Like Rain on Parked Cars, Chapter 4 – Mentoring Challenges

Martin Luther King, Jr. – I Have a Dream Speech, Source https://www.flickr.com/, Author David Erickson (CC Attribution 2.0 Generic)

“…there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcised nor uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave nor free, but Christ is all and in all” (Col. 3: 11).

Our first eighteen months together were rocky.

Again and again, Aretha would cancel visits, often at the last moment, while I was actually en route.  She was frequently late, sometimes by hours.

I could not be sure if this was outright disinterest or “testing,” her attempt to gauge whether I was sincere.  She always apologized profusely, seemed to enjoy our visits when they did take place.

Again and again, I found her asleep when I arrived, whatever the time of day.  Sleep was a coping mechanism for her, a way of shutting out the world.  This was troubling despite Aretha’s generally upbeat demeanor, since it suggested depression on her part.

I persevered.  She was so obviously worth the effort, intelligent, motivated.  Any child would have been worth the effort.  But with Aretha, I simply could not give up.

This was due, to some extent, to my own upbringing.  Because of family issues, my teen years had been tumultuous.  The transition to womanhood had been a painful and haphazard process for me.  I still bore the scars, and wanted to smooth the way of a child facing the same transition.

Lilian

Then there was the memory of Lilian.  My closest friend throughout high school, Lilian, too had been raised in a working class family.  Intelligent, sensitive, funny, and shy, Lilian helped me survive those lonely years.

Lilian had a far greater knowledge of music than I did.  Otherwise, we shared the same interests and activities, had the same circle of friends, enjoyed the same jokes, endured the same gym classes.

We might have been twins, separated at birth, except that Lilian was African American.

I was made aware of the importance of that difference when I visited her home for the first time.

While Lilian’s mother went to get cookies and milk for us, I had a chance to look around the modest living room.  A photo of Martin Luther King, Jr. clipped from a newspaper caught my  eye.  Framed and hung in a prominent place on the wall, the photo obviously meant a great deal to the family.

That took me by surprise.  Here was a public figure to whom my friend and her family felt a personal connection.  Why was this?  At our house, we had family photos on every flat surface, but none of public figures – strangers – not even the president.

At age thirteen or fourteen, I was vaguely aware of the Civil Rights Movement, but had no connection to it.  Lilian did.

That point was driven forever home to me in a physics class.  Lilian and I were lab partners.  As such, we were instructed to perform a joint experiment, but create individual lab notebooks.  When the physics teacher reviewed our notebooks she gushed over mine, pointedly ignoring Lilian’s.

I was taken aback by this behavior on the teacher’s part, could see the pain in Lilian’s eyes.  But – hungry for attention – I lapped up the compliments, regardless.  My feeble attempts to draw the teacher’s attention to Lilian’s work (certainly on a par with my own) had little effect.

Lilian would not talk about the situation with me, afterwards.  Angry and hurt, she walked silently away, her shoulders hunched forward, her lab notebook clutched tightly to her chest.

Years later, Lilian denied any recollection of the incident, when I tried to apologize for my part in it.  Either way, the harm had been done.

Destined

It was not easy for me, making time for Aretha.  Work had for many years been all-consuming for me.  There was always another case, always another crisis, calling for my attention.

I began seeing Aretha during an interval between jobs, a period that I was dealing with family illness.  Once work resumed, so did the pressures on my time.  I strove to rehabilitate an office where many of the support staff were, themselves, the products of inner city schools.

There were many evenings, stuck in traffic, I felt like an exhausted salmon thrashing doggedly upstream as I made my way to the group home for our visits.  Aretha and I would spend a few hours together in the common room, talking at a nearby pizza parlor, or driving around under the stars, something she always found soothing.

I had wanted for over a year to mentor, had signed up with a well-known mentor agency, and gone through the necessary screening process, to no avail.  Month after month went by.  I finally resigned myself to the fact there would be no call.

One day, as I parked the car in its regular spot outside my doctor’s office, I glanced up to see an adjacent building bathed in light.  I caught my breath.  The sign identified a children’s relief organization with which I had been familiar in New York.  Surely this building had not been here before.  How many times had I parked in the same spot, over the last year, without noticing that sign?

I walked into the building under a virtual spell, signed up for the program, and two weeks later met Aretha.

We seemed destined for each other.

Copyright © 2010 – Present Anna Waldherr.  All rights reserved.

READERS CAN FIND MY VIEWS ON ABUSE AND ABUSE-RELATED ISSUES AT ANNA WALDHERR A Voice Reclaimed, Surviving Child Abuse
https://avoicereclaimed.com