Our Girls Need Us!

For the past couple of weeks I have had the opportunity to work with the girls at my school. For those of you who do not know, one of my jobs is as a teacher at a juvenile detention center. Because I am not permanent staff I am afforded what I think is an opportunity to work with both the boys and girls. This week and for the past couple I have been working with the girls. It is as you can already imagine not always the easiest job to do. I encounter some things I would never have imagined in wildest dreams while working with these children. Many of them at their young ages have been a victim of or witness to more pain, violence and trauma than most adults have in their entire lifetime.
Today as I witnessed a young woman break down into tears because a female probation staff threatened to throw away her personals, which are primarily letters and pictures my heart was deeply saddened about the current mental and emotional state of many of our teenage and young adult women. It was very difficult to watch this adult woman knowing this young girls situation have little to no consideration as to her already fragile state and to also exhibit no compassion when deciding to take a minor issue to the extreme. It would be easy at this point to discount this incident to something the young woman deserved because of where she is and possibly befitting punishment for what she is accused of, but I believe the problem is much deeper than this. What was missed here was an opportunity for one woman to embrace another and to give to her the much needed guidance and support she deserves. Too many times opportunities likes these are wasted because our society has taken on the attitude of that’s not my child, WRONG; all of them are our children!
I know that I work with a population of children who are the minority, but before we begin to deny that we know these children and our responsibility to them, I want note to be taken that these children when not locked up are a part of our larger majority population walking amongst the “regular” teenagers at their “regular” high schools every day. These children look just like regular ordinary kids so trust me, you probably have little idea about who your kids are associating at school or even bringing home. Admittedly, in many cases these kids are the extreme when it comes to troubled children, but they are in essence no different from our own kids. Sadly, they have been left to their own devices for growing up and without proper guidance have landed themselves in a system which is designed to not willingly allow them escape.
It is not my intention to talk here about the juvenile justice system, but to use it as a starting point for a discussion of the importance of getting back to the way things were, or perhaps to make things better than they ever have been. I want you to understand that ANY young woman that you know at this moment could more easily than you think become one of my students if we don’t relinquish our selfishness and begin to own our full responsibility as mothers of the earth and put an end to the steady downward decline of our youth. The fact that the adult female is so relatively complacent of the collective threats to our young is an indicator of a lack of thought given to the intention for the human race to survive. Our future is in our young, they are the new inventors and healers of the world and women will be the guiding force to the change necessary shape our children and to ultimately saving our species. Our young women are missing and subsequently crying out for the proper guidance and support needed for them to develop fully into confident, beautiful, powerful, and thriving women who will continue to support the survival and thriving of our species.
Women, we have been asleep and unwilling to do anything in the past, yet how things have been has no bearing on how things have to be, and I think we're living at a time when womanhood is just a moment away from emerging into the light of our collective possibility. This many not include all of us but I believe enough of us have heard the call to awaken and are therefore ready to take action. We should not be pretending we don't know what's going on; we should not be giving in to the various and obvious temptations to anesthetize ourselves. We should be doing quite the opposite, by taking the wheel of human civilization and saying to anyone who will listen: We're taking back our children and our, and we're taking them back NOW.
Anyone who's looking at the world and not grieving isn't conscious; but anyone who's looking at the world and not rejoicing in the possibilities for how we can turn all this around, is underestimating what human beings can do. We can learn to love and to support each other. We can be conduits for the miraculous. We can stop playing small and start playing large. We can stop giving in to our weaknesses and start claiming our strengths. We can never, never, never give up. Giving up and closing our eyes is what has gotten us where we are. We can be the mothers of a new and better world. And all of this is possible because we can decide. We can decide to say something. We can decide to do something. We can decide to step up and participate. But we must decide now... not later. There is no more time to waste.

Deonae