the Song of Psalms

Psalms is a three-year-old boy who is with his two sisters being raised by their maternal grandmother Dawn. His story is an eyesore for many and yet too familiar for areas struck by the opioid crisis, unemployment, and lack of opportunities. Psalms' mother, Devin, battling with bipolar disease and reappearing gripping addiction, keeps disappearing out of his life, sometimes for months at the time. His father, Sean, just got out of jail after serving two years and wants to give his best for his only son from now on. Not an ideal family by many standards, yet this "inconvenient" situation and truth exist and is a reality for thousands of families. Their voices are most often judged, labeled, and ignored; as a community, they are not acknowledged in any possible positive way. Kids born into these complex families and surroundings have to battle with a difficult childhood and learn to feel shame about being different from an early age. In our collective unwillingness to look at these existing root problems, we become accomplices to the crime of ignorance and indifference, simultaneously feeding into a perpetual cycle of poverty with its resulting and life lasting traumas and detriments. Families, like Psalms, are not how we desire to define and see this concept represented, yet for Psalms' this IS his family. He is too young to understand these complexities of life, but he is old enough to desire the feeling of belonging to his family and society.