I have A LOT of dreams where my
husband and I are looking for a new house. Last night, we went to the
city next door to check out a place that had been recommended to us. It
had a lot of thick, dark and dusty rugs, harvest gold and avocado green. There was a stairway on the second floor with
heavy locks high up on the door. I was getting a very creepy 1970s vibe from this
place. (For the record, the 1970s have always given me a stranger danger
feeling. It makes me think of serial killers, the sons of abusive WWII
vets with undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder, and children dressed in awkwardly
short shorts. The whole decade just reeks of maladaptive behavior to me,
and it can go bye-bye for all I care.)
Anyway, I looked at the two
rooms that were supposed to be for our two kids. The first one had a
closet connected to a crawl space. Like, the wall in the closet came down
to about two feet from the ground and if I knelt down and pushed aside a heavy
drape I could see the opening give way to this enormous dark room. I used
the light on my phone to get a sense of size of this hidden space and it was
very large. Almost gymnasium sized, with hard wood resin-sealed gym
floors. I went to the second kids’ bedroom and found the same kind of
opening to the same large room. Maybe it was directly connected to the
room and not through the closet. This time I pushed past the drape and
entered the space.
Suddenly, it was lit and
walking and crawling around this room were children. Maybe 15 or 20
kids. Some were toddlers and others were older, maybe 8 or 10, but there
were no teenagers. I asked them who they were and why they were
there. They said they were there because they were 'bad' and they were
being punished. It was a nursery room, I guess, or a child’s prison because
there were no toys. The kids just milled
about.
I left the room and went
looking for my husband to show him what I had found. The people who
wanted to sell the house were there in the bedroom and I asked one of their
kids if they had ever been in the crawl space before. I asked, have you
ever seen or spoken to the children? This little kid, maybe 5 or 6
twisted his hands around while he spoke and averted his eyes, clearly
uncomfortable with my question. He said, "no, I don't know what you
are talking about," but he was lying.
Then it occurred to me, he
couldn't speak the truth, because if he did, he would join the other
kids. He would be stolen away like they were. These children were in some sort of purgatory
and the kids in the room had gone missing, taken from the house, (by the house?)
many generations ago. I crawled back under the space and yelled to the
house, or to whatever thing that trapped these children, "If you treat
children with kindness, they will turn out good!"
And then louder, "IF YOU
TREAT CHILDREN WITH KINDNESS, THEY WILL TURN OUT GOOD!" But the
lights remained dark, like nobody was listening.
Okay, whew! I just had to write that down somewhere. But yeah, let’s remember that, folks. Treat children with kindness and they will
not be vessels of pain that perpetuate harm to future generations.