You're gonna need a bigger boat

I leave the heavy, yet oddly gentle, breathing of my wife falling far deeper into sleep than I can. (I am not joking about her breathing. She snores like the lapping waves against the shore. On most other nights, I could ride the tide of her snoring nearly into my dreams. I could record it and play it instead of guided meditations or twinkly piano music.)

My insomnia, born from some minor sickness I picked up, fixates on an interaction with two of my students. I was on their unit for an English lesson, but I was a few minutes late, and it had already transformed into group therapy. I have worked with this population long enough to know that treatment was more necessary than essays at the moment. The text of the conversation is that the two had gotten into a fight over the weekend, bad enough to have earned them both Level 3s, and were, despite friendliness, still nursing annoyance for how it had turned out. Their YDA was playing therapist, drawing from them small realizations and honesties. When a YDA is good at their job, it would be impossible to overstate their worth to these kids.

The subtext emerges that one is worried about the outcome of a court visit -- though he is all but assured of hearing that nothing will change for him -- and that they were both triggered by the other saying or doing something that reminded them of their abusive parents.

In my decade with the state, I have encountered fewer than ten parents who were healthy or treated their children appropriately. I've met far more who have pimped their children, molested them, daily beat them, allowed them to roam the streets, gave them to gangs, or any other abuse it would be hard for most to believe. When I asked why the parents weren't the ones adjudicated, I was assured that CPS prefers the parents on the outside, maintaining a stable home that has never existed. I hear the invocation of this rote line from one of the students. Its automaticity convinces me that he has listened to this refrain too often when calling authorities to save his life from his mother.

My approach with my student is to silently question everything they tell me but believe the emotions behind it. The child lying about the severity of his abuse is still conveying a need. Also, I would rather believe a lie and try to help a student than doubt a truth and allow them to be harmed once more. I'll take the hit in having a teenager think he is playing me for a fool if it means he won't be the one getting hit.

As my students -- both of whom I like and look forward to teaching most days -- compare emotional scars the way Quint and Hooper do physical ones in Jaws, it becomes too much for me. They are light and laughing, one-upping the other and finding concordance. Neither has been blessed with a parent who could have allowed them to bloom as they should have.

I ask half-joking if either of them has a solitary happy childhood memory. Surely it can't all be fathers allowing their friends access to the child and grade-schoolers laying traps -- not to prevent their mother from murdering them but to provide enough warning to escape or have a fighting chance.

They look at me in confusion and amusement and then say that, of course, they don't. There was never a vacation to the beach or a hike leading to a picnic. There were no themed birthday parties. No, it was a battle for survival, physically and psychologically. Authority figures gave their parents innumerable second chances despite blatant evidence of attempted homicide and sex abuse.

I don't often cry in this job, but I like these two more than most students that I have had. Seeing that a happy memory is so alien that they can only laugh off the concept, seeing that they never had childhoods, digs into my core. I can't change what happened to them and would drive myself crazy wishing. All I have is a chance to affect their futures, but what will come after is built from a torturous and unstable foundation.

As long as they are at this facility, in front of me, I can pour myself into caring for them. When they are released, it may be to people who have brutally abused them. When they leave, that is the end of our relationship. I will never again have contact with them (unless they call asking for letters of recommendation) because it would be professionally and ethically wrong. The boundaries must be firm because this population is boundary-seeking (and rarely healthy boundary-finding) and need to know that adults care enough to maintain them. (All of this is not to ignore that I am contractually forbidden on pain of losing my teaching certification and potentially being brought up on charges.)

This doesn't stop my urge to gather them up and tell them that they are good people, that I care about them, and lie that they will have good lives. I am, for obvious reasons, forbidden from even hugging them, but I haven't seen kids in a while more in need of a genuine hug. They were abused by those who should have loved them and desperately want someone to try to love them now. One of them, a whip smart boy with deep and broad knowledge, will overtly ask me to say nice things about him. I am only too happy to oblige; all my compliments honest and sincere. I wish I could assign him to a couple who could love him long enough for him to graduate from college alive. He's lovable but admits that when he was locked up was the first time in his life that he could be happy. He was safe and fed, adults wouldn't hurt him, and he could be himself. How depressing it must be only to feel the confidence to grow when one is behind bars (metaphorically; we have locked doors, but no bars).

It feels like a reservoir in me that fills when exposed to my student's trauma. Usually, the trauma comes slowly enough to evaporate or trickle out, so nothing overflows. Not so with this, a torrential downpour of abuse that has distorted these kids, the actual perpetrators unpunished. (Though this is not to say that my students are innocent of their crimes. They did them, but they did not commit them in a vacuum or without preamble; they could have been stopped long before they started.)

One of them, often and this day, exclaims, "Quackenbush! Where do you think you are going?" He is rail-thin with a hungry smile. I know what he is really saying is, "I know that you care about me. Could you stay a little longer so you can care about me for a few minutes?" He needs my hypodermic affection. I would always wish to stay with him, but I know keeping my boundaries firm and consistent is a more loving act.

Still, I don't see the harm in staying with my students halfway into my prep period, for them as much as me.

last watched: Inside Job
reading: Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas