Since making the tough decision to open up and write about our family almost losing H to the drug overdose and beating, I’ve been overwhelmed by the kindness and support of friends and strangers alike. I plan to write more about that support later, as I have time. But today, I gotta admit that the highly critical comments (of me) following yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle’s blog post about of my decision to discuss this issue publicly are kind of hard to see/read.

Ouch.

The three primary criticisms seem to be:

A – That I had no right to share publicly that my son’s current critical injuries are the direct result of drug addiction (Was I supposed to make something up? Maybe something like, “My kid is on life support because he encountered an IED in Downtown Knoxville” or perhaps “My son has a major brain injury after being attacked by a bear while hiking the Appalachian Trail.” ?????)

B – That early experimentation with mind-altering substances (H started at 13-14) have no impact on whether or not someone eventually ends up with a true addiction.

C – That drug addiction is not a disease and that treating it as one only makes the problem worse.

Again, I plan to address all of these specific criticisms in some depth in an upcoming blog post, but for now, I’d like to hear your thoughts on these criticisms, here at this blog. Heck, if folks are gonna talk about this, I’d rather it be here…

Let me wrap up by saying again how much every single kind word and supportive message I’ve received since “coming out” has meant to me. And just to be clear, I have let H know that I’ve begun discussing this issue publicly and that I intend to continue doing so in an attempt to lessen the shame and stigma for other families (after all, people whose children have brain tumors talk about it publicly without shame), and to help raise awareness. I told him that keeping the secret about his illness has not helped him, our family or anyone else. In fact, he’s gotten progressively worse. And we’ve kept it a secret for several years now, only talking openly for the first time after it landed him in the intensive care unit with what has now been diagnosed with a hypoxic brain injury that will require intense inpatient physical and neurological rehabilitation after he’s released from the hospital.

But anyway, let’s talk about it – in the comments below.

Namaste – Katie

Several people drew my attention this week to a rather bizarre opinion-slash-feature piece in the New York Times in which writer Liesl Schillinger attempts to shoehorn a painfully forced parallel among Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann and Nancy Pelosi based solely on the fact that all three of them happen to be mothers to five children….just like me (!!!).

…the three belong to what may be the smallest, most exclusive clique in American politics. The admission requirements are beyond most women, and all men: members must be prominent players in the United States political arena and must have given birth to not one, not two, not three, not even four — but five children, something that presumably gives them more in common than they might like to admit.

What does it say about this country at this moment that, of the small handful of women who have achieved highly visible political roles, three are matriarchs of such very large families? Could it be that the skills of managing sprawling households translate well into holding office? Or that such a remarkable glut of mom cred makes a woman’s bid for external power more palatable to voters? Or are they just related to more voters, which translates into a mysterious edge at the polls?

Whatever forces may be at play, taking a look at present dynamics, any American woman with long-range political ambitions might do well to also look to her nursery.

This story is what I’m blogging about over at Babble today.

I’ve been following the story this week of the woman from Shelbyville, TN (right up the road from my hometown of Bell Buckle, by the way) who decided it would be a good idea to simply ship her child “back” to Russia because he was so difficult to deal with. Like everyone else who has read this tale, I’m fairly well flabbergasted. I mean, kids don’t really come with some sort of money-back guarantee – whether you birth them or adopt them. As I say to mine when I feed them something they aren’t crazy about, “you get what you get and you don’t pitch a fit.” The same is true of parenting: you get what you get. Period. Once you take on the responsibility to parent a child – whether that’s via birth or adoption – you are pretty well stuck with that responsibility – forever. You don’t get to return them to the factory.

Of course, we all hope that our children grow up to be mentally, emotionally and physically healthy adults with no major problems. And we all hope to enjoy our years of active parenting with no major behavioral issues or health problems from our kids disrupting family life. But it doesn’t always work out that way. Some of us hit the jackpot, with a child or children who make parenting easy and mostly enjoyable, and who grow up to make us proud. Others of us are handed a different parenting menu, involving a child with mental, physical or behavioral challenges that try our patience and cause us pain.

It’s mostly just the luck of the draw what balance of pain and pleasure our parenting will bring us. And it’s all tremendously unfair, really. That’s been my experience, anyway. No one deserves to learn that her newborn has cerebral palsy. No one deserves to have her toddler become profoundly mentally disabled after a bout with e Coli. No one deserves to have a child paralyzed after one unwise dive into the shallow end of the swimming pool. No one deserves to live through watching her teenage child sink into drug addiction. And no adoptive parent deserves to end up with a child so damaged by his years spent languishing in state care that he is fundamentally unstable. But some unlucky parents do end up with these “bad” outcomes in our children, despite our best efforts and without regard to whether our children are biological or adopted. And we are stuck with what we get. You don’t get to divorce your children. The parent-child bond is really the only true “for better or for worse” human relationship. And of course, most parents – the great majority – couldn’t abandon their children if they tried, no matter how painful it is to parent them.

I suspect that much of what this much maligned adoptive mother in the news is telling the press about her child’s emotional and behavioral problems is true. The child probably did threaten her and spit at her and disrupt her family life and home. I have tremendous compassion for any parent who feels lost and overwhelmed by her child’s problems. I’ve certainly been there in my own ways, and yes, I have been tempted to come up with some equivalent plan to shipping the kid in question off to Russia…or Antarctica…or into space. But it’s just not an option – not for me and not for any other mother. You don’t get to trade your kids in for an upgrade. It just doesn’t work that way.

I hope the child who was sent back to Russia finds a real family who will stick with him through the hard parts. I wish we lived in a world where women had better control over their own fertility and better access to family planning services so that fewer unwanted children ended up abandoned in orphanages where they eventually become emotionally unstable – like this little boy apparently did. And I hope we can all try to be a little more compassionate and less judgmental toward parents of children with physical, emotional or mental challenges – parents who may become overwhelmed and desperate.

Maybe if someone had reached out to this woman and offered her a shoulder to cry on or information on resources for helping her child, she would not have done something so very wrong. Maybe…

(And as an aside, just because I won’t REALLY ship my children to Russia if they cause me too much hassle doesn’t mean that I am above THREATENING to put them on a plane to Russia… I’m just sayin’…)

For your discussion: If the states’ attorneys general who are suing over the new federal health care reform legislation manage to get the Supreme Court to declare that forcing people to carry health insurance is unconstitutional, would states then no longer be able to require that drivers carry auto insurance? What do you think?

….MSNBC, for this winner today:

“Is Nature Out of Control?”

(ANSWER: why yes, MSNBC, yes she is…)

I was sad to read tonight that Jody Powell died of a heart attack. And I was surprised to learn that Mr. Powell, the White House Press Secretary under President Jimmy Carter who went on to become one of the partners in powerhouse Beltway PR firm Powell and Tate ( the “Tate” is Sheila Tate, Nancy Reagan’s former press secretary) was only 65 years old when he passed away today. That means he was only in his mid 30s when he came to DC from Georgia and braved, then won over the aggressive White House Press Corps of that era.

By all public accounts, Mr. Powell was a truly nice man, and I believe it, because he was awfully nice to me.

In 1978, I was a budding news and political junkie living in Bell Buckle, TN. While other little girls in my elementary school class were playing with Barbie Dream House, or experimenting with their mother’s set of Clairol hot rollers, I was more likely to be sitting in a tree in the backyard re-reading about the exploits of Woodward and Bernstein, or maybe flipping through the pages of “The Boys on the Bus.”

During that particular stretch of my childhood, we were allowed to watch some TV (for long periods here and there, when my parents would decide my little brother and sister and I weren’t reading or playing outside enough, we had a TV-free house). I particularly loved the smart, literate Saturday morning news pieces for kids that CBS ran between cartoons, reported by Christopher Glenn.

In these Saturday morning pieces, and on the evening network news, I loved seeing Jody Powell do his job, explaining President Carter’s policies. In our household full of Democrats, with two parents who were journalists, Mr. Powell’s job looked just ideal to me. I didn’t know whether there had ever been a girl White House press secretary (there had not, and would not be for another 14 years, when Dee Dee Myers finally broke that barrier), but I figured I’d aim to be the first.

So I wrote Mr. Powell a rather lengthy letter on the special, new stationery I had gotten for Christmas, the flowery blue paper with my name and address printed at the top. In the letter, I explained to him how I thought that being White House Press Secretary looked far more interesting than being President, and I explained how I intended to be the first girl to land the job. I also asked him whether Amy Carter – who, like me, appeared to be a bookish 10 year old girl with really bad glasses – liked living in the White House.

My parents gently cautioned me that the very busy Mr. Powell might not have time to respond to my earnest letter, but he did, telling me that he appreciated my letter, and that he hoped I would aim even higher than being White House press secretary. And included with his response was an autographed, 8 by 10 photo of Amy Carter, playing with her cat.

I cannot tell you how excited I was to receive this letter. And the photo of Amy and her cat hung on my bedroom wall until it was finally replaced with a poster of Duran Duran.

I think the letter and photo may still be tucked away in a drawer at my parents’ house, along with some other treasured autographs I collected as a child, including Miss Lillian, The Fonz, and both Ponch and John from CHIPs.

Godspeed, Mr. Powell. And condolences to the Powell family on their loss.

My new blog post at Babble is about why parents who did not allow their kids to see the President’s speech at school today should think very, very carefully about the anti-American message their decision is sending their children. Go read it, and let me know your thoughts.

In the past two or three days, folks around Knoxville have been rather horrified to see a large banner with a graphic photo of an aborted fetus being flown overhead, pulled by a plane. In the case of my sister, the plane flew over her 7 year old and 10 year old outside their school, leaving the children upset and frightened.

What I don’t get is how anyone thinks that this kind of tactic actually does what they claim they are trying to do, which is reduce the number of abortions in this country. I suspect that they are actually just attention hounds, like the PETA people, who care more about creating spectacle than they do about creating real change on this issue they claim to be so passionate about. And I have heard several of my staunchly pro-life friends say that they are equally annoyed by how extreme and pointless grandstanding like this gives people the wrong impression of their cause and the people who support it.

My sister took the time to track down the contact info for the organization behind this week’s city-wide campaign of visual harassment, and here it is for those of you fellow locals who also want to contact these people and tell them to knock it off:

Fletcher Armstrong, PhD CBR Southeast Region Director
P.O. Box 20115, Knoxville, TN 37940
phone: 865-776-3261
e-mail:Fletcher@CBRinfo.org
For more information on CBR-Southeast: www.ProLifeOnCampus.com

This is the email my sister sent them:

Mr. Armstrong,

How Ted Kennedy and Palin are the same: Kennedy was the original partisan litmus test of the modern political era; no one was neutral or indifferent about him. People either idolized him, or hated him with foamy-mouthed rage. Sarah Palin is the current, iconic partisan litmus test, inspiring the same extreme reactions in one direction or the other.

The comparison I am making is strictly about the extreme, emotional partisan responses each of these people has the ability to inspire in Americans. Lots of politicians are liked or disliked by “the other side,” but very few become iconic representations of partisan anger and passion like Kennedy and Palin are. Very, very few. Both Kennedy and Palin transcend who they actually are, what they’ve actually done or what their views actually are in the way that people feel about them.

However, when it comes to the two individuals themselves, and their own partisanship, there is a big difference. Ted Kennedy – love him or hate him – is recognized across both aisles as a guy who knew how to work effectively with those in Congress who totally disagreed with him in order to get things done. His views were partisan, but his collegial relationships and on-the-job working style were not. He belonged to an old-school style of partisan politics that allowed titans of both parties to bash heads on the Senate floor all day, and then go out for beers together after work. And that’s why I suspect that Teddy Kennedy, Tip O’Neill and Ronnie Reagan are at this very moment, sitting around a table together at the celestial pub, tossing back and few, and regaling other patrons with hilarious Irish talltales.

If you live in Knoxville, Tennessee, as I do, you have been unable to get away from a terrible double murder that took place in January, 2007. The details of the case are almost beyond comprehension; two happy, healthy college-age students out on a date together are carjacked by several career thugs. Over the next 24 hours, the young people, Chris Newsom and Channon Christian are held captive, blindfolded, tied up, sexually and physically tortured. They are both eventually murdered – separately – and the specific details of how each finally met their death after what they had already endured are the stuff of our deepest, darkest, most nightmarish fears.

At the time of the crime, I was working as the online producer at WBIR, in the newsroom. I took many of the first calls that came into the newsroom as the case unfolded. Within only 8-10 hours of the couple going missing, their parents and close friends had organized their own search parties, and were literally combing the areas that certain clues (cell phone signals, etc) told them their kids might have ended up. This was at a point where police were mostly uninvolved; the families reported that Chris and Channon had never come home that night, but there was no evidence yet of any crime, and let’s face it, even the most conscientious 20 year olds sometimes fail to come home at night. The police can’t and don’t begin treating every call they get from a worried parent as a possible crime until there is some further evidence of some kind that it is a crime.

We got a lot of calls like that in the newsroom each week, too – parents begging for some publicity for a teenage or young adult child whom they considered “missing,” but the authorities did not. Each time I took one of those calls, I imagined how I would feel if my own adolescent child had suddenly gone missing, but I couldn’t get anyone to help me try to find him. I always tried to be compassionate and gentle. I encouraged the parent on the line with me to continue communicating her worries to the police. I always felt really sad and kind of helpless after we would hang up.

And then, after Chris and Channon’s bodies were discovered, and as arrests were made, I spent the next year, before I changed jobs, writing numerous stories about the case. Because I had to repeatedly, over time write out the terrible words that described what was done to these two people, I found myself emotionally and mentally detaching from the reality of it. I just couldn’t “go there.” If I let myself really think deeply in an emotional way about the crimes, I knew I’d be unable to do my job.

But perhaps the biggest part of my emotionally dissociative state regarding writing about this case in the year after it happened stemmed from WHERE it happened. The small house where Channon Christian was held captive, raped, tortured and brutally murdered is very, very close to my own. In fact, I could walk there in probably 10 minutes. The railroad tracks where Chris Newsom’s burned, mutilated body was found by a railroad engineer on that cold January morning is almost as close. But that little corner of my part of town – even though it’s geographically close, is not one where I ever go. I don’t ever need to drive through it, and it’s not a place anyone would seek out as part of their daily constitutional. So even though I wrote on a regular basis about the address where the murders happened, I was somehow able to ignore the fact that this happened where it did, and basically pretend it wasn’t where it was.

But since leaving my newsroom job in August of 2008 – meaning that I no longer have to cover or write about the case – I have been increasingly unable to push away the realities of the whole thing. Over time, as the criminal prosecution of the accused has become the next phase in the story, and press coverage has continued at a very intense level, I’ve found myself “going there” emotionally, and it’s been hard.

One day found myself – almost without volition – driving by the small rental house (since torn down by the owners as a sign of compassion and respect for the Christian and Newsom families’ suffering) to see with my own eyes what I’d seen in photos so many times. I stopped a few houses away, unable to bring myself to get any closer to something that seemed so tangibly evil.

And that’s when it hit me; the thing I’d been unable or unwilling to think about previously was the fact that in those 24 hours in January of 2007, someone’s beloved children were being tortured and murdered in unspeakable ways while I happily went about my life in my own house only a few blocks away. I know it’s irrational, but I found myself feeling as if I should have known, or sensed somehow that someone was being hurt so terribly over a prolonged period of time so very close to the place I consider the warmest and safest in the world – my own home. That sense that I was oblivious to that level of suffering and cruelty over those many hours taking place so close to me has given me more than a few nightmares in the past year – generally the same nightmare. In my dream, I hear someone’s daughter screaming for help, begging for help, and I am frantically running up and down streets in our part of town, knocking on doors and trying to find her before it’s too late, but I always fail, and I wake up feeling sick and sad.

The other thing that I finally allowed myself to think about after my visit to the scene of the horror was the fact that the terrible, sick, predatory individuals who did it almost certainly DID drive by my house, likely on multiple occasions, as that’s the route they would have taken from their rental house to a major thoroughfare, and the interstate. Were my children playing in our front yard,? Did they consider hurting one of them, just because they were an easy target, like Chris and Channon? Did they ever see me standing outside my car on our city street, perhaps fumbling with my keys, and consider carjacking me? Did we pass one another in the aisles of our shared neighborhood grocery store? Did they case our street to consider possible home invasion targets? These are the thoughts that now come to me, now that I understand in a meaningful way the very real geographic connection between my home and that house.

As the details of the case have become even clearer with the police investigation and judicial proceedings, I am, of course, horrified by the brutality of the men who did these things. You hear about sexual sadists – and that’s surely what these guys are – on TV and in true crime books, and you pray that you don’t have one of this relatively rare but incredibly dangerous kinds of predators living in your own neighborhood. But what are the odds that we apparently had three or four men who all knew one another capable of this level of depravity living basically up the street? Three or four men capable of something that went far, far beyond the “ordinary” criminal behavior of robbing, killing or even of raping a woman in an opportunistic way. And not only were there three or four of them who were capable of doing something savage like, they were capable of doing it over and over and over for at least 24 hours, hurting Channon Christian, leaving the house for groceries or to visit friends, and then coming back to hurt her in new and unbelievably horrific ways. This brutality wasn’t carried out in a brief time frame – in a sexual or murderous rage or frenzy, or while under the influence, or during a psychotic episode – this was a conscious, willful brutality over a prolonged period of time. The fact that that many people with that level of evil perversion and willingness to cause pain to another human being over that period of time were here, right here all the time, chills me in a way I can’t quite express.

The last thing that I really struggle with is the issue of the women, at least one (she admits it) and probably others, who knew that there was another young woman, just about their age, hogtied, blindfolded and bleeding in the bedroom at their boyfriends’ rental house, and yet they went about their lives inside and outside the house during the day or more that Channon was being held captive. They did things like prepare sandwiches for the men between their individual forays in and out of the bedroom to rape that other young woman. At least one of the women has children of her own, just like Channon’s mother. At least one of them knew that Channon’s mouth was washed out with household cleaning chemicals in a bizarre and horrible attempt to erase evidence of rape. But these women, who could have ended Channon’s suffering and saved her life DID NOTHING. And there is absolutely ZERO evidence that this was a case where the women in question were “brainwashed” or had any sort of battered women’s syndrome or that they even felt actively threatened by the men during that period of time. They weren’t strung out on drugs and incapable of thinking clearly. No, they were just without consciences, and part of a trashy, thuggy subculture that’s both incredibly sexist – everything caters to the men, and to getting and keeping these worthless men who father their children – as well as very self-absorbed. But as a woman and as a mother, I just find it incomprehensible that other women, another mother, could stand by and let this happen without making any attempt whatsoever to make it stop.

I am sure that there are many thousands of other people all over my adopted hometown who are also haunted by this case, and who have nightmares about it, like I do. Sadly, however, I suspect that the people who committed the crimes – or who stood by watching others do it – sleep just fine at night. And that’s terrifying to me.

ADDENDUM: Attention kneejerk racists who have just started posting comments on this: this is MY blog. Thus, I decide what content appears here, including comments.

Katie