By JILLIAN SMITH
For the Rantoul Press

Six months into our marriage, the Copeland agency placed our first “child” in our home. Darryl, an almost 17-year-old African-American youth, was to be with us on an interim basis until a home was found that could also take his older brother.

Maria, director of Copeland, pressured us into taking him, even knowing we had requested younger children.

“It’s just to get your feet wet before we place younger children with you,” she  said.

Darryl was to be our introduction into the devastating world of child abuse.

This may be a good time to give you a physical description of Hal and myself. I’m almost 5 foot 2 inches, blonde hair, blue eyes. Hal is 6 foot 3 inches and African-American.

I worked at a large university athletic department, and Hal was an undercover narcotics officer. A mutual friend introduced us, and we became best friends before marrying five years later.

We felt that we could offer a home to children who might otherwise fall through the cracks. I attribute our long friendship and keeping a daily journal for helping us survive as long as we did.

It was a cold day in January when we opened our door to Darryl.

He stepped into the front hallway carrying a worn-out cardboard box stuffed with dirty clothes. His caseworker, Denise, carried in another box. A third box appeared with school books and a worn-out backpack.

Denise only stayed a few minutes. As Hal and I stood in Darryl’s room, he looked at us with a small glimmer of hope in his eyes. Our new family.

Darryl was a handsome and polite young man. He had an athletic appearance and wanted to be a professional boxer. He ate a lot! When he smiled, it was from ear to ear.

He had been living in a shabby apartment complex with an alcoholic woman and her son. It was several weeks later when Darryl told us that our home was his 16th and that he had attended 21 different schools.

He called us “mom” and “dad” right away and later told me he called all his foster parents this because it was just easier than having to remember all their names.

One morning after breakfast, he suddenly said, “You know, my dad used to tell me that all I was ‘was a wasted  ----.”

A look of pain immediately washed over his face, and then it quickly disappeared. I tried to hide my shock at his statement as he continued.

“My dad had a bad temper. He was always beating one of us up. Sometimes it was my mom, sometimes my brother. Most of the time, though, it was me.”

We sat in silence for a while, a small bond beginning to form between us. That night Hal and I talked for hours about what it must have been like to grow up with an abusive parent.

A few days later Darryl was not feeling well. He seemed depressed, and I asked him if he wanted to talk.

In a burst of emotion, he started telling me about how his father used to be in the Marine Corps and how he ran the household like he was still in the military. My mind raced back to the previous day when Darryl asked Hal if he had ever been in the military.

Hal replied, “The Marines.”

“My dad would come home in the middle of the night and get us out of bed,” Darryl said. “He would make me and my brother stand in the corner and bend over and hold our ankles.

“Sometimes he made us stand there for hours. We were scared of him because if we didn’t do what he said, we’d get beat bad.

“A lot of times he would order us to bend over and hold our ankles and then tell us he was going out for awhile. He told us not to move until he came home.

“The first time, as soon as he left, we stopped doing it. We didn’t know he was outside watching us. He came racing in the house and really beat us both up bad. From then on, every time he told us to do something, we did.

“Sometimes he was out all night, but we stayed in that position because we really didn’t know when he was coming back, or if he had even gone anywhere. In the morning we would be so sore we could hardly move, and our muscles would cramp all up. I hated it.”

My arm now around his shoulders, I quietly asked him about his mother.

With absolutely no emotion in his voice he answered, “I’m not sure if my mom is alive. She left my dad and me and my brother when I was little. I don’t really blame her. He was pretty mean. I heard she was murdered, but I don’t really know for sure.”

Sometimes the best thing to do or say…is nothing. Just being there is everything.