Kim Michele Richardson's memoir, "The Unbreakable Child"

In reading Kim Michele Richardson's memoir, "The Unbreakable Child".

There are times when a story touches me at one, two, or three in the morning, darkness takes on a silence that echoes white noise in my ears, full of thoughts of the people, the characters and their stories, they make me write what I hear...  

Life, Love, and Forgiveness

Life is but a testing ground, a bleached quadrant of earth where souls gather and spew a heritage of worth and pain  

Love intervenes where hate dominates

Life lingers, life goes on, life, the hearth where fire mounts the hills before gravity can pull the warmth away from the soul  

Love carries the flame to the highest peak, and forgiveness takes the burden of truth and radiates

…..To Chapter #3 and already I’m touched beyond measure. My own memories are surfacing. I want to say I can't imagine Kim's struggles in telling her harrowing story, but I can, minutely, I can.

I sat in that deposition, I knew the cold sweat that permeates, the nausea...I felt the frustration, no words...the anger...the indignation...the disorientation, not knowing the way home...   

I see Kimmi, a little girl...A defenseless child. I was also that defenseless child….As I read on last night, my heart broke in a thousand pieces, a thousand years ago...rendering me to tears. I wept for that child of three, of four, of five, six, seven, eight, nine and ten….when will it come to an end?

I heard that voice, don’t cry...if you do, I’ll give you something to cry about...I heard those words, I felt the pain.  I stopped crying.  As an adult, I had to be taught, to learn all over again how to cry.  Six years in psychotherapy...no pills.  Depression was my nightmare, the monster that eats away at your soul.

The nun that beat Kim, Sister Charlie, I asked...how can anyone call themselves by name a representative of God? Or even the human race! This woman was so filled with hate...she was a psychological mess who belonged in an asylum of another nature! How in the world Kim survived in one piece…

...reading further...how in the world Kim survived her abuse as a child at the hands of these Nuns and a rape by a Priest, physically or psychologically, I don't know.  

On the front of the book it reads, “A story about forgiving the unforgivable.”  

True stories are sometimes hard to write, I’ve tried and failed.  The courage it took Kim to write her story, and to relive each moment over and over in her mind and in front of strangers, takes a courage I don’t posses.

I praise her revelations of what transpired in this Catholic orphanage, one not even a scene from a horror story could depict.  I praise Kim for her loving and kind heart.  Even though I don’t know her on a personal level, I hear her voice, the inner child, the adult with the wisdom to carry on, to laugh, to change the world, to love, and most of all to have the courage to forgive.  I love her for who she is.