Kids These Days

If I never have a child who shares my name, these, the children who share my heart, are mine. They are mine because I see them. I see their faces, their eyes, their souls. I see who they are when they hide behind bad-boy exteriors, tough-girl grins, brave faces, silliness, or silence. Some keep silent, afraid to let their mixed-up insides spill to the outside. Some play it cool so you’ll think they’re something they’re not, because they too are afraid.  When they don’t believe they can be good again, I do, because I see what even they have forgotten about themselves.

They are six or eight or ten years younger than me. They are my students, but they are my children too. These are the children who face hell every day, the ones no one remembers except to criticize and condemn them with phrases like “kids these days.” These kids hear it so often and spoken with so much disgust that soon they believe it too. But I don’t. I look into their eyes and see who they are, and more, who they can be.

At nine years old, he alone took care of his dying mother. His older brother, who had already married and moved away, never came back to help. After his adoption, he saw things about his homeland on the news, images of frightening destruction, and no one would or maybe no one could tell him why. He came here, as scared and alone as any boy. For a long time, he never smiled, he never asked questions. He didn’t know how to trust anymore. Slowly, slowly, as he learned about electrons jumping back and forth and laughed at my silly pictures of cells and trucks and dogs, he began to trust. Slowly, he started to learn that he didn’t have to fight alone. He started to smile back, and after a while, he started to smile first. Then his mom, who didn’t understand his fears, took him away again, and he had to start all over learning to trust.

One day she told me her story. “I was born addicted to heroin,” she said. “I have my birth mother to thank for that. And I grew up and there was a chemical imbalance in my brain and I got depressed and seven months ago I found my way to heroin and got addicted again. I was born a stillborn, but then my heart started beating at exactly 6:06. I used to think it was some big mistake. That I was never supposed to live and by some awful mistake my heart started working and my lungs too. But then, my therapist and other people more optimistic than me said I was never supposed to die and that’s why I lived.”

We read “Chicago” by Carl Sandburg and she told me the story of that city was her story too. “To me, this city is not only my home, but the place where I faced my worst nightmares and found that I was able to get through the night.” I told her to write. Don’t put me between your heart and the page. Just write, I told her. She wrote. She said, “If this world were faultless and absolutely perfect, no person would experience courage, strength, and success.” She smiled when she wrote that, for once feeling a little pride in herself. I smiled at her too, hoping she would remember this feeling, my heart pleading for her take this pride and bring it on her road to triumph.

The voices of my children drift down from my ears and into my heart. I hear them. I hear them crying out, afraid to be alone. “Can I have a pocket you?” she said. “Then whenever I am lost, I can pull you out and set you on the table and l can say ‘Amanda, help!’” Their voices sound familiar, ring of my own voice and the moments I find myself helpless, crying out for somebody bigger, stronger, wiser to take my hand too. Then I remember their words, their courage. I tighten my bootstraps and walk on.