Crow and Flame

Have you ever been on the other side of the line?

The side you never imagined you’d stand on.

I have.

I was a therapist, but I was also the one sitting in a therapist’s office, trying to put words to the things that had broken me.

I was a child abuse investigator. I walked into homes, made impossible decisions, and wondered why some adoptive parents reached a point where they wanted to give their children back to the state. I couldn’t understand it.

Until I became an adoptive mother.

My daughter carried unimaginable trauma. She wasn’t a bad child. She was a hurting child. And sometimes that hurt came out in ways that terrified both of us.

I remember one particularly violent outburst. She grabbed my hair and ripped it from my scalp. My blood was on her hands.

The next day she showed her teachers.

They did exactly what they were trained to do. They called the abuse hotline.

I remember sitting there in complete disbelief.

Why don’t they understand?

This child wasn’t being abused by me.

She was drowning in trauma.

And I was drowning right alongside her, trying with everything I had to keep us both afloat.

For the first time, I wasn’t the investigator trying to understand someone else’s choices.

I was the parent begging for help from a system that didn’t seem to know how to help us.

Everything I thought I understood suddenly looked different from this side of the line.

I’ve stood on that line in other ways too.

When I was younger, I looked at women in abusive relationships and wondered why they didn’t just leave.

It seemed so obvious.

Just go.

Until it was me.

Until fear became more complicated than logic.

Until love tangled itself together with hope, guilt, survival, and the belief that maybe tomorrow would be different.

Things always seem simple when you’re standing outside someone else’s life.

They rarely are when you’re living it.

I’ve learned this lesson over and over again.

The patient becomes the therapist.

The investigator becomes the parent under investigation.

The advocate becomes the one needing someone to advocate for her.

The person offering grace becomes the one desperately hoping someone else has enough grace to offer.

Sometimes people call us difficult.

Troublemakers.

Too emotional.

Too demanding.

Problematic.

But often we’re simply fighting for what we believe is right.

We’re protecting the people we love.

We’re surviving.

We’re asking for help.

We’re refusing to be silent.

The older I get, the less interested I am in judging people from a distance.

Because life has a way of moving us.

Of placing us on the other side of lines we once believed we’d never cross.

And once you’ve stood there…

once you’ve felt the fear, the exhaustion, the shame, the impossible choices…

you stop asking, “Why would they do that?”

And you start asking,

“What happened to them?”

“How can I help?”

Sometimes the greatest teacher isn’t education.

It isn’t experience.

It’s finding yourself on the other side of the line.

And realizing the people you once struggled to understand were never so different from you after all.