My father never once tossed a ball with me. But he did take me to see 'Mildred Pierce.' There was a time in my life, about 6 years, when my father and I lived by ourselves. This was in spite of the fact that I am a part of a very large family. My siblings had all gone off to college or begun their lives, my mother had begun a new chapter in her own, and Dad and I suddenly found ourselves alone, together. Dad had not counted on raising a lonely teenager by himself. In truth, we knew very little about each other, and didn't even have a shared language. I remember Dad, a microwave engineer, coming home to dinners and asking him about his day. I would get a long discussion of RH frequencies, wav
The greatest power of the predator/abuser is to find what it is you love and hope for…and take it away. This past week, we have watched our president work to do exactly that. For a decade of my life, I worked with children who were groomed and victimized by sexual predators. The work was never easy, and required a patience to allow a child to come to his or her own understanding of the situation. I listened to a lot of the stories of how the connection grew, and one thing was always clear: the grim reality is that the predator was successful because he made his victim an accomplice. That was the central part of the predator’s work, to create in his victim not only a victim, but a helpmate. F
