Weird as it Seems...

I took the picture for the preceding post (which in blog-world is the post immediately beneath this) from a 2009 post of a blog "Ned Hayes / Notes". Recently he had a post on Michael Dorris, author of The Broken Cord which describes his life raising his adopted son who was diagnosed as having fetal alcohol syndrome.

Fetal alcohol effect is a much subtler and more insidious after-effect of alcoholism, which often manifests itself in a child's adolescent and adult behavior. In these lives, alcohol becomes a chemical with a savagely toxic half-life. Sava and Madeline share a history of instability, of pervasive lies, of violence, of suicide attempts, of aggressive behavior, of inappropriate sexual contact.

http://www.nednotes.com/writing/index.html

Beyond the obvious parallels of "cord" and connections and umbilicals and children and the neck as a cord capable of being pulled or cut, there was

In 1992, Dorris summed up the experience of many fetal-alcohol affected families by noting that over the past four years his family "hadn't had a single period longer than three consecutive days in all that time when one of our alcohol-impaired children was not in a crisis

which is what I feel like so much now. At the beginning of December, there was a short period - I'd say December 3 through December 5 midnight - when I actually said to myself I was free of too many troubles with family and friends. But this week shot it all again. And I seriously wonder that if fetal alcohol children have such problems, what is the reason for the rest of us, and why is life more toxic? Is it just me and I'm going through a period? I don't know.

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