Jack Brennan Perspectives

Note: As I quoted Rod Stewart’s line in his song, “Mandolin Wind,” in another context: “Oh, the snow fell without a break….Through the coldest winter in almost fourteen years…” Having a school kid at home, when school is cancelled on even the rumors of snow, has made this the winter from hell for me. Sadly, the blog took a four month hit as a result. But I’m back now. Maybe even bigger and better?

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God and I do not agree on the way He has created the world. I realize He wins, and I lose…. but I believe what I believe anyway. Were it I who created the world, I’d have at least allowed the dead to come back – say, once a year – just to pick up the conversation, in the light of all the experience I’d have had since they died. Sadly, God doesn’t work that way. I plan on discussing that with Him, among all the other things on my list, when I die.

But if He did, I would bring Aunt Rita and Msgr. Huntington back in a flash. The two people whose conversations and witness gave me more ability to think and put it together than I’ve ever received from anyone else on the face of this earth. There are times when I miss each of them almost to the point of pain. This blog, as I’ve said before (repeatedly, I know) is in honor of each of them.

Aunt Rita, unwittingly I think, once gave me one of the most powerful lessons of my life. She told me that when she was a kid – during the depression – she was poor. But, she said, that she never knew that. She thought that the way she lived was normal. Our whole family lived as she did; all the neighbors lived as she did; and there was no TV to show anyone anything else. It takes – I learned and never forgot –  contrast to recognize where one’s experience fits in the scheme of things.

Over the past few weeks, I have been involved in conversation with a boy, now fourteen, who was given up by his adoptive parents, when he was ten. His behavior was out-of-hand. It’s a story one sees too often when working at an adoption agency, as a new family is sought for these kids.

This particular boy, call him Joey, over the course of time has been slowly revealing stories about what happened in the house. Things he didn’t like; things that hurt his heart. They were done to him in response to his behavior, which he recognized as “bad,” so he accepted that he deserved them. Pretty typical thinking for a kid.

Two of his stories are enough, I think, to reveal the truth of what he was in the midst of.

The first happened at some Christmas when he was not yet ten. While all the other kids in the family had a normal Christmas, he received only coal as a present. That was it. He told me that he cried and cried and cried and finally his adoptive mom called Santa and Santa delivered presents the next day.

Now, threatening one’s kids or getting threatened with getting coal in their Christmas stocking is a common experience for those who celebrate Christmas. It’s implied even in the Christmas standard: “Santa Claus is Coming To Town.” Why else start with “You better watch out; you better not cry; better not pout; I’m telling you why….” But in all my 63 years, I have never known anyone who really did it, except perhaps, and only as a joke, wrapping a piece of charcoal and putting it – with all the other presents – in a stocking. You can’t even find it in the movies or the cartoons, as I remember. It’s a threat no one EVER acts on.

The second was when Joey revealed that there were family photos on the walls in the house. But his adoptive mother would take paper and cover over the images of him. What???? And doing that to your child? Who was less than ten? In front of his siblings? And whomever walked through the door?

My grandmother, and separately my great-aunt on the other side of the family, used to cut out from their family pictures the photos of some relative they were on the outs with. I had no idea what that was supposed to do, except express their anger at the cut-out person, and I always found it funny. But that was not this.

In both situations that happened to Joey, it was done in front of the other kids and relatives (humiliation) and it was done by his mother (I don’t even have a word for that.)

What Joey did not know until he revealed these stories, is that this woman was not only wrong – she was wrong to the point of evil. Where her thinking came from I don’t care. What she did to her son was evil.   She did it, she told him, because of his behavior. He saw the behavior, he accepted the logic, and he blamed himself. He has been, in his head and for his whole life, a bad person.

But this posting isn’t just about that. It’s also about Joey’s father. The man didn’t participate in any of this – this wasn’t some version of “Bonnie and Clyde” or one of those torturing couples one sees on “Criminal Minds.” No, he was worse. He stood by and allowed his wife to do what she did to a boy who, after all, was his son. He went along with her soul-stealing behavior. Aunt Rita would say, that he did that because it was easier. Yep, the true mark of a wimp.

All this left Joey no out; no way to measure how depersonalizing his mother’s behavior was. Mom did it; dad, by his silence, allowed it. Joey, in his normal human drive for health and wholeness, had no choice but to act out in order to stand up to this torture of being depersonalized by one’s own parents (after, and on top of, his infant experience of being given up by his birth parents). But the acting out was labeled “bad”, he believed that was so, and that made him convinced that he was a bad person.

Which brings us to today. For a fourteen year old to grasp the concept that his being bad was good; that being bad saved your sanity and your soul from this soul-thief of a mother, is very difficult. But in the end it is what will free him from the horror of his history.

My experience was very different than Joey’s. I saw both Aunt Rita and Chris Huntington stand up to wrongness wherever they witnessed it. I saw it. They gave me what Joey’s father did not give him: not only perspective and hope, but through their witness, they gave me myself.   Joey’s mother was a sick woman to my eyes. But his father did much worse by Joey.

Wimps always do. Without the wimps, the evil-doers don’t get very far.  And I suspect that hell is less filled with the evil-doers, than it is with the wimps.

In the end, Joey is a very lucky boy to have learned at his age what he’s learned about how soul thieves and their enablers work. I suspect God has great things in store for this boy. And that is lucky for us.

Jack

Ordinarily, I am in bed by 10, as I have to get up at 5:30 because my grandson has to leave for the bus at 6:20.  But last night, watching a recording of the “Soul Train Awards” which were honoring Dionne Warwick, whose music from fifty years ago I still love listening to, I decided to stay up to finish the show.  I could have skipped ahead to the Dionne part, but knew that if I did, I’d never go back to watch the rest of the show.  Nor would I ever delete it from the DVR, until I had watched it all.  So I stayed up.

It was just about 11 when the show was over and then my cell phone rang.  I most certainly had to get to bed now, but I recognized the area code as being from Long Island, well within the catchment area of my agency, and I am, after all, the executive director.  So I answered.

And it turned out to be one of the now-grown kids whom we had placed for adoption maybe ten or twelve years ago.  He had gotten my phone number from the agency website apparently.  I recognized his name immediately as I was his transition worker way back when.

He apologized for calling so late. He told me that he was sitting on a park bench with his “fiancée” and they had no place to go.  He said that he had tried everything he could think of to get help and that I was the last idea he had. His family had moved to a town very far away and though he’d gone with them, he’d come back to Long Island on his own.  Now he was homeless and he was cold.  “Cold?” It was 8 degrees in my yard. This is the weather that one dies from.

I asked him about relatives of his or the girlfriend; I asked about shelters; about going to the police; about going into the hospital – all just to get out of the cold.  He told me that he had tried all of that and the responses he told me that they had given him seemed bureaucratically plausible.  He wasn’t asking for money. He wasn’t asking for anything but help. There is no doubt that this kid has issues; he always did.  I could easily see his adoptive family throwing their hands up when he crossed into adulthood and still did nothing productive for himself.  I’ve been there. Sometimes you think that the shock of not being supported anymore will force these now-adults to wake up, to grow up, to DO something.  Sometimes, in other worlds than his,  it might; but sometimes, in too many worlds for too many kids,  it doesn’t.  What did it matter?  It was now 7 degrees.

I went on the Internet looking for walk-in shelters.   I could find nothing.  But one of the sites said that if you needed a place in an emergency to go to the emergency room and the hospital would let you stay overnight.  I got back on the phone and told this young man that in the end, that’s what he would have to do, and he could tell them to call me if they disagreed. It was simply too cold to stay outside tonight.

It was killing me that I had no viable solution. But I had none other than the hospital.  Staying on the phone was just using up his battery. So, I told him again to go there; I got off the phone; and I went to get ready for bed, and then I thought, “What about him going to a motel, and I’d pay for it by credit card from here (110 miles away).  I called him back and he told me that he had tried that with an aunt but that the motel only took cash.  What?  I said I’d call. Sure enough: cash only. Must be quite the dive.

Anyway, to make a still longer story shorter, we found a motel in the next town. I paid for two nights using Chocolate Milk Club funds [http://familyfocusadoption.org/thechocolatemilkclub.html]. I called him back, and told him to go there – they were going to walk – and spend today dealing with DSS.  I hung up and finally went to bed.  It was near midnight.

But more importantly:

It was now 6 degrees.

We need to do better than this.

Jack

I was having a conversation the other day with a man who has a long history in twelve step programs. He told me that as a result of that history, he lives in his “own little bubble.”  I started to laugh and told him that we all live in our own little bubbles.  We do what we know.  We know what we’ve been taught, or more accurately, what we’ve learned from our own experience and our perspective on that experience.  What’s outside our bubble we are more or less blind to.

I have seen this attributed to some anonymous person in AA, but also to Einstein: the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results.  We are clearly not getting the results we want and expect with what we do with our foster children.  Too many are walking around their entire adult lives, stuck.  For all our therapy and all our pills, and all our supposed knowledge, we are obviously doing something wrong with kids who through no fault of their own, end up in the system.  How do we figure out what that is? 

The first step is to recognize that our experience is not the same as a kid placed into foster care.  We don’t know what it does to the kids when they lose everything. Our “own little bubbles” are very different from theirs.  I had a former foster kid once tell me that I didn’t get it: “I lost EVERYTHING, “ he told me.  He was right. I was kicked out of college the first time I went; I have lost a job here or there; I have buried many family members whom I loved and still miss; I have even buried four of my kids.  Every loss hurt – many still do – but I never lost everything. Ever. I think that today the citizens of the Philippines would be able to identify with that man beyond anything I ever could.

Recently I had a young (11) boy in foster care tell me that it was understandable why his aunt and uncle didn’t keep him.  After all, he said, “They had their jobs, they had me, they had my sister, and  (he emphasized) they had all the pets to take care of.”  As though it were perfectly obvious to the world that he was the obvious candidate to be dumped. Pets vs. me? No question.

I have been looking at safety this week.  And I realize that I have missed the boat on that subject my whole working life.  Oh, I’m good at picking up things that others miss; I know a lot about keeping kids safe.  But it’s all relative isn’t it?  A forty on an exam beats a twenty. But they are both failing. 

How on earth could I keep the citizens of the Philippines safe this week?  I couldn’t. I wouldn’t even know how to begin.  Yet, I and my fellow workers in the foster care system, especially in the world of foster care adoption, assume that we know how to do it with these kids?  Whose experience, whose bubbles, are as far from our experience as our experience is from the people in the Philippines.

It is the worst kind of arrogance, isn’t it: when one doesn’t even suspect that one is arrogant?

Jack

Over the past few months, I have come to the realization that I still don’t get it when it comes to our kids who end up in foster care, especially institutions.  The depth of their fear and the horror of their experience of being essentially left to fend for themselves, even those who do have family, I have apparently glossed over. I think I did that because I saw the unsafe behavior of the kids as leaving us little choice.  I am exploring that in my thinking any which way I can. Forty one years after starting in the field….

On Sunday, came a new way to see this.  One of my kids, now 34, is developmentally delayed. He has an almost-always-fatal brain tumor that has now long stopped growing for some wonderful, and unknown, reason.  Nonetheless, he has had two brain operations in his life.  The first was covered by Medicaid, and the second was covered by Medicare (entitled to based on his work record). But at some point a few years ago, we received a letter that said that his Medicare was being cancelled due to his no longer being disabled.  What??? No longer disabled??? Yet, the doctors, and the MRIs, and I, all thought that the tumor, aka time bomb, was still there.

They measured his disability, it turns out, not by his medical situation, but by his work income from the two part time jobs he’s had for fourteen years now.  He made too much money to qualify no matter the reality of this time bomb in his head. So I had to search for replacement medical coverage. Not really full medical coverage, but enough to cover his neurology surgeon and her hospital.  Other stuff, we’d simply have to pay for out of pocket. 

With the advent of Obamacare (and I once worshipped Ayn Rand) I was very relieved. Finally, real coverage with realistic limits on out-of-pocket expenses for deductible and copays.  What a weight lifted from me, especially with my fears of what happens to him if , as now looks very likely, he outlives me.  I felt safe for the first time since he lost the Medicare.

I thought about that new found feeling of safety, and of not being left alone stranded due to circumstances beyond my – or my son’s – control.  I don’t care what anyone says about Obamacare: there is a rightness to it.  It is empowering and empowerment is always right.  It makes individuals stronger, and that, in turn, makes the societies they are part of also stronger.

And then I read an article in the paper (that I now cannot find.)  I read about a little kid with cancer who’d had to be hospitalized a number of times and operated on.  Her family had good and full insurance coverage.  But the coverage, like almost all of them (?) nowadays, was only for in-network doctors.  In the operating room, unbeknownst to the family, out-of-network doctors got involved.  Their good insurance paid nothing towards those fees. Tens of thousands of dollars in uncovered fees. 

And my feeling of empowerment dissipated instantly. Along with my feeling of my son being safe.

The way we pay for medical care in this country is ridiculous. It is unfair. It is disempowering. It is dangerous.

And I thought to myself, is this how our family-less kids feel all the time? Unsafe to their core? Disempowered always? In danger constantly? No wonder they act the way they do.  In many countries in Africa there is no free schooling. Your education depends on the financial circumstances of your parents and their ability to pay tuition.  I learned that when I was a kid and I remember thinking then that was ridiculous: no kid should be victimized through something he has no control over.  Our job as the adults is to empower our kids; and our job as citizens – adults in society – is to create an empowering society.

Those medical in-network rules are sneaky and two-faced.  I wonder if that’s how the kids whom we dump into foster care – or worse, leave there, experience us.

The thought is beyond embarrassing. It is mortifying.  And horrifying.

Jack

At one of our Family Focus training sessions earlier in the year, I found myself unsure about whether I was repeating an idea that I might have already spoken on many weeks earlier (the trainings are a long fourteen straight weeks, excluding holidays, hurricanes, and so forth.) One of the group members pointed out to me that there was nothing wrong with that as repetition is one time-proven way of learning.  Sounds good to me.

And as I have noted in the blog before, one of the inherent risks of writing a blog is repeating oneself over time.  I know no reasonable way of avoiding that over the course of years so I leave it to the reader to decide when they’ve read all that I have to say and the repetition is getting out of hand.  In the meantime, I blog…..

A continuing theme of the blog has been the damage caused by bureaucrats who misunderstand that following procedures and applying rules should not be robotic.  Computers are robotic. Either you give them what they want, the exact way they want it, or you go nowhere.  If the computer form, for whatever reason, does not accept periods in one’s name then you don’t enter on the form your middle initial with a period after it.  If the computer wants your birthday in this ridiculous form: mm/dd/yyyy, then good luck writing 9/3/50 on it.  You will go nowhere till you do it the computer way.

Humans though are not computers and shouldn’t act like them.  We all have millions of examples of humans that don’t get that (I was up at the Social Security office yesterday e.g.).  What a breath of fresh air then to find folks on the other end who listen and respond as human beings and not robots.

Two stories:

1. My grandsonson has insulin dependent diabetes. He recently got suspended from school and sent to the temporary school for the “bad boys and girls.” What I call “doy-doy” school. At this school, there is no resident nurse, simply an on-call one.  There was concern about this by the higher-up medical folks in the district who wanted me to get permission for him to attend by his endocrinologist . That doctor of course wouldn’t/couldn’t speak to his behavior impacting the diabetes etc. etc..  CATCH-22.  I responded to the head nurse that an on-call nurse was far beyond anything I had at home and my grandsonson was allowed to go out and about the neighborhood, the malls, the stores, by himself. He was an expert on his diabetes and I was not taking extraordinary risks with him in allowing this. Indeed, he was safer at school with an on-call nurse then he was at home, with no nurse. In addition, I would never be more than 15 minutes away because I had to pick him up each day anyway.  Her response? “Good point. I’ll double check with the head doctor, but in the meantime, send him to school.” A human response (but it felt like a small miracle.)

2. Folks with criminal records – 65 million Americans now, according to last Tuesday’s NY Times* – have a terrible time with job applications.  Some want to know if you were ever arrested; some, if you were ever convicted.  Some go back forever, some only go back seven years.  Offenders, often more desperate for jobs then the regular unemployed, have to decide whether to risk lying or risk being automatically rejected for having a record.  This past week, an ex-con I call my nephew, got hired for a perfect job – four miles from home, full time, decent hourly wage, paid holidays, vacation etc. (Remember when those were normal jobs?) When the background check came back, however, the job offer was rescinded.  It turned out not to be his history that brought this on, but rather that he’d lied on the application.  He does that so automatically – right or wrong – that he didn’t even remember that he’d done it.  He was devastated by the rescinding of the offer. So I wrote a letter to the company giving context (as I’d done with the nurse in the first story) and asking them to reconsider. Not wanting someone else to be hired in his place, I emailed the letter over so it got there the very next morning before the company opened for the day.

The personnel person called me immediately.  Human. We talked. Human. She promised to go to her higher ups. Human.  And within hours, the job rescindment was rescinded.  Human – and miraculous – still again.

Our lives are lived in context.  Bureaucrats don’t get that.  Humans do.  Are there human bureaucrats?  Yes, of course.  They are called responsible adults.

Jack

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* http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/29/target-bans-the-box/?hp&rref=opinion

After going from December 12, 2012 until March 6, 2013 without doing a posting, I decided that the only way the blog could get its due was if I posted at the same time each week. I chose Sunday mornings, which was consistently the quietest time of my week. I decided to commit to that until June 30^th to see how it went.  And more or less, it went pretty well.  Until, that is, June 9^th.

Around that time I was making plans to have my grandson (13) return home.  He began visiting each weekend and I had to drive him here on Fridays, and back on Sundays.  Each of those weekend days was a one hundred mile round trip.  And suddenly the “consistently quietest time of my week” disappeared.  When my grandson came home for good in mid-July, the only “consistently quietest time of my week” came when he was asleep.  And when that happened, I couldn’t stay awake much longer myself.

In September, I finalized his adoption, committing myself – though the judge never mentioned this – to noise, and interruptions for too many years; as well as to my grandsonson or is it my songrandson?  Certainly, the quiet Sunday mornings went away.  Four days before his adoption finalization, I became the new executive director of Family Focus.  With the combination of the two, it finally dawned upon me just how much of my work requires uninterrupted concentration. 

One of the advantages of working at FFAS is that so many of us are based in offices at home.  Yet, some years ago, one of my co-workers actually moved out of her home office and went out and rented an office in the next town over.  I don’t think I fully grasped the fullness of why she did that, until the past few months.  It’s not like I never had kids before, but as the years passed and they grew up and moved out, I unwittingly took on more and more work that requires concentration.  Uninterrupted concentration.  Consistently uninterrupted concentration. I am not a multi-tasker.

School up here starts ridiculously early.  The first class begins at 7am; the bus is at 6:25.  So from 6:25 until about 9 or 9:30, I do have a solid block of time during which I am both awake and able to concentrate.  I have used that time since school began (unusually late in September) to get caught up on much undone business. And as I did so, I began to get very happy: consistent uninterrupted time – for hours – each school morning.  The blog was on my list of things to do, although it wasn’t (obviously) at the top of that list.  But it was moving on up.

And then, my grandsonson – yeah, that’s an accurate description – got suspended from school for behavior that was once considered normal, although even back in the day one had to be called on it, and even punished for it. He brought a pocket knife to school. That is what boys do. As a kid, I did it myself – I used to whittle; and I was a Cub Scout.  Before Columbine, of course.

The suspension lasted for three weeks.  And that only because I hired a lawyer – you can imagine what that cost – to protect him from the 45 days – one quarter of the school year – that they were seeking.  What’s next? The death penalty?

This morning my grandsonson went back to school. Finally.

And I got back my uninterrupted time. Not as consistently as my Sundays once were – given all the normal days off from school, that’s now just history.  But the best I am going to get for far too many more years most likely.

So I am back.  

Still again.

Let’s try Tuesday mornings and see how that goes.  Maybe with some make-ups thrown in on some other days, huh?

Jack

One of our FFAS kids, now a young adult, wrote a poem to open up the evening on Friday night.  His name is David Whitaker. His words just floored me, when I finally got a chance to concentrate on them. It was a wonderful gift for Maris.  And for me. Different words for the same concept: “If Not For You….”

Ohana

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Thank you, David.

Jack

[Yeah, yeah, I didn’t post last week. I apologize to all who were expecting the once a week posting. So today, I’ll post two, okay?]

My boss at Family Focus, Maris Blechner, an agency founder and the sole executive director for almost twenty-six years, has decided that it’s time to retire.  It won’t happen till the end of August, but her staff decided that we wanted to give her a retirement party and to schedule it before summer vacations kicked in.  The party happened on Friday night.

The theme for the party we had decided on months ago, almost as soon as we decided on having the party.  We took it from that wonderful Bob Dylan song, made much more popular when it was covered by the late, and still greatly missed, George Harrison: “If Not For You…..” (The Richie Havens’ version – which I discovered only upon searching for as many versions as I could find is – to my mind – the best of the forty plus that I found, and given Havens’ death last month, has a special poignancy:

I doubt that anybody gave Maris more grief that I did over these years.  There were times I wanted to kill her, and I am sure there were even far more times that she wanted to kill me.  But, as I have said repeatedly, in many contexts, one measures who a person is by the best you have ever witnessed of them.  Not the worst; not the average; not the typical; not the stuff that you hate; not the stuff that frustrates you.  Their best is what defines them.  All else is only human failure to live up to whom we are.

Maris created an agency  – and did what she needed to do to keep  it alive for all these years – whose lifeblood is empowerment: empowerment of her staff; empowerment of the families who come to us to adopt; and empowerment of the kids for whom we transition into families.

At the event, I had to speak – as the incoming director.  I stood up on the stage of this beautiful classy room at Columbia University’s Italian Academy, and I looked out at all the folks who had come to show their respect for and gratitude to Maris, despite the travel advisories, and realities, of torrential rains from the first tropical storm of the season.  And I thought, “Yep, if not for you…..”

You know, if you had a great relationship with your third grade teacher, you might well want to honor that teacher and thank him or her.  But, the truth is that if that teacher never existed, you would still have finished the third grade, and you would have had a different third grade teacher.  It might not have been as good an experience; it might have been even a horrible experience.  But it would have happened.

When my father couldn’t take care of us after my mother’s death, I think every last one of our aunts and uncles stepped up to offer to take one of us.  Every last one.  Good people and I loved each of them.  But it was Aunt Rita and Uncle Frank who changed our world.  Specifically, Aunt Rita’s thinking and realness that changed our world.  The power of “If not for you….” has been very personal for me for a long long long time. And Msgr. Huntington?  “If not for you…” It comes down to the experience of being saved as a person, not just rescued as a student, a nephew, a client, a neighbor, and so forth.  It doesn’t have to be directly – like Aunt Rita and Chris Huntington saved me. It can be by creating an enviornment, a structure, a way of “doing” like Maris has done. It can be by being the support for the ones who can then do it directly.  It can be by creating an agency that gives kids the parents who then change their world.  And as one of the parents there Friday night, Joyce Wilcox, pointed out to me, by giving parents the kids who then change the parents’ world.

Friday night, standing at that podium, looking around the room at so many of the children, many now grown, who had been adopted through us, I was overwhelmed.  One after the other after the other had been children who had been effectively, and disgracefully, written off by the system till we came along, with our empowering placement protocols. We not only got them adopted, we got them adopted forever.  Not a counterfeit adoption in the room.

At one point, from the podium, I began to tease my adult son, Luis, standing up front among all these people. Luis was one of those kids twenty-two years ago. He was referred to us at twelve and we were told he would be dead due to his brain tumor by twenty years old.  All kids with his kind of tumor were dead by twenty.  Did that deter Maris?  Did it deter any of us at FFAS?  Yeah right…..we couldn’t find a family for him, and that’s how I ended up with him.  But now, twenty-two years later, and fourteen years past the predicted end of his life, he was standing there in that room. And I said directly to him, “Luis, it was I who made the decision to adopt you, right?”  And proud as anything, as though the impact on his brain of that still-there-tumor didn’t exist, he yelled up to me in front of all these people, “You got it wrong. I made the decision.” And when I then said, “Okay, Luis, but it was a twenty year contract right?”  he responded, “Maybe for you it was twenty years, but for me it is forever.”  Lots of kids in that room Friday night – grown or not – could identify immediately with Luis’ words that came from his deeply rooted and strongly felt sense of empowerment. Their parents too.  Maris created the protective umbrella under which she and her staff were able to bring that into existence.  All the rest, good or bad, that she did, or didn’t do – all of it – pales by comparison.  No Maris? No Luis in that room Friday night.

And these kids, if not adopted by the families who adopted them, would not have been adopted elsewhere.  They wouldn’t have been adopted at all.  That is a fact that we all know.  And it gives the words “if not for you” an impact like no others I’ve ever experienced.

To know that you have changed the world for a particular kid, and his parents, forever and for real by the choices that you have made, should make it clear why we chose as our final summing up theme for Maris’ tenure, “If Not For You…..”  The words to the song are not precisely applicable, but they are so close…..to what Maris has given to so many. Including me.

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If not for you

Babe, I couldn’t even find the door

I couldn’t even see the floor

I’d be sad and blue, if not for you

If not for you

Babe, the night would see me wide awake

The day would surely have to break

It would not be new, if not for you

If not for you, my sky would fall

Rain would gather, too

Without your love I’d be nowhere at all

I’d be lost, if not for you

If not for you

The winter would hold no spring

Couldn’t hear a robin sing

I just wouldn’t have a clue, if not for you

If not for you, my sky would fall

Rain would gather, too

Without your love I’d be nowhere at all

I’d be lost, if not for you

If not for you

The winter would hold no spring

Couldn’t hear a robin sing

I just wouldn’t have a clue, if not for you

If not for you

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If not for her………..

Thank you, Maris.

Jack

Two days ago, I asked my adult (college graduate) grandson if he knew who Helen Keller was, He told me he had “heard of her.”  Then I asked my son with the severe learning problems.  He laughed and said, “Yep, I know who she is.”  I was relieved.  So, I asked him to tell me and he told me that she was part of the joke.  Joke?  “What joke?” I asked him.  And he told me that when someone doesn’t clean something right on his job, the other guys will say, “Who are you? Helen Keller?”  That’s all he knew of her…..This is worse for me than recognizing that the music of my much loved and still listened to Beatles will disappear into history as my generation dies off.

Helen Keller, or more accurately, her teacher, Annie Sullivan, has been a personal hero of mine for decades.  When I was a child care worker, working in the institutions, I used to say that Annie Sullivan should be the hero of all child care workers.  For those reading this who have no idea who either woman is – would such people be reading this? – a quick Google search will tell you plenty.  For everyone else, I am going to assume that we are each familiar with “The Miracle Worker” – the fifty one year old movie, if not the play, or the now 111 year old book that both were based on: “The Story of My Life.”

The NY Times obituary* for Helen had this paragraph: “After Helen’s illness, her infancy and early childhood were a succession of days of frustration, manifest by outbursts of anger and fractious behavior. ‘A wild, unruly child’ who kicked, scratched and screamed was how she afterward described herself.”

Hmm….I wonder how we’d approach the care of Helen today.

Here is Helen’s description of how Annie did it:

“We walked down the path to the well-house, attracted by the fragrance of the honeysuckle with which it was covered. Someone was drawing water** and my teacher placed my hand under the spout.

“As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten–a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me.

“I knew then that ‘w-a-t-e-r’ meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free. There were barriers still, it is true, but barriers that in time could be swept away.”

Helen had an awakening.  She had a realization.  She woke up.  She got it.  She changed. She was freed.

And  “In 1964 she was one of 30 Americans on whom President Johnson conferred the nation’s highest civilian recognition, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.”

Can you imagine that award for any of our kids?  I certainly can and hope to see the day.

I am who I am today hugely due to, as I have said many times, the gifts of themselves that Aunt Rita and Msgr. Christopher Huntington gave to me. It wasn’t behavior management or medication or therapy on their parts that helped me.

It was simply teaching me real truths, in the context of loving me for real.

I have had many who cared about me; many who were attached to me.  But these two freed me.

That is what our model needs to be: teaching with the goal of freeing.  If behavior management is needed, fine. If therapy is helpful, good. If medication moves us along that road, then by all means let’s use it.  But those things are not ends in themselves – they haven’t the power to free anyone. Not because those who need them are broken, but because these things are only tools. Tools are needed to build, but they, of themselves, build nothing.

Coming to recognize the truth – not all truth now, but simply the relevant truth – is what frees people. All people. Including and especially our kids. Annie Sullivan is the model.  Not psychiatry, not psychology, not social work – tools all, but tools only.

Helen Keller was the incredible beneficiary of Annie Sullivan’s belief in Helen’s wholeness.

I hate to see that witness lost to history.

It remains too real.

Jack

* [http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0627.html]

**[http://www.biography.com/bio-now/anne-sullivan-the-miracle-worker-20761491]

I was reminded this past week of two very painful life changing events in my life, that led to wonderful changes in my thinking pretty much immediately.

The first was the death of my mother, forty seven years ago yesterday.  She was killed early in the morning in a (single car) car crash.  My father, who was driving, was hospitalized.  It fell to Aunt Rita and Uncle Frank to inform us kids. Some time between the crash and our alarms going off to get us up for school, they came over to wake up my fifteen year old self, my almost fourteen year old brother, and my ten year old sister.  They told me first, and then my brother, as we shared a room.  Then one of them, Uncle Frank I think, was going across the hall to tell my sister.  I begged them not to.  I remember that Aunt Rita’s response to me was simply that they had to, but I also remember her being surprised by that immediate and non-thinking reaction on my part.

Years later, I became a foster parent to my first three kids, brothers, eight, ten, and twelve. They had a fifteen year old brother who was in Children’s Village. Some months later, I heard through the grapevine that that boy had been referred to the foster home department.  Immediately, I reached out to the foster department and told them that I wanted him here with us.  They refused.  They told me that I had “too many kids.”  I was shocked, and horrified.  I fought. Ultimately, without telling me, they went and asked him if he wanted to come live with me.  He, of course, said no.  And with that, they closed it out, perfectly sure of themselves. When I asked them if they had told him first that I wanted him with us, they said they had not.  I begged them to let me talk to him and they refused. I said to them, what else could he have said to them but “no” when he had experienced me taking his brothers and essentially abandoning him (I had known him for many years)?  I said to them that he needed to hear first hand from me that I wanted him with us and that I had gone to get him the second I learned that he was being referred to a foster home.  Only then could you trust his “no.”  They refused.

When he was eighteen, I adopted him out from under them anyway.  But for those in-between three years, he lived with believing that I didn’t care about him.  (I couldn’t tell him because he had to live within the agency with those folks till he was eighteen.)

That behavior on the part of my caseworker, and her boss (significantly to me: neither had kids) is my definition of arrogance.  My intended behavior towards my sister that night my mother died, was also arrogance.  Not in the “overbearing” definition which I have been accused of many times in my life, but rather in the sense of “presumptuous claims or assumptions.”

Many years ago – decades now – my boss in my last job accused me of being arrogant.  We had a long discussion about it and he came back to me and said that upon further thought, he decided that I was “abrasive.”  And I said, “absolutely.”  He was surprised how immediately I had accepted that.  I told him that abrasive is always in the mind of the “abrased.”  And that most often it was the truly arrogant who felt that I was abrasive as I went after their “presumptuous claims or assumptions.”

Out of my experience with my son came two rules at Family Focus: one, adults go first – always.  And two – every decision we make about one of our kids or one of our families has to pass “the forty year test.”  How, we are required to ask ourselves, will this decision  I am making, impact this child or this family forty years from now, when I am long gone from this position, and maybe from this earth?  That arrogant caseworker and her boss didn’t stop to think that by me adopting the three brothers, the fourth brother would be a part of our lives, one way or another, forever whether they agreed with it or not. And how would that look to the boys: that three got one life, and the fourth, a very different life.  And that then becomes the starting point: will this be right in the long term. Not “too many kids.”

Out of my experience with Aunt Rita that night, came my recognition that I wasn’t trying to protect  my sister – there was no protecting her after all – but rather trying to protect my own feelings about her devastation and my need to respond to it.  With Aunt Rita’s words, I realized that I was being stupid: my sister “had to know.”  But only later did I realize that I was really being arrogant.

I had – and have had for three weeks now – a responsibility to speak to a fifteen year old kid about some stuff that will impact her life from today until at least forty years from now.  But the powers-that-be, afraid of the current behavioral impact on her of what I have to say (all of which is affirming and empowering so I don’t even get that) have forbidden it.  Exactly what I would have done to Aunt Rita and Uncle Frank, had I the power to keep them from talking to my sister that terrible and life-changing night.  So was my thinking forty seven years ago incredibly mature and years beyond my age? Or are the current powers-that-be thinking like a fifteen year old, and a very arrogant one at that?

The only question that matters is how their arrogant decision will impact this teen “forty years from now.”  Not whether I will shake her world today.  Even if they were right about my shaking her world today – which they are likely not.  This teen is entitled to a conversation with me.  And she will get it.  Perhaps not till she’s eighteen and free of them and their arrogance and power, like my son became.

And this posting this morning will serve as evidence to her then that I wanted to talk to her now.

Hmm….this blog has it’s benefits for me far beyond any I had originally thought of……

Humble Jack, the Abraser