MOLI VIEW™

My game was gone. I had spent the last seven days worrying about my son. Now I had nothing left to give to this young man, about my son's age, sitting next to me. He was good-natured. He was ebullient. He would not shut up.
The most exhilarating thing for me about teaching — especially a challenging population — is the improvisation: the need to take in everybody's moods, figure out who's got beef with whom, and in a split second adjust all my plans, and keep adjusting until everyone is excited about some kind of project. I don't even care what the project is; what's important is getting everyone motivated to do something, and do it together.
When I teach at the university, this can get pretty humdrum. Everybody follows the rules. When I work with a group of incarcerated women or the homeless or youth in crisis, it's a wild ride. I love it. Usually.
This week, I'd had my own wild ride at home. My son had been hospitalized with panic attacks a few days before. When he got out, the real work began. My son is delightful. He talks to us parents. He laughs at our jokes. He makes really funny jokes of his own. He gives hugs and tells us he loves us. That makes it all the more heartbreaking to see him struggle.
We'd been doing yoga every morning, reciting soothing mantras, breathing deep, coming up with hilarious alternative endings to the scary stories coursing through his brain. Over and over and over again. I had plenty of help from his dad, his grandparents, his cousins, his friends, his teachers, a battalion of medical experts. All of us focused on him. All of us were exhausted.
Now here was this other young man, far from home and family, without a village to worry over him, doing the best he could to hold it together by talking nonstop. This youth crisis center is as good as they come, with caring staff, clear rules, and plenty of rewards, but those are all shared with 20 other kids who feel bad too.
Any other day, I would have devised a strategy to help. I would have moved someone here and someone else there or come up with just the right assignment or simply had everyone stop and sing a song. I would have come up with something. But my mojo was gone. Instead, I did something I've never done in 23 years of working in settings like these. I asked the young man to leave.
"You're welcome to come back next week if you feel you can focus on what we're doing," I told him.
"Please miss, please miss, give me another chance," he pleaded.
"I'll be happy to give you another chance next week," I repeated.
"Please miss, please miss, don't make me go."
The staff member who accompanies us escorted him out.
The room went suddenly quiet.
"You shouldn'ta kicked him out," the young woman who had been sitting on his other side mumbled.
After a pause, the rest of the group got back to writing or decorating their journals. As almost always happens, another young woman started making remarks, filling up the space the young man had left behind. But not quite as much space; there was still room for the rest to keep on with their own projects. Even she kept working, while she spouted snippets of suggestive song lyrics. Fine.
Someone else lay elegant strips of color across the cover of her book. Another young woman devised a gorgeous symbol for her native Puerto Rico. Another wrote a sonnet about achieving her dreams. As the session drew to a close, I asked a bright-eyed newcomer to start a poem with a single line. She passed the book around and everyone else added a line of their own. When we finished, the girl who had started the poem read it out loud. It was about the meaning of love. I wished the young man who could not stop talking had been there to hear it.

Celeste Fraser Delgado is the MOLI View's contributing editor for Worthy Causes.

» Read Celeste's blog