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Listen to thisI sit now, mug of tea in my hand. Day is at an end. My three year old daughter, Emma climbs onto my lap. My eyes close. Thoughts drift back to my day at the Child and Youth Care Centre. Morris is in my office again. Run-away. He has only been back for a few hours. Skinny, bedraggled, fifteen years old. Outside a young girl in tears. Morris's fist into her face. “Jou Ma se Poes.”
Now in my office, the anger palpable, primal, you can smell it. He knows me now, this boy, knows that he is safe here. In time the anger fades, chameleon-like as the grief and despair bring forth their own colours and textures. Loss, primary loss, rejection, violence. All there in my small cubicle office wrapped around fifteen short years of life. Yes fifteen, and at fifteen the world of the gangs beckons to Morris and he is heeding the call.
Emma's voice: “Daddy look I cooked supper for you, it's pancakes.” A plate of flattened playdough held enticingly under my nose. Bringing me back to the present moment.
My thoughts, troubled, return to Morris. How do we reach through the experiences, through the walls, the violence, to the soul of Morris? Reach him in the place of mystery, where divinity finds accord with our humanity. Say to him: “Morris look there is another path, how about it?”
"Daddy, wake up!” Emma indignant now.
"Hmm? Oh! Sorry, Sweets.” My arm and hand bend and fold to take the shape of an ostrich which pecks her lightly on the cheek. She looks at this strange apparition – daddy’s arm – and steps into her own sweet fantasy. “Is that a baby ostrich?” she asks.
I shrug my shoulders, “Maybe you should ask the ostrich.” I suggest.
A little face with the biggest blue-green eyes turn to my hand and arm, and she asks: “Are you a baby ostrich?”
My hand nods.
“Oh,” there is some amazement in her expression, she continues: “Do you have a mommy?"
The ostrich, my hand, shakes its head.
"Ah,” she takes my arm, pulling it towards her. For Emma it's no hand or arm; for her there is a baby ostrich that needs a Mommy, she strokes the baby ostrich and plants a feather-light kiss on the top of its head. “Shh, shh, now, I will look after you, I will be your Mommy.”
I watch my daughter as she rocks her baby ostrich to sleep. And I love her as much as God allows. Love her for the medicine of innocence she has brought to her dad, love her for the purity of her being. This moment is exquisite by contrast.
You cannot do child care work without opening the gateway to your soul, your heart. And in opening the heart the dark stuff will pour in. And you will know pain and sorrow beyond the ego and you will weep. For this, after all, is child care work.
You and I both know the story of Morris, his anger and despair. You might know his story in a child by another name, but you know. And you might walk home with a heart that is troubled.
May you also, then, somehow, receive the gift of the
exquisite moment.
