The Old Modus

There’s not a lot (that’s positive,) that I remember, outside of that which was captured by film. Little girls standing so eagerly next to each other on bikes or with hair-sprayed bangs or resentfully basking in her beauty. I don’t know what happened, maybe mostly because I don’t remember anything aside from this. When it was bad it was bad and when it was good you waited with teeth gritted wondering when you’d wake up to a little girl screaming because her mom was gone, or desperately trying to signal to you in her way at eleven years old that all was not ok. But first,

She called me and said she wanted to visit and I was already all alone down there -- not lonely; alone -- and I thought,

Like a lamb,

How wonderful, and how wonderful. Maybe it’s an opportunity, finally, to bond.

And she arrived and it was wonderful, for awhile. We went to my favorite bar for the live music and laughed and danced and made grand gestures toward the musicians and she told me she had to meet up with a friend and that friend was Jack Cooper and that was the last time that I saw her that entire weekend. And all at once the whole thing was clear, laid bare.

You just grow stronger, at the broken places. You decide about the things that you have control over and the things that you don’t and you make a plan for your life and you move forward. What else is there? Maybe we could stack our disappointments up against each other, like cord wood. Maybe we’d see similarity and feel some moribund kinship; maybe the stacks would be irrevocably different and highlight whatever fissure started back before Jack Cooper thought to creep through a first floor window. Whatever the result, there’s a choice that I made, that you didn’t, that makes all the difference. A choice that makes moot any further need to operate like an overgrown and misunderstood teenager.

He cried in the backseat two weeks before the start of third grade and it took every fiber of strength within me to not cry right along with him. I couldn’t understand what was wrong but that red face slick with tears and terror told a story of malaise; a distrust of change. You give up the right, when you have children, to continue to be a selfish person. To continue to be wrapped up in and controlled by your mental illness, if that’s what it is. If it harms you, it doesn’t just harm you. Imagine. Imagine mom on the floor, skull cracked open, almost dead. Imagine! The doctor said, “she is very very very very very lucky to be alive.”

My innocence would make me weep. My wish for them: to have been born the sons of a female shark. For you: gnosis.

Among the Quadi at the Granua

The paperwork on him didn’t look good, but it so rarely did with foster children. “Does not get along well with peers,” it offered, along with a host of recorded suspensions and other disciplinary infractions. He was 13 with the body of a potential NFL rushing back and they’d decided to hold him back in the 4^th grade. For the third time. During the school  year in which both his mom and dad entered jail for drug related offenses. Usually one of them was able to keep their nose clean enough to retain custody of the child, but obviously things were on a downturn.

“Who knows what he was able to get away with in Cleveland,” one of his soon-to-be teachers mused when I talked with her the day before he was to start. I found myself surrounded by a group of four of them, and somehow they already knew everything that his file had to say.  I’d been there to deliver the dates for our state testing for the year (which was received with grimacing, moaning, general obstreperousness) and didn’t anticipate this diatribe about our new boy. About whom I, in actuality, knew nothing. About whom none of us did.

“And again,” she always started this way but it was never any clearer to what she was referring, “here we are, supposed to take this kid in like it’s just going to be fine, like he’s not going to just cause problems and potentially hurt someone. I’m sorry, but this is ridiculous.”

If you were 13 years old, and your parents put drugs before you, and you’d bounced around the system a bit, and you were in school with 10 and 11 year olds and you found it all to be utterly ridiculous, and then you started in a new place that truly should be a fresh start with a foster family that hopefully chose you because they felt that they could help, and before they even met you (they’d only read the file) this is what your teachers said –

As a 39 year old with a Masters Degree, even I didn’t know how to respond. Or react. So I went into my comfort zone and left awkwardly as I do, and there has been a considerable distance and continued awkwardness since. But not without a remark that was perhaps as troubling as the first:

“You know, that kid really turned out to be so nice. He was drawing so quietly in class and said he wanted to continue it at home and he came up so funnily and sweetly next to me in the hall and and and.”  Imagine. If your whole life was written in a few paragraphs of legalese and disciplinary summarization and your whole future was predicated upon the opinion of those who were charged with educating you, mentoring you. Those who had already sat around the table, mouths full with your story, before they'd even known you.  We work for God! We are not Him. There is so much that I don’t understand, but that at least is axiomatic.

And so I withdraw, and it becomes awkward. There is this really narrow sliver in which I fit, and I’ve learned to become very happy with it, in my core; I guess my charge is to become outwardly OK with it. To stop the comparison. To stop worrying about others’ estimation of me. I know what my job is, and I know that I’m damn talented at it. Their life is not my life. I tell this all the time to the kids, it’s ridiculous that it’s not as easily applied to my own situation: the number of friends that one has is not nearly an equal a measure to the quality. 

"Zeus, bring down the rains

on the plains and the fields of Athens,"

A prayer that simple, or none at all.