I bear witness to their stories. I bear witness and sometimes it breaks bits of me, cracks my heart into weeping wounds

For the children they were

And the elders they have become

So many decades later, still struggling to understand the brutality

The harm that they did not deserve (but were told they did — had it beaten into them)

Abuse they never could earn, but which was applied to their bodies and their psyches liberally.

I bear witness to their stories and long to stretch back through time, hold that child’s hand and that one

tell them they are loved, tell them they are loved, worthy of love and belonging

I bear witness to their stories and long to stretch back through time, hold that adult’s hand and that one

tell them they are loved, tell them they are loved, worthy of love and belonging

But I cannot reach back

Only forward

And outward

To remind us that how we treat children matters to everyone.

Many different people are credited with the quote “childhood is what you spend the rest of your life trying to overcome” — perhaps because so many people’s lives are spent recovering from and trying to make meaning out of the harms that shaped our youngest years.

May we remember that how we treat humans in their first two decades sets the course for all the remaining years of their lives; everyone reaps the consequences of what we sow.