elizabethlevett

What goes around comes around. Just like the moon around the earth or the planets around the sun. Just like a necklace made of paper clips. Just like generations of family wounds, words that aren’t spoken, pacts that can’t be broken, and inexplicable silences.

I’ve been a teacher of young children for over thirty years and I’ve felt mostly successful in my efforts to teach hundreds and hundreds of little kids to read, to write, to make stuff and explore the world together. I’ve worked with hundreds of families and caregivers and have found most of them incredibly caring and smart. I’ve been humbled by their trust and their support. But I have to say that the most difficult, sleep disrupting, hair raising students are those in whom some form of disability intersects with family dysfunction. There is nothing we can’t achieve for a child when families are willing to work with us and things become incredibly challenging when they won’t or can’t.

Traumatic flashback to a formal meeting (which included the administrator and at least three specialists) where a mother and grandmother sat across the table and poured out layers and layers of accusations, subterfuge, denial, and disconnected narrative delivered without making eye contact with anyone in the room while the distracted child sat with me. I tried to keep her calm, to tend to her squirms and demands. (“I want the purple one!”) She clearly needed more help than we could give her in a general setting but it would be years of meetings like this one before she’d get it.

You put all this on paper and it sounds pretty straightforward. But it trips me up every time. I hear a parent say, “He would never do this at home.” That one is actually pretty scary to me. Then later I get the pivot – “He does this all the time.” The selective recall, the denial, these are all familiar and yet always shocking. I can’t help losing sleep over the clear pathology of a child being raised with two or even three adults whose total focus day after day, year after year is to find a way for their own story to be heard, yet unwilling or unable to put it into words. And all the while the child right under their noses is slowly slipping downstream to that unreachable place of dissociation.

We gather our team, we strategize, we create a suite of interventions, we make notes about everything. Then we bring the issue back to the family and can sometimes face a wall of noise we can’t possibly penetrate as it’s been built over generations. So we begin again week after week to find new ways to approach the situation and look for ways to connect with the child, to help them feel safe, to find a way to bond and we document the tantrums, the lashing out, the refusal to engage, the disruption to learning.

I slip into my invisible unicorn costume in the morning and pour myself some decaf (stay calm). I get lots of water and as much sleep as possible. I assure my students that they are wonderful, brilliant, resourceful. I admonish them to not judge each other. I tell them nobody is bad, that we all have a different way of getting where we need to be. I try to catch moments in between the drama to gently but certainly teach something fabulous that they might remember like why tigers have orange stripes, how plants make food from sunlight, how to draw a castle or write a poem. And somedays even the most troubled child will create a paper airplane that really flies or a paper clip necklace for mommy and I get to say, “Good job!” and believe that someday this cycle might be broken.