Surviving What I Can’t Forgive

After living with me for eight months, my 17-year-old foster son, Clayton, ran away without warning. He left me a note saying he had gone to find his father in Texas.

When I first met Clayton — not his real name — he was in a temporary foster home. He’d been kicked out of another foster home the week before, and he had all his belongings in three garbage bags, which he loaded carefully into the back of my car like they were thin-shelled eggs threatening to break at any provocation. He was tall, but he hunched his shoulders and kept his head down, shrinking into himself. The Children, Youth, and Families Department had given me very little information about him; they didn’t tell me why he was in foster care. What I know, I would learn later from Clayton himself or police reports: his mother’s mental-health problems, the domestic violence between his parents, the house that went weeks without electricity because no one could afford to pay the bills.

“Should I sit in the front?” he asked me.

“Wherever you want.”

He sat in the front. He drummed his right heel anxiously against the floor mat.

I asked him generic questions while we drove the 20 minutes to my house: What kind of things did he like to do? Did he play sports? Like movies?

He looked at me like he was trying to figure out what I might want from him. If I’d told him the truth — that I wanted nothing from him — I doubt he would have believed me. “I’m not really good at small talk,” he said finally.

“Me neither,” I said. “You can tell me to shut up if you want.”

He laughed. At last, he looked relieved.

Over the next months, I tried to make him feel at home: I bought him new bedding and furniture and curtains. I put him on my car insurance and logged his driving hours so he could get his provisional license because he told me this was the one thing he wanted. I even gave him his own house key. At the time, I worked as an attorney representing children and young people in New Mexico, and one of my clients once told me, after she’d been thrown out of her seventh foster home, that this seemed like the ultimate sign of trust. I hoped Clayton would see it the same way.

I’d become a foster parent because I saw how badly equipped so many foster parents seemed and how badly my clients, particularly teenagers, were hurt by many of these adults who had promised to take care of them. What they needed was not an attorney but a home, I thought, and I figured I had the skills and the money to provide this, especially for older kids who were so often vilified.

I took the foster-parent-training classes, 24 hours spread over four Saturdays. I did the home inspection. I showed the social worker my fire extinguisher and first-aid kit. Before Clayton, I’d been a foster parent for a little over a year. I’d had mostly short-term placements, children who were returned quickly to their parents.

Clayton seemed content, happy. He hung out with his girlfriend. He watched superhero movies. He also lied constantly. When my landlord mentioned that Clayton had people over drinking beer while I was at work, Clayton told me that actually one of these people had shown up to demand money that Clayton owed him. “I told him to leave,” Clayton said. “But he just brought more people.” When his grades came at the end of the semester and he had two F’s and notes about his “lack of attendance,” he insisted, “I went to all those classes.” One teacher had it out for him, he said, and another just had bad eyesight and couldn’t see him in the back of the classroom.

I told myself that these were small things, not signs of danger. I would not be like other foster parents who might have demanded that Clayton leave their home. I hoped that once he realized I would not abandon him, Clayton would trust me, stop lying, and open up to me the way my teenage clients did.

Three months after Clayton ran away, someone dismantled the spare bedroom window in the middle of the night. I woke up in a hospital with no memory of what happened.

“Someone broke into your house and attacked you,” an ICU resident told me. My mother had found me, unconscious on my bedroom floor, face wrapped with duct tape, after I failed to show up for work. I had a new body, an ill-fitting suit. My limbs moved with the pace of glaciers. My tongue like mud, my words made shapeless as its muscle fibers. The damage to my brain, starved of air, was diffuse and far-ranging. Places I’d never heard of, places that controlled my balance, speech, movement, were ruined: basal ganglia, caudate nuclei. The doctors talked mostly to my mother, who, since I was single at the time, was my next of kin. “Hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy,” they said, which meant my brain was damaged because it had gone too long without oxygen. They had no way of knowing if I might recover. “Wait and see,” they said.

I waited through weeks in hospital rooms, a physical rehab center. “I’ll get better,” I said to friends over and over when they came to visit, my speech garbled. I had no reason to think this was true.

For months, my fork refused to settle easily between my thumb and fingers. I couldn’t remember how to place my feet to take a step. I spent hours on physical therapy exercises that left me nauseous, trying to recover some semblance of the body I’d had: I dug turquoise beads out of a hard lump of putty, I spun nuts onto screws, I flicked cotton balls across tabletops.

I got better. Not entirely, but enough that people could look at me and not see the damage. I moved to a new house. I went back to work. My hands worked well enough that I could again play my cello. I started a new relationship with another cellist, a professional, who was patient and caring. I could speak clearly most of the time and walk again. But I still grew tired quickly, lost my balance without warning.

My memory of that night never returned.

Nearly a year after I was attacked, the detective assigned to my case asked me to meet with him in his windowless office at the Sheriff’s Department. He didn’t tell me the reason for this meeting. Before this, I’d heard nothing from him for several months, and I hadn’t expected to. He’d told me at our last meeting that DNA results could take years, and, without my memory, all they had was DNA. “I’m going to show you something,” he said, once I was seated in his office.

He had a package, wrapped in brown paper, waiting for me on his gray metal desk. He put on black nitrile gloves. He cut the paper. Inside was a burgundy T-shirt, a man’s size. It was covered with dark stains and flecks of grass.

“Do you recognize this?” he asked.

I didn’t recognize it. I didn’t understand what it meant.

“Is it Clayton’s?”

“It looks like the kind of shirt Clayton would wear,” I said. Until that moment, I hadn’t really thought Clayton had done this.

This shirt had been wrapped around my kitchen knife, left in the middle of my living-room floor, the detective said. It was full of Clayton’s DNA. And there was more. Clayton’s DNA had been found in various places in my bedroom — his semen on my blanket, his skin cells in the crotch of my underwear. I felt not rage but confusion.

Before I was attacked, I believed I would have found it easy to forgive in a situation like this. If I had been asked to define forgiveness, I would have pointed to something like a feeling. A sense that I did not wish someone badly, that they no longer had any hold over my life.

I’d been representing children for six years at the time I took Clayton in. I’d gone to law school specifically for this purpose. My own family had been enmeshed in the legal system when I was a child, and no one had listened to me then. I wanted to find ways to make the system listen to children, to take them seriously.

Forgiveness was a word I’d thrown around carelessly in my work, on behalf of my clients. I represented young people who’d often done terrible things: broken their children’s bones, shot other people. They needed a system that would forgive, I said, that would not condemn them forever for what they’d done. They needed tools to become better parents, better community members, and that meant some acknowledgment that what they’d done could be overcome. I didn’t let myself consider that the harm they had done might not be overcomeable.

I would have made the same arguments on Clayton’s behalf that I made for many of my clients. Look at the facts of Clayton’s life: He was young, he was in foster care, he had likely been harmed many times.

I should say that I did not want to meet violence with more violence. But I did not feel this way. I wanted Clayton to go to prison.

I wanted him far away from me. And prison was the one way I could make that happen, at least for some period of time. So I let the police and the district attorney do what they did. I encouraged them. Clayton was arrested, charged with kidnapping, aggravated burglary, aggravated battery, and breaking and entering. He pleaded not guilty.

At his trial, I had family and friends seated with me in the rows behind the prosecution table. No one came to support Clayton. I felt guilty about this, but not guilty enough to tell people not to come. For five days, I went every day, all day. The trial felt like a gruesome accident that I couldn’t look away from. I also wanted the jury to see me, to remember this was my life on the line. Clayton testified for hours, claimed he had been forced by gang members to break into my house at gunpoint and attack me.

He swiveled in his chair. Sometimes he seemed to smirk. He wouldn’t look at me even though I kept my eyes on him. He took long pauses before he answered his attorney’s questions. His responses seemed muddled. About one of these gang members, he said, “I don’t really know that much about who he was, necessarily, or where he came from. But I knew he was a gang member.”

“And you didn’t know where the gun was other than in his hoodie at that time?” his attorney asked, and Clayton responded, “I didn’t know if he had it out or in his hoodie or I didn’t know.”

I didn’t believe any of it. I watched the jury shift and yawn, and I hoped they believed him as little as I did. When Clayton’s testimony was over, they went to deliberate. I spent the 45 minutes it took them to come to a guilty verdict in a Xanax haze.

After the trial, before sentencing, I thought about asking for some type of restorative-justice proceeding. It seemed like the kind of thing my pre-attack self would have done. But I had nothing more to offer Clayton — no more compassion, no forgiveness. I didn’t want an explanation or an apology from him. I suspected there was no explanation, that the gray void of my not-memory was closer to truth than anything Clayton might say. I suspected that, if given the chance to explain, Clayton would only tell another story, similar to the one he told at trial, about how this was not his fault. And I didn’t want to hear a story.

Clayton was sentenced to 27 years in prison.

I moved on, or tried to. I got a different job. I no longer represented children. I did policy work, analyzing legislation, writing recommendations to make courts fairer. I told myself that it was a job where I could make a difference, but it felt in many ways like a failure. It did not feel brave, and I was not sure it helped anyone. Not that I believed that I could anyway. My body still grew weak with fatigue at inopportune moments, when I had plans to go to my partner’s concerts or have drinks with friends. I still woke nightly in a gray space of panic. But I could do things I enjoyed: work, play the cello, write. I moved in with my partner. I told myself this was enough. I told myself that it didn’t matter that I found it hard to trust people.

The idea of forgiveness would not let me go. I wanted to find something that would allow me to forgive, because I thought it would help me erase this from my life. I could go back to the easy assumptions I’d made about the world: that everyone was redeemable, that everything could be overcome. For years, I read restorative-justice manuals, prison abolitionists. I read thought pieces; personal essays about people who had been nearly murdered; people whose parents, spouses, children had been murdered, who decided the way forward was to forgive. I Googled obsessively “crime violence forgiveness.” These stories seemed to have little relationship to what I felt.

The word forgiveness seemed like the yellow putty I was given in physical therapy, stretched until it was nothing but translucent strings.

In 2021, I learned about a juvenile-justice reform bill pending in the New Mexico legislature. This bill meant Clayton would be eligible for parole, not in 16 years, but five. I would not be free from him for the long time that I hoped I would be. Faced with this fact, I grew sick with panic. I lost days of work.

Many of the people advocating for this bill were people I’d worked with. They knew me, and they knew what had happened to me. Some had even come to my hospital room, to Clayton’s trial. But they did not return my calls when I left them messages saying I felt this bill was unfair, that it unsettled people’s expectations, that it had made me physically ill.

“You should look into forgiveness,” one of the few legislators who returned my calls told me.

That word came up many times in the legislative hearings that I livestreamed from my bed, my body a knot of migraines. “Forgiveness” meant I should move on, and hadn’t I done that? There were so many moments — when I was hiking up a rain-slicked mountain trail or wading through the chromatic passages in Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony — where I forgot entirely that Clayton had once tried to kill me. What I heard instead was that what happened to me did not matter, or at least that no one wanted to hear about it. They did not want to know that Clayton had wrapped my head with duct tape, left me for dead in my own shit and vomit. They wanted to believe, like I had once, that people could transform, that forgiveness was the magic word that could cause this transformation, and once it happened, past violence would be somehow erased.

Forgiveness in this context felt like an evasion, a way to shift the blame away from our society that could not figure out how to deal with violence. I could be blamed for what happened to me and to Clayton, because I could not forgive. Or maybe this was projection, born of my own guilt for the way I abandoned my principles so quickly when my life was at stake.

In 2023, eight years after that night in June 2015, the legislation passed. In its aftermath, I tried to think about Clayton himself and what I felt for him. He had receded in all the rhetoric. But I didn’t know what I felt about him. He was as inscrutable as the thing he had done. All I knew was that I could not say I forgave him.

I still can’t. The promises of forgiveness feel hollow to me. I will never fully move on. Even if forgiveness leads to apology or transformation, I don’t want these things. They feel meaningless to me. I don’t begrudge Clayton the opportunity to change. But that change wouldn’t undo what he did to me.

The only thing I can say with certainty is that I want Clayton to have nothing more to do with me. But Clayton will always be an opaque place in my life that I cannot move around. And I can’t change that no matter how much I want to, no matter what apology or explanation Clayton might offer, no matter what forgiveness might mean.

For many years, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I, too, needed to be forgiven, that I’d done something wrong. Maybe it was that I was unable to forgive Clayton, that my empathy had a hard limit when I wanted it to be boundless. I wanted some assurance that I was not in the wrong, that I had not made mistakes. I wanted a way to close this part of my life, put it away, and pretend it had not happened.

But, just as I can’t forgive Clayton, I can’t give myself these things. What I can give myself is not forgiveness but something more like acceptance. I can say these things happened, there is not an explanation or an ending. But I can still go on.