Flashbacks

I am one of those lucky people who wakes up every day loving their job. It may mean working long hours, being chronically broke, and losing people in my life who do not quite understand, but there has never been a moment since day one that I have doubted these sacrifices to be worthwhile. Watching kids develop into the person they want to be is one of the biggest miracles of my life, and one of few experiences which have changed my life forever for the better.

Nevertheless, after watching three busy school years pass and working with over 150 students, there are still some aspects of my job to which I cannot and will not ever grow accustomed. For many of these students, I am their "go to person," and while most days bring news of improved grades, acceptances to scholarship programs, or new jobs, some days are radically opposite. On those days, the news of abuse, depression, homelessness, bullying, grief, rape and hunger hits me like a baseball bat to the knees. On those days, the stream of good news disappears into a swirling black hole at the back of my mind, overlooked and forgotten as I hold my head in my hands, feeling powerless against the state of the world around me.

It is not that I am unfamiliar with tragedy or somehow shocked by the plague poverty leaves in its wake, but instead that my tendency is to absorb the pain of others and accept it as my own, bringing thoughts and images to the surface that I would rather ignore. As I listen to a student explain why they ran away from home, I remember the boyfriends I once had who did the same and left me behind to answer questions, and I wonder if I will have as many nightmares this time as I did for the first homeless student I tried to support. As I give advice to a student worrying about a suicidal friend, I hear the sound of my own voice desperately screaming no into a phone receiver and envision the casket holding my friend being lowered into the ground. I see the suicide notes and cutting marks of friends and family, and remember crawling to the bathroom on hands and knees late at night. As I call child protective services, a shiver runs down my spine in remembrance of the BB gun shots, broom handle fights, torn t-shirts and afternoons in the vice principal's office that plagued my friends and I. I shake a little considering how many more times I will need to call this number, and try to gain my composure before I walk cheerfully into a room full of students who are utterly unaware of the conversation I just had.

I fear for our way of life, for the future we are building in our communities, when we raise generation after generation of damaged children who in turn become damaged adults. Education, love and financial stability may allow us to move forward to create positive new memories and experiences, but they do not erase the horrors of the past. The scars will always be there, just below the surface. I am tired of watching the look on students' faces change when they enter the real world and see that it is broken. When are we going to agree that children deserve better? Until then, I guess I will continue to be one of the people putting band-aids over the damage, hoping that perhaps today's children will be the ones to use their experiences to give the next generation a better chance.