Another Place At The Table – Kathy Harrison

Angie and Sara ar- gued, Karen fell and put her tooth through her lip, and the phone rang. | mopped up blood with one hand, picked up the phone with the other, and silenced the girls with a sharp glare. While Sara stomped upstairs, Angie turned her attention to Lucy. Some of Lucy’s apathy dissipated in the face of warmed-up left- overs and Angie’s gentle persistence.

By the time Lucy finished a glass of milk and a second bowl of spaghetti, she looked consider- ably better and was, if not exactly chatty, at least willing to re- spond to a direct question. Lucy spent the whole afternoon in a gloomy mood. Even an evening trip to the lake failed to energize her much. Still, | put off any attempt to talk until the younger children were in bed and | was alone with her in the hush of a darkened room.

Talking with children is all about timing. Insisting on too much intimacy before they are ready will just put them off. If you wait too long, you risk losing the moment. | didn’t ask Lucy what was wrong. She probably didn’t fully know the answer.

Nor did | ask if she had had a good time with her mother. The question was too loaded for honesty. Instead, I relied on a conversation starter | used a lot with my children, a game we called “Best and Worst.” Children who have lived in chaos often don’t have labels for their feelings. Things just happen to them with no one bothering to help them process it or put it in any kind of context.

Because of their egocentric natures, children perceive adult events as being all about them. If the police take a parent away in handcufts, a child doesn’t understand that it happened because that parent was drunk and disorderly. A child assumes that the parent drank because of the child’s misbehavior. Therefore the arrest was the child’s fault.

“Shocking, brutal, heartbreaking, and ultimately redemptive. This is the riveting and profoundly moving story of a hero, disguised as an ordinary woman. And like every hero, it’s the children she is out to save.” . ’ ‘ ’ : 4 —AUGUSTEN BURROUGHS, AUTHOR OF fa story of shattered childhoods redeemed by love another place at the table kathy harrison RUNNING WITH SCISSORS U.S.A. $2319 Canada $36.00 rh “They have to go someplace, the children | you read about in the paper: the injured | ones with burns and broken arms, the | frightened ones on the scene when their parents are arrested on drug charges, ihe glassy-eyed teenagers sleeping on park benches.

Sometimes, someplace is a hospital or detention center or shelter. Sometimes, someplace is my house.” ——FROM ANOTHER PLACE AT THE TABLE Teaching a Head Start program for at-risk four- year-olds, Kathy Harrison became increasingly concerned about one student, Angie, who had been abandoned by a mother who would never be able to care for her. “Could we take her in?” Harrison and her husband asked themselves— a question that quickly changed to “How could we not?” After Angie came Madeleine, and Gabrielle, and Tyrone, all with horrifying pasts and needs as small and as large as a hot bath, clean sheets, and unconditional love.

For the next six years, Harrison opened her arms and her home to other people’s children. And then Sara arrived at her door. Tough as nails, intense and magnetic, tortured by every adult in her life, at age six Sara already has a police record for breaking and entering. Under Harrison’s roof, she is the spark that ignites an already volatile mix of damaged per- sonalities: Lucy, a sweet eight-year-old desperate for a scrap of attention from her birth mother: Karen, a precocious but troubled baby: and Danny, at age seven a budding pedophile taught as a toddler to hurt people before he can be hurt by them.

Sara nearly destroys the haven she’s been offered, as her abusive past manifests in a (Continued on back: lap) 0304. CONCORD — (NG 1 6 2003 Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2022 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation https://archive.org/details/anotherplaceatta0000harr Asvot het Pla ee at the Table JEREMY P. TARCHER/PUTNAM a member of Penguin Putnam Inc. New York Another eo lan tege at the Avasbalre WITHDRAWN A Story of Shattered Childboods Redeemed by Love I= 2 VoVETTL if) CT f PB It At ropa i of koe Ge 8 ok ies Ah’?

{ { A Le eae Le, wir fad Wall Lob bot “AE AE KATHY HARRISON 3 1901 03057 4166 This is the story of my family — my birth children, my adoptive children, and the many other children who have joined our family, however briefly, over the years. My birth children and adoptive children are identified by their real first names.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: f1f8c2cb57f6e6e5
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 8,826,020 bytes (8.417 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• ISBN: 1585422002
• Pages: 249
• Language: English (en)

Reading & Word Statistics

• Estimated Reading Time: 347.03 minutes
• Total Words: 69,406
• Total Characters: 379,485
• Average Words per Page: 278.74
• Average Characters per Page: 1524.04

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