Senior Year

I will start my senior year officially on Thursday with Contemporary Business Law. Classes are more in....so I'm having a moment. One of my colleagues just put her toddler daughter on speaker phone while she was singing "Itsy Bitsy Spider" and then I thought about how it might be to hear Isis sing and secretly I dream up make believe situations like I'm sitting in a meeting at work and Detective Gretchen tells me that Mike has been harboring Isis this whole time, he faked her death so he wouldn't have to pay child support but they found her and she's mine and I get to take her home. Or sometimes when I drive to my parent's house I pretend like I've just been out playing and being a kid and Isis will be there when I get there and I can pick her up and go back to my "normal" life. And then I take a birdseye view of my silly dreaming and have to say to myself that what I am doing is awefully depressing. There is NO way Isis will ever walk through my office doors. She is not playing with my mom at home and she never will be. This is not a custody battle with her father. This is not a social services issue with the state. She is gone. And how definitive is death?! Uh, very! Then I cry at the realization that I can dream all I want for Isis and it will never, ever come true. Then my heart HURTS for all the children out there that just need love and attention and people to care for them and nuture them and I read the paper and discover that a 16 year old boy is 43 lbs and he lives in a closet with 4 other kids and they get their toenails ripped off for misbehaving. I imagine all the helpless infants and toddlers that are abused and hurt and I just want to love them. Then I realize that it was MY daughter, MY infant, MY toddler that WAS abused and beaten to death and I want to tear my heart out!!! I want to cry out to the world "WHAT WAS I TO DO? I DIDN'T KNOW! GIVE ME, NO FUCK ME, GIVE HER - GIVE ISIS ANOTHER CHANCE!!!!" I just want to love her. I just want to tell her it's okay. I just want to save every child from this. Why? Why do people hurt kids?