[Blarg]

A girl once told me, You make me feel so strong. I told her, Maybe I just let you be strong. She didn't expect the credit to be turned around and given back to her instead of slurped up greedily, I guess. Got a pretty good reaction out of her.

I grew up in a foster family. We took in all kinds of abused and emotionally distraught kids. From all that exposure, intimacy, and responsibility from a young age, I got really great with kids, kind of a pied piper but without so much gay dancing. But still it was very tough to establish trust as a male much bigger than they were with kids who had been both emotionally and literally abandoned by their fathers, and abused, often pretty violently, often sexually, by their fathers too. (Others had been abused by their mothers, there was plenty of that too.) There were plenty of times when they cried uncontrollably, and many found it very hard to trust anyone, and would bolt whenever they were afraid thinking god knows what was going to happen to them. (Actually, we usually knew the backstory and knew exactly what.)

Anyway, sometimes it took a lot of long nights of holding them while they cried for hours, but there were many small miracles along the way. A kid can be almost emotionally ruined and near unreachable at a very young age from the traumas their parents put them through, but I think it was a real lasting compliment when they made the transition from blocking out life and reacting against it to letting down their guard and letting it in and being a part of it, and began trusting me and realizing the entire world might not be such a hostile, terrifying place after all and they might actually have a friend in it and be able to love and be loved in return.