The Badlands
How Deprivation in Childhood Can Make the Abundance of the Holiday Season Feel Like Pure Hell
I didn’t expect his reaction.
I was packing empty cardboard boxes, about seven of them, on our dining room table, filling them with candies and goodies from the International Marketplace, a market that always has fun treats from all over the world. Little bottles of Calabrian hot honey, candies from Finland and the Netherlands shaped into cones for tree hanging, tinned mackerel, heirloom black popcorn, Korean seaweed, and all kinds of dried pastas, radiatori, mafaldine and campanelle. The hodge podge of boxes are meant to go out to family and friends who don’t live near us, but who we want to celebrate and send our love.
The truth is it’s only been the last couple of years I’ve had the ability to pull this kind of thing together for Christmas. It’s usually so full-on with the kids and their preparations. This felt like an extra thing I didn’t have the bandwidth to do: the buying (the fun, but costly part), the assembling into boxes and imagining what people will appreciate which product the most, writing cards, packing, taping, assembling addresses and getting it all to the post office and out into the world. To do this you must be able to afford the costs of money and time.
We are fortunate we can do these small things and it isn’t lost on us.
“Hard candies are for the older folks,” I say to Desi. I had everything laid out on the dining room table, Desi helped me fill boxes.
“What’s this?” Raffi asked, coming out of his room.
He was in a good mood. Curious.
“This is for…” and I name the boxes and the intended recipients.
“So this isn’t for us?”
“Nope”. I said. His body tensed.
“Wait, so you went out and spent all this money on other people?”
“Wait, what?” This is me buying time to sort of get my bearings. I see his face turn to stone, his arms are rigid, crossed in front of him.
“They don't do this for us,” he says. “They don't buy us cool stuff and send it.”
Fuck. I should’ve seen this coming.
“Well actually, your Aunt C. sends you gifts every year. And my book team helped me a lot. I want to thank them. Not that they have to give us things to receive gifts.”
“Aunt C. doesn't count.”
“Well, when my book launched your Uncle T. took time off from work and came all the way out here. From New York. He paid for the flight, the hotel…”
“Mom, this is wrong. We have to keep this stuff for us!”
This is the impact of hunger, scarcity, neglect and poverty on children. Abundance brings tension. Who is it for? How much do they get? Can we afford more? If they get things, will I get things? What about my needs? How will we divide this so its fair? Will there be enough for me? Who is taking care of me? Is this mine?
David and I both tried to talk him through it.
But nothing worked. The next hours went badly. He couldn’t settle. He paced and kept poking me in the shoulder with his knuckles, pushing past me, his shoulder slammed into mine. He controlled his anger - David was monitoring, just in case, and that kept him in line - but he blustered around and had to let me know this upset him. He banged things, twirled sticks in the air, stopped me from moving room to room, scared Desi to the point we had to remove her.
Raffi was in a place that I’ve come to know as “The Badlands”, that mental expanse of territory in the brain that is by definition “dangerous,” “unwelcoming, and “derelict.” A kind of no-mans-land of thinking, an un-cultivate-able place where first wounds are made fresh again and people take their lacerated selves and retreat into a kind of emotional wind storm that makes them relive the original cut in often surprising and powerful ways.
We all have wounds that rise up on us and take us to the Badlands. It happened to me last week. A miscommunication with a friend sent me into a hurt spiral, triggering my abandonment/adoption issues. My tendency is to wallow in the Badlands, feeling abandoned and uncared for while smothering myself in it, confirmation that I am unloveable, unwanted, not good enough. We talked it out. But often, I’ve let these issues fester and friendships rot because I couldn’t manage the vulnerability, the putting myself out there, the facing of the abandonment, required to start the conversation that could heal us.
My friend made it easy and I am grateful.
If I let him, Raffi would put his name on every food product he loves in the kitchen pantry.
“That’s mine," he will say.
“Food is for everyone,” I say, gently, but I know without having it put away in his room for himself, he will eat it all as fast as he can to keep it from being taken by someone else in the house.
At Christmas, there is a kind of reinforcing of Raffi’s transactional mindset. He is ever so focused on equity, mostly for himself and not really for anyone else, so not exactly equity at all. Those boxes covering the dining room table triggered and jostled all of this old fears of not having enough. Of our resources going to frivolous candies and miniature bottles of imported olive oil for people we rarely see who have spent nothing on us in his mind. In his mind, I wasn’t just giving away resources that could’ve gone to him, I was giving them away right in front of his face.
Salt meet wound. Wound meet salt.
What I know for sure is that holidays can be rough for kids and adults who came from trauma and scarcity.
“Trauma can behave like a river on the brain,” says Forrest Lien, a licensed clinical social worker, speaking on RADAdvocates.org. “When trauma washes over the brain over and over in a profound way, it leaves deep pathways behind. Even after the trauma has passed, the child’s brain is left wired in fear. They won’t authentically trust or rely on anyone, especially those who try to get the closest to them.”
This means throwing a bomb into family activities. It means blowing up vacations. Doing the most enjoyable, fun family activity ever, and jamming a stick in the motor to make it all stop, so that no one is having fun. It means creating a small twister of a storm in the middle of the fun because family bonds are a tough sell to a kid focused on not getting hurt again. Every loving interaction can feel like a tease, or a cavernous terrifying exposure. Something they crave, want and need but can’t handle when it’s right there.
When he is in the Badlands, I say: “Babe, are you doing this so you can be alone? Do you want to be alone? Because this is what you are doing, pushing us away?”
“I don’t want to be alone,” he says.
This is a signal for us to re-set.
We start again.
And yet, sometimes, like this day, it means standing over the boxes I had carefully packed and watching him tip them, one by one, off the table and onto the floor, while watching me to make sure I am unhappy, that I am paying the price for not taking care of him.
In the end, we worked it out. He jumped on me and bear hugged me. It was like being attacked in an alley, but I know he is trying to bridge the gap.
“Let’s try that again,” I say.
“Softer. I don’t want to be touched like that.”
He knows.
“Okay,” he says and comes in for a proper hug. We stay that way for a bit and we say we love each other.
And we do. And always will. In and out of The Badlands.
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END NOTES:
We are slow-rolling into the holidays. Take care of yourself. Do your best and know other folks are doing their best. Be kind to the person blowing things up - they have their reasons - while also being kinder to yourself. Not easy to do both. Breathe.
And thank you, as always, for reading. xo Kim
You are a (expletive) good writer, Kim.
I wish I had known the expression ’badlands’ when my adopted daughter was younger. With support and time the kids find it easier to adjust, but they need the support that parents / foster parents give them. You wrote beautifully about how you supported Raffi. I hope you have support for yourself.