I was separated from my family when I was 10 years old. It was dark out. We had been celebrating Grammie’s birthday: aunts and uncles, cousins, a cookout on the big screen porch, a warm summer night. It had been perfect.

As everyone was leaving, hugging and kissing and saying good-bye, my mother said, “Susan. Go up to your room. Get the suitcase that’s on your bed and bring it down. You’re going with your Uncle Bud to see what it feels like to live on the other side of the tracks.” She sounded furious – with me, with everyone.

That anger penetrated my whole skeleton. The acrid smell of cigarette smoke filled Uncle Bud’s car as it punched through the night and the fireflies, on and on, to the little shack down the dirt road. I stayed awake on my cot all night, alert to the sound of the collie’s nails on the linoleum, to cousin Greg talking in his sleep.

Separations really mess with your head and your heart as a kid. You know you are to blame for making someone that angry. You don’t know how long it will last, or what it will take to make it end someday. And you don’t know why, which drives you crazy.

Ask children whose parents are going through a trial separation. It’s all the same. Why is this happening? What did I do to make them so mad? When will it be over? How do I get us back together?

It infuriates me to hear that the current administration in our country is referring to cleaving immigrant children from their parents as a separation. The federal government calculates that nearly 3,000 children have been “forcibly separated” from their parents at the border (NYT, 1/17/19). These children have been dispersed to shelters and foster care systems all over the country.

However, in addition to the numbers the government knows about, thousands upon thousands of children have disappeared. Records were not kept and do not exist for finding these children. Agencies have used dozens of data bases and searched tens of thousands of cases to try to locate children who were treated like empty boxes of cereal that could be tossed in the trash.

Separation is intended to keep apart elements of the same thing – like a family. When family members are separated, they are still a family, even under the worst of circumstances.

To cleave means to split something like kindling, lay it open and divide the one from the other. The severed parts have little to no chance of being joined together again. This administration, in drafting its policy of cleaving children from their parents, displayed a profound ignorance about the irrevocable damage that would be done to so many children. If it wasn’t ignorance, it was heartless cruelty.

My separation lasted for three weeks. Many years later, talking it over with my aunts and uncles, we were able to find a compassionate reason for the separation. My mother had been caring for her mother in our home for several years. Grammie had cancer and had been getting sicker and sicker, sometimes requiring round-the clock care. My mother was exhausted.

She may have gone about it all wrong, and with cruelty. She may have had regrets. But she never intended for it to be permanent. She always knew where I was and that I was in good hands. I knew, even in my heartsick state, that I would someday go back home to my own family.

This is not the case with the immigrant families we have destroyed at the border.