Monkey in the Middle

By: Ruth Ann Runyon

There used to be a game of toss that was played in bygone days, where the children would select a “monkey” who had to stand in the middle of the playing field while the rest of the children surrounded him and threw a ball over his head to another child on the opposite side. The only way out of being the “monkey” was to somehow jump and catch the ball. If you were small and other children were larger than you, most of the time you were in the middle and the longer you were there the more you were taunted and ridiculed and made sport of. This is a lonely place for a child to be. You want to play with others but you know that it will lead to humiliation and so you just say that you don’t like that game.
There is a game that is being played today, it is called divorce, and more and more people are playing it. In this game also, there is a “monkey” in the middle. This game is being played out all across this country. These little “monkeys” are not big enough to ever get out of the middle. Their days are spent trying to catch the attention that is being thrown back and forth from one adult to another, and their nights are spent trying to fix the problem of being too small to matter to anyone.
Custody is tossed back and forth for a long time and the monkey catches nothing, for you sees no matter which of the adults wins, the monkey loses. Daddy’s gone away and Mamma has to go to work because Daddy doesn’t want any of his child support money to help Mamma in any way. Now the little Monkey has lost Momma, too. He now has to stay with strangers all day and at night Momma has to study for a better job so she has no time to be Momma any more.
Months go by and Daddy comes less and less. Monkey decides that Daddy must not love him anymore because of something he had done or said. Maybe he should have played the game better or maybe he should have been bigger, then maybe Daddy would have loved him better. Then he starts to get angry, mostly with himself. Momma’s busy working, trying to make ends meet and Monkey is alone most of the time, the people who are with him most of the day could really care less about him as a person, he is money in their pocket. At home the TV and video games are his friends as he goes deeper into the depression that began when Momma and Daddy started to play the game.
Years go by, nobody knows where Daddy is. Some say he found another wife and has children that he loves more than Monkey. Momma has remarried to a man that has his own children and Monkey is just a troublemaker anyway. So Monkey sits in his room, he doesn’t care about the game any more. He wants nothing more than to get through this game of life, he is tired of jumping for the ball, maybe somewhere out there in the unknown dark universe there is someone that will love him for who he is.