Two of my kids, both now dead, were birth brothers, only 14 months apart. They were literally tortured by their birth grandfather in monstrous ways that would have had that evil man easily arrested were his crimes to my kids revealed. The youngest, Irving, died in a terrible car crash when he was only 21. The other, Danny, died three years ago from a fentanyl-contaminated drug he took. Danny was 51.
One time, Irving said to me, “Pop, I always felt protected by Danny – always.” The suffering that Irving revealed to me, later confirmed and expanded upon by Danny, was suffering I had never even imagined could exist. There was no way that Danny could have protected Irving from it, and, in point of fact, he had not. But that is not how Irving experienced it. I had learned of something called “parentification” from my work at Family Focus. And that’s what I understood what Irving was talking about. I was a parentified kid – but I was 15 when I took inside me the responsibility for protecting my younger brother and sister. How could Danny have done this at what I later figured out must have been mid-grade school?
I knew that Irving spoke the truth, but I couldn’t comprehend it. In recent weeks, we at the agency have explored the concept of an “unshakeable bond” between an older and a younger person, created by the older one for the good and protection of the younger. And I now believe that is what Danny created with Irving.
I also believe that that unshakeable bond is what a new parent has with their new-born baby: under normal circumstances, nothing can shake the parent’s bond to their baby. And I furthermore believe that the loss of that unshakeable bond lies at the very core of what our kids are missing. I think folks have always sensed this, and thus the push to get our kids without parents adopted into good homes. But now I think that the unshakeable bond can be recreated without an adoptive parent. I believe that we have created such a program at Family Focus, a tremendously successful program, and I now believe that creating that bond is the most serious responsibility we as adults have towards our parentless kids. Are there other possible ways to do it? There must be. But to find them we must get creative. Our kids, like all kids, are entitled to being the beneficiaries of an unshakeable bond with some adult. It is right to give them that.