Orphan's Home

I wept at the end of Part 1 of Horton Foote's Orphans' Home Cycle on Saturday. The streaming tears from my front row seat heralded the bowing cast with more poignance than my feeble claps. I unwittingly surrendered to the dramatic moment and lacked the strength to stand.

The Orphan's Home Cycle is comprised of nine full-length plays written over decades recently whittled to a nine-hour series exploring the early life of Horace Robedeaux. The death of Horace's alcoholic father at age 12 and the absence of his mother due to his step-father's refusal to allow Horace in their home shapes his character and informs every aspect of his journey to and through adulthood. Part 1 concludes when Horace is a young adult visiting his mother in Houston for the first time and culminates in his realization that he is entirely alone in the world and will have no one to help him forge his way.

Refusal. Rejection. No childhood home. Orphaned with living parents. I know these. I've navigated the estuaries of self-reliance and parental disassociation. I've felt the burden of needing shelter from mothers and fathers whose own fragility and cowardice and instability banish children to the arms of strangers.

But I did not weep for me. I am blessed with an inner fortitude and will to survive. I have the skill to bind up wounds so they leave no trace when they heal. My outburst registered the pain of the children unprepared and unable to weather the frosty climate of homes with step-parents eager to bar the door and the complicity of parents who ship their children off with neither a key nor return postage.

Horace found his way. And so did I. But many don't. They find solace in drugs, alcohol, emotional barrenness. And unfortunately, they too have children. And become step-parents of other people's children. And the cycle continues. More parented orphans in need of home.