Be careful what you give children,
for sooner or later you are sure to get it back.
–Barbara Kingsolver
If you are here unfaithfully with us,
you are causing terrible damage.
–Jalal Al-Din Rumi
Not Their Fault1
I sat across from Brooke in my classroom, talking as we often had that year, when she abruptly blurted out that she had finally shared her secret with her mother.
“Did I tell you? I finally told my mom.” Brooke said.
“What did you tell her?” I asked, having a pretty good idea.
“Everything!” She gestured wildly. “We were in the car riding home from school yesterday, and I told her about how I had thought about killing myself and the stuff with my dad and how I hate my life and the night that I went with my friend over to that boy’s house when I wasn’t supposed to and how I normally never do stuff like; so why doesn’t she trust me…. Everything; I told her everything we’ve talked about.”
As usual, it all came pouring out in one emotional torrent, and I had to fight to keep my expression neutral. Having received more than a few of Brooke’s intense outpourings myself, I could imagine the scene in the car, and for a moment, I could feel a tiny speck of actual empathy for her mother. But only for a moment.
“So what happened after you told her?” I asked, keeping my tone as impartial as possible.
“Well, at first she just sat there in silence.” Brooke replied, agitated, and I nodded. “That’s a pretty big revelation to hear.” I told her.
“But then she started screaming at me!” Brooke shouted. “Yelling at me about how I’m such a thoughtless and selfish person and it’s no wonder I don’t have any real friends and how I should be grateful for all the opportunities and privileges I have and why don’t I try to be a better person like my sister is….” Her voice trailed off, and she just looked despondent.
As usual, I wanted to eviscerate the damn woman for not loving this child like she should, but what Brooke said next horrified me more.
“I mean I know she’s right.” Brooke continued, shaking her head and staring off into space. “I’m a selfish bitch. I gripe and complain all the time, and there’s all these people who have it so much worse than I do, and I should be grateful for what I have, and….”
I quietly but firmly interrupted.
“Brooke. Stop.” I insisted.
She complied but fidgeted silently in her chair. I waited, looking directly at her until she finally stopped and looked directly back at me. I spoke slowly and carefully.
“Do you understand that it is not your fault?” I asked her.
“Mmm?” She mumbled, looking puzzled.
“The way your mother treats you.” I stated. “It’s not your fault. You have done absolutely nothing to deserve her or anyone else’s abuse.”
Brooke looked shocked. “My mom doesn’t abuse me, Mr. Brock!” She protested.
I tried but couldn’t quite prevent the harsh and bitter laugh that escaped my throat.
“Brooke, some of the things you’ve told me your mom has done make me want to shudder.” I told her truthfully. “If we lived in a society that recognized emotional abuse the same way we recognize physical or sexual abuse, I would have hot-lined her six months ago.”
She looked stunned, and we both sat in silence while she digested what I’d said.
“She just attacked me.” She finally said, a growing sense of realization in her eyes. “I tell my mom that I almost kill myself two years ago and how much pain I’m in, and she screams at me about what a bad person I am.”
I could see the anger welling up in her and simply waited.
“Why didn’t she pull the car over yesterday?” Brooke suddenly demanded, gesturing wildly again. “Wouldn’t you have? How could she keep driving after what I told her?”
She got up and started to pace.
“She didn’t even slow down!” Brooke exclaimed bitterly. “Just glanced at me in the mirror and started yelling.”
Tears started to well up in her eyes as she stopped to watch my reaction to what she was saying, and then the proverbial damn broke.
“I’m telling her that I’ve thought about killing myself and how much I hate my life, and she acts like we’re just driving home like any other day!” She screamed. “God damn it, Mr. Brock, your mother is supposed to love you! My mom is supposed to love ME!!”
She sobbed and collapsed back into her chair.
“How could she love me and treat me the way she does?” Brooke wailed. “Why can’t she ever compliment me? Why does she always have to put me down and tell me what a horrible person I am?” She looked up at the ceiling and cursed. “Damn you! Why doesn’t she love me?! Why did you create me just to punish me all the time? What did I ever do to deserve such a shitty life?!”
She just buried her head in her arms then and bawled. I got up from where I was sitting to walk around the table and gently rested my hand on her shoulder.
As I had throughout that year, I felt again completely in over my head; so I simply let her weep. I had tried repeatedly to convince Brooke that it would be better if she were talking to a professional therapist and not her teacher, but while all the appropriate people at school knew–had in fact been told by Brooke herself with my encouragement–she seemed to refuse to talk with anyone but me. My principal and the school psychologist kept pointing out that that meant that she was at least talking. But as I listened because I cared, I also knew–because I cared–that the someone who should be listening should maybe be someone better at this than me.
Finally, the tears came to an end, and Brooke sniffled and lifted her head.
“God, I hate doing that in front of other people.” She said.
“Yes, you’ve told me that before.” I replied, smiling ever so slightly. “Every other time.” I patted her shoulder once and walked back around to my seat. “You clearly, though, have a need to cry.” I told her seriously. “And you obviously trust me enough to do it around me, or you wouldn’t keep coming back and doing it.”
Brooke glowered at the truth but nodded. She continued to sniffle and looked around for something to blow her nose.
I got up to go get the box of tissues, and because we had the kind of relationship where I could, I gently teased. “You’d think after all this time, I would know to just go get this.”
She snorted and gave me a “ha, ha” look and blew her nose. As she did so, I looked her right in the eyes and told her, “Don’t ever be ashamed to cry, Brooke. Crying is how we get the hurt out and start to heal and to get better. And from everything you’ve told me, you have a lot of hurting to get out.”
I took my seat again and studied how she was doing. She looked back and asked, despondently “Why doesn’t my mom love me like she’s supposed to, Mr. Brock?”
I studied her some more and shook my head.
“I don’t know, Brooke.” I answered truthfully. “Perhaps she can’t because of issues of her own; perhaps she doesn’t know how; perhaps no one’s ever loved her like she was supposed to be.”
Her eyes widened a little at that, as I’m sure she thought about her father.
“What I’m just challenging you to see,” I told her. “Is that love is not something you earn. It is a gift people give to us freely or not at all.”
She looked quizzical, and I continued.
“The way your mom treats you now.” I said. “And the way your dad used to is not a loving way to treat anyone. But it is also not something you did anything to ‘earn.’ You’re not being punished simply for being you–even though I know from my own childhood how much it can feel that way sometimes.”
She nodded in understanding, even if I wasn’t sure she believed me, and I paused, then, to emphasize my words.
“Remember, Brooke, no one ever ‘deserves’ how your family has treated you over the years and the kind of emotional pain you have endured. It…is…not…your…fault. And the good person you are must always remember that.”
She sniffled. “But it’s hard to do that when your mother is screaming at you.” She said.
“Yes,” I answered. “But the only way you’ll stop screaming at yourself is if you try.”
A Broken Vision
From its very beginning, I have known two entwined truths during my career that haunt me always and that my relationship with Brooke came to epitomize. The first is the validity of education’s old truism that the quality of learning is directly proportional to a society’s commitment to it–that where children know the adults in their lives are truly invested in them, they really will strive to rise to the highest of our expectations. As psychologist Lisa Damour puts it, “the most powerful force for good in a young person’s life is having a caring, working relationship with at least one loving adult.”2
But the second ugly truth I have learned is that ours is arguably the most child unfriendly culture in the modern world. When it comes to our investment in them, we declare quite clearly to our children just how important we really think they are: entertainment, consumerism, and self-aggrandizement–these are the ‘gods’ of our communities, and because they are about “me” and “now” while students and learning are about “thou” and “someday” (not exactly commensurable sets of ideas), the children in our society learn quickly just how valuable they truly are to the adults in their lives.
Look merely at how we prioritize our economic (let alone other) resources with respect to education. I could, of course, cite statistics on athlete salaries versus state education budgets, but I would rather make it more personal. At one of the first schools where I once taught, the annual budget for science in the early 1990s was $8,000 for 1,275 students–which sounds like a lot until broken down to $6.27 per child for the supplies needed to run our entire curriculum for the whole year. That’s right: $6.27 or three cents per child per day to purchase such “exotic” items as gumdrops and toothpicks to build molecular models ($3.50 in 1995 dollars for a single class period in a six-period day). Compare that expense with the $8 a typical movie ticket cost at that time, and in one evening, a family of four would spend enough money (not counting concession costs!) to have financed five! additional students at that school. When I think of how many students that hypothetical family’s monthly cable bill could have afforded back then, I wince.
Nor have things gotten better. Even as I write these words, the governor of my state is actively raising so-called “dark money” to fight the potential implementation of the educational reforms recommended by a commission he first actively supported—simply because it would involve the necessity to raise taxes. In spite of headlines that the 2019 public school ratings for the state show a further slide toward mediocrity, the leader of one of the wealthiest states in America has declared “war” on what he is calling the “Kirwan Tax Hike Commission,” and while the majority of Marylanders polled say they support additional taxes for education, I am either cynical enough or realistic enough to wonder what their response would be if informed that better schools might cost them their Netflix subscription.3 Even in the private sector of education where I have most recently worked, I had to rely on getting grants whenever I wanted to fund something truly state-of-the-art, and the bottom line is that the funding levels for education tell our children loud and clear what we think of them.
Money, though, is not the only coinage we don’t seem to want to expend on education: we don’t seem to want to make the necessary sacrifices to parent them either. It can be as simple as disrupting a child’s learning by taking him or her out of school for a family vacation that doesn’t coincide with a scheduled break simply because it’s more convenient for the adults. Or it can be as dramatic as unapologetically instigating legal action against a school for “daring” to punish self-admitted behavior such as cheating or downloading pornography off the school server.4 But from one extreme of the parental behavior spectrum in our current culture to the other, “the supports vital to child development are in sharp decline”5 in today’s society.
Moreover, drastic changes in technology since I first started working on this project have only made it worse. Today, “teenagers complain that parents don’t look up from their phones at dinner,”6 and “children describe in almost identical ways a sense that their parents are virtually missing in action.”7 Distracted supervision has actually put children at risk of physical injury, and “tech-centered parenting can look and feel to a child like having a narcissistic parent or an emotionally absent, psychologically neglectful one.”8 Put simply, parental support for child development is not just in decline; we now have a society potentially “growing into a world that no longer protects childhood”9 at all.
Quite rightly, then, do educational sociologists declare that “schools as theater [merely] reveal–in bold relief–the dissonance between…our societal claims that ‘children are our most precious resource’ and what we are actually willing to expend and sacrifice in order to assure their [successful maturation].”10 Furthermore, “if it takes a village to raise a child, [then] our children are knocking on a lot of doors where nobody seems to be [at] home, [and indeed, too many of education’s so-called stakeholders seem to] regard children as a sort of toxic-waste product: a necessary evil.”11
A necessary evil. Every time I reread these words I want to weep. They are words that should plague our very souls–especially those of us in schools where the threat of this broken and distorted vision entering our classrooms and our interactions with children is all too real. Students are already “marginalized people in our society…told that they have no experience worth having, no voice worth speaking, no future of any note, no significant role to play,”12 and in the daily demands and power hierarchies of the classroom, it can be tempting to maintain this peripheral status. The pressure to prepare kids for state tests and AP exams…the rush to cover the curriculum…the challenges of differentiated instruction in an increasingly heterogeneous society…even the natural estrangement that can arise from generational differences can all cause the most dedicated and caring teachers to start devaluing and distancing themselves from their students, treating them like obstacles to overcome rather than opportunities to share a journey. As a former student of mine once wrote on her end-of-year evaluation, “most teachers…only want to be doing other things and this shows through in their classes they teach.” While I have worked in education too long not to recognize how unduly skewed my ex-student’s comment likely is, the very fact that she could describe her twelve years of educational experience in this way at all should be a “wake up call” to us all.
Light a Candle 