Love in the Time of Corona #8
For the last 10 weeks, I have had the honor of serving the families of essential workers by helping the YMCA provide emergency child care to hospitals, first responders, the VA, public transit personnel, and other people who had to be in harm’s way during the stay-at-home phase of Kentucky’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. As I met the kids, I noticed right away how many of them had names from the Old Testament. In the last few days, I’ve been watching parts of my nation burn, once again placing many of those same families in harm’s way. Today, on the Feast of Pentecost, I woke with all of that knocking around in my brain. I want to tell you some of their stories, but to honor their privacy, I’ll create a composite and choose a name that wasn’t on the roster.
Call him Gideon.
I heard him before I saw him. He was crying, sitting in the lobby where the children who misbehaved in their groups were sent to be punished and cool down. “Time out,” I guess. Any engagement with him was met with argument and protestations of innocence. I heard the theatrical howling and imagined the crocodile tears. Later, I heard what would be a recurring theme. “Gideon is terrible. He’s a bad kid.”
During the first few weeks, before the Commonwealth closed the pools, I was the lifeguard. It was chaos. I’m very inexperienced in the chair, and found it more stressful than I could have imagined. Ideally, the guard’s job is to anticipate, prevent, and if necessary, respond to emergencies. It quickly became apparent that my job was going to be making sure none of these children killed each other.
Gideon loved to jump. He was stronger, bigger, and more acrobatic than the other kids, and he loved to test the boundaries of what was permitted in the pool. They were not allowed to dive in the shallow water, so he would do summersaults in the air, landing feet first. They weren’t allowed to jump backwards, so he would leap high out and twist 180ยบ. His worst habit was one that seemed almost unconscious. He always jumped toward the other kids. I tried calling him out, reasoning with him, making him sit out for 5, 10, 20 minutes. He would behave well for a few seconds, and then return to the very things he’d been punished before. It was almost compulsive with him.
He loved to throw things. Hard. Sometimes across the pool. Sometimes at kid’s heads. I sometimes worried that I might miss a kid in trouble in the water because I had to pay so much attention to this one incorrigible child. One day, one of his good days, he made it all the way to the end of the hour without any misbehavior. I was really proud of him. I tooted my whistle and told the group to gather up the toys and return them to the basket where they were kept so that the next group could come in. Gideon dove to the bottom easily, retrieved a plastic diving stick, and whipped it across the pool, toward the basket, accidentally hitting a teacher square in the side of the head. She knew who had thrown it before even looking. With a sharp voice, she told Gideon that he would be sitting out the swimming hour the next day. Howling. Tears.
The next day, he started the hour in street clothes, pouting on a bench in the corner. The teacher he had hit sat about 10 yards away, keeping an eye on him, and scolding him from time to time. I scanned the pool, watching for trouble. 5 minutes into the hour, I looked over and Gideon was lying on her bench, his head in her lap, while she stroked his hair with her soft, brown fingers. Each time my head turned their way, I saw this angry black boy being loved on by a woman who had watched and wept over many others like him. After the hour, I joked, “I think Gideon only acts up so he can have somebody love on him.”
“Of course, he does,” she answered with kindness and patience. This old white man had a lot to learn about being a little black boy.
Once, I was called to the conference room. “I need to leave for a few minutes. Will you sit with Gideon? He hit one of the other kids and he won’t be going back to his group for the rest of the day.”
We sat quietly for a minute, then I asked, “What’s going on, man?” Tears. Howling. The teacher hated him. He was just playing. He didn’t mean to hit anyone.”
“How did it happen, Gideon?”
“I don’t know. Sometimes I just have to hit someone. What am I supposed to do?”
“Well,” I tried. "Maybe you could find another way to use that energy."
“But I just have to hit sometimes. Don’t you?”
I didn’t know what to tell him. I could not imagine what could make an 8 year old child this full of rage. I don’t know when I’ve felt so helpless and ignorant.
Later, one of the more experienced teachers told me, “He was playing you. I could see it from a mile away.” Was she being callous? Jaded? Was she too busy to take the time to help the boy? Or was she right? Was he just playing me, telling me things that would get my soft old heart on his side? I’m still not sure if I know.
Sometimes, Gideon would run to me in the morning, throwing his arms around my legs in a bear hug. “Hi, Mr. Bob.” Other times he would be surly, angry and sulking over his latest scolding. Correcting him might result in tears, or it might send him slamming through the door and out into the hall, alone.
“Gideon, what are you doing out here without a grown-up?”
“I hate her. She hates me. It’s not fair.” Then he would stomp off in whatever direction necessitated the longest chase.
There were other kids who acted out. Rebecca was almost aggressive in the way the would pee her pants. Staring defiantly at the adult who had failed to recognize the warning signs as the urine flowed down her legs, soaking her shoes. Ezekiel was punished almost daily for hitting, grabbing, or kicking. He was finally banned from the program the day he stabbed another child with a pencil. Esau tormented and fought with his brother Jacob constantly. Their dad just sighed and shook his weary head after another long day’s work.
Ruth and Naomi were sisters who would not stop touching one another in inappropriate and what I thought were really disturbing ways.
“Is that a red flag?” I asked a more experienced teacher. “Should we do something about that?”
“They’re fine,” was the answer. I deferred to her expertise, but am still not sure if I did the right thing.
Gideon’s final straw came when, at the end of a class session, he was told to put his toys away. Furious, he grabbed one and threw it into one of the large mirrors on the wall of what is normally an exercise studio. The mirror broke. Had it been a young skull instead, we would have been sending a child to the hospital. Gideon was suspended for 12 months. No child care. No summer camp. No after school care. His granny was called to come pick him up, but she could not leave the hospital without losing her job, so Gideon sat at a table the lobby for the next 6 hours. Waiting.
It broke my heart. I couldn’t sleep that night. I kept waking up, imagining the things that could happen to him on the street. Wondering what I could have done differently. What should I have said? Not said? Did I spend enough time with him? Did I over indulge him? Did I have any business being around these children at all? And how did this little boy get so god damned angry?
A teacher who knew him well told me some things I didn’t know. Gideon’s mom had been trapped in an abusive relationship with his dad. She was also an addict. When she finally found the courage to escape, she refused to move back to her parent’s home. So she and Gideon spent a year living in her car. God only knows what that boy saw and did over those months. When his grandparents finally learned where their daughter and grandbaby were, they sued and were granted custody of the child. They are loving, hard-working people, but so much damage had been done. No wonder my little sermons had no effect. What words could heal a soul that had been that battered?
I missed my grown-ups. There are things in this world that are much more terrible than cancer. And I do not have the tools to help heal them. I remembered something my ex wife used to say about social work. “We can’t save them all. But we can love them all.” That, I could do. For what it was worth.
Last week, I learned that I would be transitioning to new responsibilities when the Y re-opens on June 1. Predictably, I started getting sentimental about the kids. For 10 weeks, they had driven me crazy. Now I began to think about how much I was going to miss them.
On Wednesday, I walked into the gym. Ostensibly, my morning visits were to check in and see if the teachers needed anything. But the truth is, I just liked hearing the kids shout, “Mr Bob!” I wasn’t one of the teachers. I was the fun uncle who comes to visit and plays kickball with you, before sending you back to the people who have to make you behave the rest of the day. So they love me.
In the corner, all alone, coloring, I saw Gideon. The Big Boss had given him another chance. No one else would have dared to. I waked to him. He glanced up, but didn’t acknowledge me. I gave him a hug, and whispered, “Welcome home, little brother. I missed you.” He hugged me back. Tentatively. Silently. I waited for him to give me his eyes. “Be your best, Gideon. I believe in you. Be your best.”
I went and found the Boss. “Thank you. For Gideon.”
“You’re welcome.” I knew she hadn’t done it for me. But she knew how much he had meant to me. I would walk through fire for that woman.
Gideon had a pretty good week. He hadn’t miraculously transformed, but he softened his behavior. He made it to Friday without being sent to the office.
And I came home to prepare for my return to the adult world. You know, the one where old people break their hips and young people have strokes an everybody gets cancer and people are murdered on the street and angry crowds set fire to police stations.
I think of all the old white people trying to reason this out. Talking about how the rioters are just bad, how they need to find another way, how they are hurting the very people and places that they need. And I think about Gideon. An African-American boy with a life I can never imagine and a rage burning inside that I will never be able to feel. I pray that God will protect him from the evil killers on the street. I pray that someone will be able to love him in a way that I could not. I pray that nothing I said or did made things any worse for him. Because, I don’t know what will happen the next time he acts out.
But I do know that when he is old enough, he will experience injustice. He will feel racism’s knee on his neck. And he will want to hit someone. Please, sweet Jesus, keep him safe. I love him. But I can’t save him. Please, save him.
