a sad way to die. His mind is as sharp as ever, discussing Libyan and Palestinian-Israeli politics even as he wastes away. We spent many an hour pouring over politics instead of working back when we were at the Berkeley Geochronology Center. I moved on last year and he got to sick to look through his microscope for hours on end at grains of million-year-old rocks. I told him he can't die: who would I talk politics with? Few people grasp the events and policies that swirl about us as spot-on as Abed. At 100-pounds and bedridden, Abed still nails the truth like a sniper.

But he wants to die, and his knowledge and acceptance that he is dying is an unexpectedly peaceful shelter amid the rubble that lies at our feet right now. Nothing makes more sense to me right now than the peace he has made with his death.

Katrina's victims didn't get to make peace with death. The Bush Administration, FEMA and other dazed officials robbed them of that. While Bush and Brown may have been surprised by the ripples of destruction that Katrina sent through New Orleans and the rest of the country, Katrina victims were surely surprised when they realized the beacon of democracy - the light of liberty - was asleep at the wheel, leaving them vulnerable to death and destruction. The world's richest and most powerful nation can't even clean up all their bodies as the flesh is slowly eaten away in a watery, toxic cauldron. There's no peace in that.

Soldiers who have died in Iraq were robbed of that peace, even though death accompanies warfare, is an inherent feature of it. Soldiers, I am told, accept death when they sign the dotted line that makes them responsible for protecting the country with their lives. But the war in Iraq started with lies and is being propped up by foundations made from twisted logic. How many soldiers would be alive today without the war? How many signed up, convinced that without war, radical Islamists would see to it that 9/11 was just the beginning of terror for Americans? They died for lies.

Abed is honest down to the core about his death. As if trying to shake off the pity oozing from his friends, he said, "What the fuck. I'm sick of this pain. Then there are the people who like you, because you were nice...But what can you do?"