Word: child
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...sense that he was not going through this alone. "A couple of years later, my best friend's parents got divorced. Then a lot of other kids' parents got divorced. I guess when it happened to me, it was just starting." When asked about his greatest worry as a child, Josh replied, somewhat absently, "War. It's scary to think what could happen." But at the mention of his parents' divorce, Josh adds, "Now that I think about it, war looks really small compared with that...
MOTHER AND DAUGHTER WAIT on a New Orleans park bench for their respective buses to arrive. Every working day, the child takes one bus to school, and the mother rides another to work. When the vehicles pull up, mother and daughter part company, as usual. But the girl realizes she has left her school books on the bench, and she runs back to retrieve them. By now the mother has boarded her own bus. With a maternal premonition of danger, the woman tries...
...that instant, Sherri Belonga wakes up screaming. She sits upright in bed. Leonard Howard, her fiance, is also awake. "Leonard says to me, 'It's only a dream,' " Sherri reports. She is a 25-year-old single mother. Bianca, 9, the girl in the dream, is her only child. That night Sherri can not fall back asleep. Months later, the dream still haunts...
Themes of danger and escape, often through fantasy, are woven into the textures of Bianca's life. "Sometimes I have problems sleeping," says Bianca, a shy, sensitive and self-centered child. "Like I sweated one time. All you could see is wetness." Was she sick? "No. But then it reminds me of when that girl got bitten on Fright Night. She started turning ugly, and then it was like she was sweating. But the only movie that scared me was The Exorcist. That scared me. Her head turned all the way around, and something green just jumped...
Other journal entries are less encouraging. Cynthia, a former foster child who sits in front of Bianca in class, once wrote, "I would like a magic ring that do anything I said and I would want my baby doll to be a real baby." The teacher wrote back, asking her, "How would you take care of a real baby and still go to school?" She answered, "I have a mom, you know." To this, the teacher replied in her red ink, "This isn't your mom's baby. Why should she take care of it?" No reply...