Gosh, these blog titles are getting weirder and weirder by the week. Anyway, I’m going to need you to help me out. I know, I know. It’s supposed to be a nice, relaxing 5 minutes of simple reading, but trust me. Just do it.
I need you to find the nearest thing around you that remotely resembles a microphone. It could be a popsicle, your phone charger, or the half brown banana that’s been sitting on your kitchen table for a week. Find it? Okay, good. Now pick it up, and read the next paragraph in your best national news anchor voice.
Good evening folks, from my very cold and very dark basement. As you can see behind me, we have about a 1 foot by 2 foot glass window, where we have been viewing the occasional flash of lightning, and . . BANG, CRACKLE . . . Wow, that was quite a loud clap of thunder in the background. Unfortunately, folks in this area have been experiencing some power outages, your very own [insert your name here] included. Now that I think about it, you probably can’t even see me. Let’s get back to you, Sarah, before the viewers get too tired of my voice without a face attached to it. We forgot the extra generator in the newsroom today.
*Now would be a good time to wink at your audience*
I had to get creative—I wrote that in my own very cold and very dark basement, a place where inspiration is far and few between. The power had gone out. I killed a gnat on my computer screen. What a time to be alive. (Also, sidenote: the power came back on, I kid you not, probably 2 seconds after I wrote that last sentence. Whatever. It’s prime blog content).
So, I’m sitting there in the dark, I’m thinking about what to write, I’m thinking about my experiences this week, and, as if on cue with the BOOM of the thunder outside, the idea hit me. I began to take in my surroundings, or maybe more appropriately, lack of them. It was pitch black, except for the bright white of the Google Doc I was writing on. And, for now, we are going to ignore the fact that the power came back on, which prompted me to tell my parents that the creative juices had dried up, and they needed to turn the lights back off, for ingenuity, of course.
After ruminating in the dark for a few minutes, the first thing that came to mind was a children’s book called In a Dark, Dark Room and Other Scary Stories retold by Alvin Schwartz, probably because the word “dark” is literally a third of the words in the first story. It goes like this:
In a dark, dark woods
There was a dark, dark house
And in that dark, dark house
There was a dark, dark room
And in that dark, dark room
There was a dark, dark chest
And in that dark, dark chest
There was dark, dark shelf
And on that dark, dark shelf
There was a dark, dark box
And in that dark dark box
There was . . .
A ghost!
Growing up, my mom’s brother, my Uncle Dave, would tell another story out of this book from memory, when all the cousins were young and we’d sit around a campfire making s’mores. It was about a girl named Jenny with a green ribbon tied around her neck. Jenny dated and married a boy named Alfred, who always asked Jenny why she never took the ribbon off, but much to his dismay, she never told him. Until, that is, she was on her deathbed, and she finally untied the ribbon, revealing that it was holding her head onto her body. The book ends with a sentence as simple as it is sinister: And Jenny’s head fell off. It seems creepy, I know, but we got a kick out of the fact that not only did Uncle Dave say he knew Jenny, but that she actually lived under the shed in his backyard.
That was an aside, but back to the dark. The word “dark” can be used in a lot of ways. Sometimes, we mean it in the literal sense of the word, as in the absence of light. Other times, we can use it to mean grim, evil, or sinister. But for now, we’re going to focus on the former. Let’s start with an obvious fact: in the dark, you can’t see. You’re completely devoid of the visual world around you, and in turn, completely reliant on touch, smell, and hearing to navigate your surroundings. Being scared of the dark is also an incredibly common childhood fear, and a fear that actually has prehistoric origins. (How many times have I told you that fear of the unknown will come back around? It really is at the root of everything). However, we’re not totally at the mercy of the dark. Over time, humans have developed adaptations in their cones and rods (the two types of photoreceptors in the human eye) to allow for a simplistic version of night vision. I won’t get into the details, but click here if you want to learn more. Generally though, trying to complete our daily tasks of living in the darkness would not be ideal. We’ll get back to the dark in a second, but first, we need to talk kids.
This week, I spent my first full day with the kids in Residential, the part of SVFS that houses children in the custody of the county that are also in need of mental health services. I couldn’t decide how I felt about the whole thing, and I wavered a lot. I knew the kids were in a good place, and I felt grateful that they were surrounded by people who truly cared about them. The other side to this, though, was that they were even at SVFS in the first place. Every time I looked at them, I couldn’t help but imagine what kind of circumstances could have brought them here. I thought about their families, too, and I’m not all that foreign to situations like these. My family adopted my two sisters, both of whom were born into families that couldn’t care for them, but who made the incredibly brave and difficult decision to place them for adoption. It’s not the same situation, I know that. But, it is similar in the fact that these children are no longer living with the family they were born into, and that’s emotional, and complicated, and difficult. But something else struck me about these kids. They were happy. I think I kind of forgot that they were still kids, and they found joy in things like painting, and legos, and four square, and sitting in a circle listening to someone read them a story.
One little boy in particular caught my attention. He had the biggest smile, the kind that takes up a person’s whole face and brings out the light in their eyes. I’d met him about 3 weeks ago when I spent a few hours in Residential for the first time, and from then on, I was greeted with a “MS. SARAHHHHH!” and a hug every time I saw him in the hallway. I finally spent about an hour with his class on Thursday building towers out of marshmallows and dry spaghetti noodles, and again, I had an interaction with him that stuck with me. After every kid had built their towers, they were instructed to place a book on top of it to see if the tower was strong enough to hold it up. “Do you think it’s gonna work?” I asked him, to which he replied, “I don’t know Ms. Sarah, but I believe in my tower, and I believe in myself!” I couldn’t help but think to myself how unbelievable his attitude was, considering he’d been at the facility quite a bit longer than the other kids. As I was getting ready to leave his class, he asked if he could give me a really, super, enormous hug. “Of course!” I said, which resulted in him standing at the opposite end of the classroom to get a running start. He jumped into my arms and squeezed me so tight I had to put him down. Best. Hug. Ever.
I think that living in residential care as a child would be somewhat like navigating life in the dark. You can’t really see where you’re headed, and every step you take requires thought and consideration, because you don’t have anyone lighting the path you should be taking. You’re living your life blindly, and without a fully developed brain. And children living in residential care are much more likely to carry a psychiatric diagnosis. But, our psyche has adaptations to metaphorical darkness, just like the human eye does in a physical sense. Children can be incredibly resilient, as long as they are supported with trustworthy, interpersonal adult relationships and a goal-oriented future focus approach to care, both of which SVFS aims to provide.
So, don’t worry. No one’s head is falling off, and no one is stuck in a dark, dark house, in a dark, dark room (except for me, last night, when I wrote the first few paragraphs of this blog entry). I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’d like to think the kids will be okay. Of course, no one can predict what they’ll experience when they leave SVFS, and I can’t say for certain that this will be true for all of them—that’s just reality. What I do know for sure, though, is that I love those kids, and I hope they know it.
Columbus Foundation Fellowship Programs 