And By the Way, Yesterday I spoke to one of the "good guys" we all pray are still out there, a womanwho told me yesterday....

I spoke to a woman yesterday she too heard a knock on her door it was a Public Safety Officer come to warn her, a Police Officer who handed the woman a SEX OFFENDER IN YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD FLIER emblazoned with the picture of a young boy (maybe 16) who was adjudicated, sent to adult prison. A young Sex OFFENDER who had just moved in to live with relatives  across the street for the woman I spoke to.

The woman told me she had never met her neighbors but...

She said she took the Sex Offender WARNING flier and went across the street and knocked on her neighbor's door.(which she said was covered with screws and nails and locks and dead bolt key hols) and after knocking a couple of times and waiting while all the bolts were slid back and un-bolted) a woman answered the door. and asked "how can I help you?"

The woman tell me the story said, she asked to see the young man pictured on the flier. After a few moments he came and stood behind his mother (or grandmother or aunt or sister?) in the doorway.

The Woman held up the flier and said to the young man, "I just want to welcome you to the neighbor hood." And the boy answered? The boy said, "Thank you. No one ever said that to me that before"

This story isn't apocryphal. She isn't one of us. She knows of no SO in her family. But she is just one of the good guys we all hope will meet us when we too share our stories, overcome our fears  and become  VISIBLE.

I hope to open a discussion about molested children and about Juvenile Sex Offenders on Wind harp Tree, soon. One of the things this woman told me, almost in passing was that she was shocked at the contrast between the picture on the flier of a young sex offender (before his imprisonment) and the way the boy looked standing behind his mother. She said the boy standing before her in the door way looked afraid and discouraged and a hundred years older, all covered with tattoos and  undoubtedly used and abused and un-healed himself by the system we all deal with (especially because some of us are  also not only the mothers to abused children but to children who have abused and harmed other children in our wom families or in others) Believe me there is enough "HURT" in this "hurt locker" to go all around. And still if we can't some how find a way to heal the hurt done to oueselves, to our children and to "our abusers/offenders" how will we ever manage to take the loks off our own door and welcome others into a community of  survivors who all know our duty is to use power to protect ALL of those made vulnerable among us???