Caring for Jack in the Deep Grey Sea
(This is fiction, based on many stories over years of time. No names, people, or places are real. But the problems in this story are very real. This story will appear in installments.)
He slogs down the hallway under a burden he has carried all his life, his eyelids drooping over soulful eyes. When he enters our office, he doesn’t say a word. The weight does not leave his shoulders when he drops his backpack and coat onto our floor. Still trudging, he heaves himself to the futon we have in the corner, flops onto his belly, and does not move. This is Jack. He has just arrived at school. He is in the second grade.
We don’t know if its the meds, or if he decided night replaces day again. We don’t know if he has been raging all morning or if his parents were partying all night. It’s too easy to jump to conclusions, or project our own stories onto Jack. But we wish we had a story that made sense, so we can try to help him. None of our interventions seem to work. We’re always searching. But for now, we let him sleep.
We work in public school. We’re therapists. Jack is in our room because there is nowhere else safe for him. He’s pushed every object off of every desk in his classroom, yelling and swearing the whole while. He’s shut himself in the principal’s office and pulled over the table and all the books off the shelves. He’s run outside in a blind rage, and adults have followed, praying he does not get hit by a car. He does these things many times in one day. He’s had evaluations, education plans, assessments, behavior plans, medication, case workers, therapists — he is too violent and disruptive for general ed, and he is not violent and disruptive enough for a higher level of care. On paper, he attends school in a general ed classroom with special education accommodations. But in reality, he spends hours in our office, day after day. When he is awake and cheerful, we try to integrate him into his classroom. When he is tired, he sleeps. When he is violent, he destroys our room. Today, each time we try to wake him, he yells at us with his little fists in a ball. It’s better to let him sleep on days like this.
There has been nowhere to put Jack for three years now. “You should have seen him in kindergarten,” says his kindergarten teacher, while we both graze on snacks in the break room, “dancing on the tables, yelling the names of body parts, screaming, biting anyone who came near.”
His parents are concerned, and they do the best they can. That’s partly why Jack doesn’t qualify for better services: His parents are in the picture, caring.
Jack has three other siblings. A little sister, a little brother, and an older sister. The family is poor, but doing alright in today’s world where everyone seems to be poor. Older sister is entering her teen years, and the parents are constantly torn between her outbursts and Jack’s. Jack tells us the trouble his sister gets into, like how she slept over at her boyfriend’s house, and how she steals her mom’s cigarettes. The parents, while maybe not parenting the way “holier-than-thou-social-workers” might do it, have asked for every resource available to them. They are also pretty burned out, and cynical at times. They sometimes have their own friends over late on school nights, and let the kids play violent video games till they all fall asleep on the hide-a-bed, where Jack wakes them all , screaming from another nightmare. He might not always have brushed teeth, and he often smells like cigarettes and urine, but these parents show up to every conference, and cooperate enough with every plan. If they were to neglect him just a little bit more, or party just a little bit harder, maybe Jack would qualify for other help. Not that we would want that for him. We are glad his parents care. Compared to other kids on our caseload, Jack has it pretty okay. And even though he punches us and yells at us, we never give up on Jack.
(to be continued)