He was smart, maybe too smart for his own good. He was a listener from a very young age and he thought he understood. He listened because he thought he should, because the tension was there in front of him, being served up daily like his morning cereal. He never thought to go to another room, to hide his self from his parents’ unhappiness. Instead he listened and felt like he was pulling a wagon people were shoveling dirt into, making it impossible to move in any direction.
The problem was probably his intelligence combined with enormous feeling. It would have been easier if he didn’t think so much about why his parents were unhappy or why kids were mean at school or why adults were careless with him and how no one did anything when it was obvious something needed doing.
At first he tried to help his parents see that fighting made them unhappy, and his teachers see that that children were being excluded at recess and not just him. But they nodded dismissively and said, “don’t worry, we’ll handle it,” and they never did.
Instead of getting lost in video games, he worried about why adults weren’t better at being adults. And if adults couldn’t do something, who could, because there was no one else besides kids and adults, he thought. I suppose he might say, if he could articulate his feelings without adult prompting, he felt unsafe, which made him weary, which made him not trust, but no one asked him how he felt and he certainly didn’t think to tell anyone anyway.
At school, he knew he was on his own. Homework was easy and always would be. The real problem was he didn’t have friends. There was no one to play with during recess. The other boys controlled the football and threw to the kids they liked. Every time the ball didn’t come his way, he felt a pain in his head, like they were hitting him even though they weren’t. He looked at the adults looking like everything was fine and instead of asking for help, he told them he felt sick and they sent him to the nurses office.
His strong thinking and feeling moved unobserved through the grades and by 6th grade, a hard crust replaced his once soft malleability; his hard understanding of how the world worked made permanent grooves in his pliant brain.
By 10, his thinking made so much sense; he started to grow a turtle’s shell, a shell strong enough to last his lifetime.
This is so sad. It does make me feel a lot better about Americorps programs like City Year though. The value of these programs are in the small interactions with kids, providing positive attention and support. Was this taken from a real account? Either way, powerful.