SILENT NO MORE
The story behind The Advocate and the series that made it necessary.
THE ADVOCATE — THE GAP SERIES
Introductory Post — Silent No More
By Terry Marquardt
The Advocate and The Pussy Toe Fields.
It came to me in a dream.
Not the kind that arrives with trumpets and revelation. The ordinary kind — the ones that wake you at 3am with your heart pounding, not wanting to go back to sleep, fearing it will start where it left off. I have a history of weird, twisted, vivid dreams. And I never watch horror movies because of that.
This dream though, it hit me hard. I knew instantly it was a book.
In the dream, my oldest son had a relationship from which he gave me three beautiful grandbabies.
I was watching the children at my house when I received a phone call from the mother telling me she was coming to pick them up. When I told the children they started crying. They did not want to leave. They did not want to go back with her.
She was a meth addict who would leave the kids for days. Sometimes weeks. No call. No warning. Just gone. Then she would just come back like nothing was wrong.
In my dream I knew why they didn’t want to go home with her. I also knew there was nothing I could do about it — legally.
She had rights. The court system looked at legal precedence, not moral. I knew my grandchildren would be subject to whatever impulse she had next — and that could put them in very dangerous places. My grandchildren were justifiably terrified.
In my dream, my grandkids were not going to live in fear. There was only one true way I could protect them. Only one thing with absolute clarity.
I had to kill her.
That’s where the dream ended.
Like I said, I woke up in a panic. It was like I had actually lived it. I was afraid for my son, my grandbabies. I was mortified with what I had done.
I also woke up with an absolute conviction. This is when I met Evelyn and started writing The Advocate.
I am in no way saying Evelyn handles abuse correctly. I am in no way saying harming another human being is okay. I am not promoting murder.
I am, however, promoting child advocacy.
That dream came from a deeper part of me. Not some movie I watched or book I read before going to sleep.
It came from my first story. My autobiography.
It came from Hamilton, Montana, Easter Sunday 1999. A phone call at 6am. My father’s wife Karen — a woman who never called, who never sugarcoated anything — on the other end of the line telling me that my cousin Brandy had wrecked her car at 130 miles an hour on a dark road, and that my brother Joe and her brother Tim were dead because of it.
I drove four hours with my brothers to get to the hospital where my cousin was and fell to my knees on a linoleum floor and didn’t know yet how to get back up.
Joe was my brother. He was gone. And the woman who had been my shadow since childhood, my best friend, the person who knew every secret I had ever whispered — she was behind a curtain, alive, hooked to machines, carrying something she would carry for the rest of her life.
I had already lived enough by then to know that grief was not the worst thing. I had grown up in poverty and alcoholism and abuse that started when I was four years old. I graduated from an alternative high school in Coeur d’Alene and moved to Hamilton at eighteen looking for something different and found mostly more of the same. I had gotten pregnant at nineteen by a man who was already gone. I drove out of Montana at six in the morning on the Fourth of July 1994 — four months pregnant, $400 in my pocket, no destination, no plan — through Reno, San Diego, and ending in Dayton, Ohio.
The drive was a bridge though. I had no idea what was on the other side. I knew giving my baby up for adoption was an absolute necessity. I also knew I had no idea how to do that. So I started praying. If you’re real, and you’re creating this baby, you better find her a home.
On the other side of that bridge was a place where I would change. I gave my daughter Katie up for adoption in October of 1993. I held her once. I prayed over her. I kissed her. I told her I loved her. And I told her I was letting her go because she deserved parents who would protect and love her — a life I didn’t yet know how to give her.
That decision did not break me. It saved me. She saved me.
Years after giving her up I got a job as a CNA — in all places, a children’s hospital ICU.
And it is there where I fell in love with children. Not sentimentally. Not in a sweet, charming way. I fell in love with their specific gravity. Their honesty. The way they looked at you and either trusted you or didn’t and never pretended otherwise. The way they fought so hard with so little and asked so little in return.
Shortly thereafter I moved back to Idaho where I continued working with children at a Spokane hospital.
I had my first baby in 2001. Then Hunter came in 2002. Two boys. My own babies. Falling in love is inadequate to describe how I felt. I didn’t fall. I had finally come alive enough to see what true love was.
That changed me again. Going back to work on the pediatric floor was different. Working pediatrics when you have children of your own is a particular kind of weight — you cannot look at a sick child without seeing your own, and you cannot unknow the bond that a mother has with her children and children with their mother. It is cellular. It can’t be broken — or so I naively thought.
Then I had my Timothy experience. A child came in, again, failure to thrive. No parents. No family. Something in me broke and I lost it on one of my coworkers — but realizing I was wrong, I apologized and took a small break from work.
Somehow I found myself volunteering to teach CPR and First Aid at a women’s treatment center. There I heard stories I have never fully put down. Women who loved their children and destroyed them anyway. Women who were destroyed themselves and had no idea how to stop the cycle. Women who were trying so hard in systems that were not built to catch them.
I have been writing for most of my life. It has always been a passion — the only place where I could put things down and look at them clearly without flinching. And of the thousands of dreams I have had, this dream is the only one I have ever written about.
My first book was about my experience with Katie.
It was that experience that changed me. A particular woman of God showed me how to be a lady. I fell in love with God, his people, and my faith. I lived that for 26 years until I experienced and saw things in the world that changed me again.
I am agnostic now. I still hold deep respect for people of faith. I know the depth of that love and the power, peace, and hope it can give you. But for me now — I see things differently. Some things you just can’t unsee.
I am not mentioning this to disavow the woman I was. I was deeply in love with my faith, and am very thankful for having experienced it. That woman was real. That faith was real. It carried me through things I could not have survived otherwise.
In fact it has given me a fearlessness to confront injustices.
What I believe now is simpler and harder than anything I believed before.
I believe children deserve protection.
I believe the systems we have built to protect them are failing — not always from malice, not always from negligence, but from design. From fragmentation. From the particular way institutions process what they can see and lose what they cannot.
I believe someone has to keep looking even when the system has stopped.
That belief is where Evelyn comes from. That belief is where this blog comes from.
The Gap is what I call the space between what children need and what they receive.
It is not empty. That is the lie we tell ourselves — that the gap is an absence, an oversight, a failure of attention. The gap is crowded. It is full of forms and reports and pending assessments and improvement opportunities and caseworkers with impossible caseloads and judges making decisions with incomplete information and systems that do not talk to each other across county lines or state lines or the invisible borders between jurisdictions.
Children fall into it not because no one is watching.
Because everyone is watching a different piece.
In this series I am going to ask questions that provoke thought and hopefully action.
I am going to write about cases that fell into The Gap. Some happened in Washington state. Some in Idaho. All of them local, all of them in the Pacific Northwest. Some you might have heard about. Most I had not heard about until I started researching for this book. And when I did, I was provoked. Provoked to ask why.
Why have I not heard about this in the news?
Why is this not being talked about?
What happened to the abusers?
What did our local government do to protect or punish?
The silence is deafening. It has caused us to not hear anything at all. It is costing our society, our communities, our families, and our children — walking straight into traffic because we can’t hear the warning.
I am not remaining silent anymore.
I am speaking out about The Gap — the place where children are lost.
What is hidden will come to light.
The only question is who decides how.
Next in The Gap series: Meela Rose Miller. Eight years old. Airway Heights, Washington — nine miles from downtown Spokane. Twelve calls were made. Four CPS intakes. All screened out. An officer saw her breathing under a blanket and left. She weighed 26 pounds when they found her. Her body was in a U-Haul.