The Tiger’s Child: The story of a gifted, troubled child and the teacher who refused to give up on her. Torey Hayden

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СКАЧАТЬ by a sense of insight. Wow! I had always written because I found writing like pretending: an opportunity to turn myself into someone else for the moment I was doing it and be that individual, feeling his or her feelings and experiencing his or her adventures; but once the act of creation was over, I had never really gone back to what I had written. Now here it was, two weeks later, and I was feeling exactly what I had experienced earlier when I was writing it. Exactly. Again. As if the two weeks hadn’t happened. I had stopped time. There, on the school steps, I knew I had stumbled onto magic of the first order. Real magic!

      For the rest of my childhood, through my adolescence and into adulthood, writing compelled me. It was an internal, almost autonomic, activity, like circulation or digestion, that happened simply as a natural part of me. I wrote in all forms: diaries, anecdotes, stories. I wrote to understand other people, to give myself the opportunity to be inside them a while and see what it felt like to see the world from another point of view. I wrote to understand emotions and experiences I had not yet encountered. And I wrote to understand myself.

      It proved a powerful, if somewhat unusual, education. In particular, it fostered my abilities to be objective and to empathize, which in turn allowed me a greater general acceptance of differences; and, of course, it made me a keen observer.

      I was in the final year of a doctorate I hadn’t meant to find myself doing. I had weathered the mainstreaming law that had so disconcerted me the year I’d had Sheila. Although still not happy with all aspects of its implementation, I’d returned to the classroom a couple of years later and taken up teaching again as a “centered” resource teacher, which meant I stayed in the same room but the children came and went. It wasn’t quite as fulfilling as having my own class, but at least I saw the same boys and girls on a regular basis.

      Then the administration in Washington changed and with it, the general attitude of the country. Issues I’d fought heart and soul to see achieved a decade earlier were swept away with a single signature. Lower taxes and cuts in public spending became the bywords of the day. Because treating handicapped children in the public schools is labor intensive, and thus expensive, ours were among the first programs to be targeted. Further emphasis was put on placing special education children in the regular classroom as the cheaper alternative. We were being forced to respond to children in ways that were not necessarily the most beneficial to the child—or the teacher, either, for that matter, as many regular education teachers had little grounding in dealing with handicapped children. These philosophies, however, were the only ones that allowed us to process children through the system at the cost demanded of us by the government. The market economy was now being applied to education.

      Angry at this change and all too aware that if I continued in the classroom, I too would soon find myself unemployed, I’d decided to work on a doctorate in special education. This was a stupid decision. The degree would overqualify me for the only part of the special education hierarchy I genuinely loved: teaching. Worse, it threw me into the hotbed of those creating the theories that I was trying to escape. Consequently, my heart was never in it.

      I coped by finding other outlets. In this case, it was the continuation of my long-standing research into psychological language problems. This work was of little interest to my colleagues in special education; however, I soon found a niche across campus in the university hospital complex. There, in the department of child and adolescent psychiatry, among others, I discovered willing partners among the psychiatrists and other professionals. Despite my hybrid credentials, my ideas were accepted and encouraged and my research flourished.

      As always, I continued to fill my spare time with writing. Indeed, I was writing more then than at any previous time; in part, I suspect, because I wasn’t fully engaged in my work.

      The desire to write about my experiences with Sheila had been with me for some time. I had saved a lot of material from that class, not with the intention of using it to back up writing at a later date, but just because I was a bit of a hoarder and a sentimental one at that. Although I hadn’t kept a daily diary while working in the class, I had kept copious anecdotal records; moreover, I had had liberal use of a video camera, and as a consequence, had quite a lot of Sheila on tape. I went through these things periodically, and all the while I could hear Sheila in my head: the inflections in her voice, the strange lilting grammatical constructions. I had to write it down. I had to liberate those five months from the onward rush of time.

      Then, driving home on the freeway from work one dark January evening, the beginning came to me: I should have known. I went home and started writing. Eight days and 225 pages later, I was finished.

      It was only in the aftermath that I realized what had happened. At 225 pages, this wasn’t a little something done for my own amusement, it was a book. I knew then that I had to find Sheila and let her read it before the matter went any further.

       Chapter 7

      The job advertisement that caught my eye was for a small private psychiatric clinic in a major city about four hours’ drive west of Marysville. In all my years back east, I had missed the Midwest. Admittedly, Sheila also crossed my mind. Broadview, where she had last been living, was a satellite community of the city. Six months had elapsed since I had written the book and I was no closer to finding Sheila. The idea of living near her, of perhaps reestablishing contact and renewing our relationship was appealing.

      I was accepted at the Sandry Clinic as a research psychologist to coordinate and oversee the various research projects among the staff, as well as to continue my own research work with elective mutism. There were seven staff. Five, including the director, Dr. Rosenthal, were established child psychiatrists. They had founded the clinic together several years before and overseen the conversion of the elegant old building into a series of quality offices and therapy rooms.

      I liked the Sandry Clinic very much. My colleagues were creative people, all lively and articulate, who worked well together as a team. The pinnacle among us in more ways than one was our director. Dr. Rosenthal was a giant of a man physically, standing over six and a half feet tall, with a giant-sized intellect to match. He had about him that charisma powerful men seem to have, which make them handsome whatever their actual physical characteristics. I was in awe of him much of my first year there. Although born and bred in America, he had a European formality about him. For instance, he never called any of us by our first names. “Doctor” was his usual method of catching someone’s attention, but as I didn’t merit that, I remained steadfastly Miss Hayden. This gave him a certain aura of unapproachability, which, combined with his formidable intellectual reputation, kept me shy around him. Nonetheless, I came to know him as a gentle man, firm but kind with his staff in much the same way he was with the children he worked with, and always, always fair.

      Life at the clinic was luxurious compared to what I had become accustomed to while teaching in the state school system. We had wonderful facilities, including a large, sunny therapy room full of things I would have killed for when in special education, such as a five-foot-tall doll’s house, complete with extended doll family, a pony-sized wooden rocking horse, an indoor sandbox and a water tray.

      Similar luxury applied to my workload. Children were parceled out to me for therapy mostly by virtue of their language or lack of it, but I was also allowed a generous amount of time to work on the research projects or to consult with colleagues. Not completely comfortable with the fifty-minute “psychiatric hour,” I was given the freedom of seeing my own clients two or three times a week, if I preferred that to the more traditional one session or of seeing them in their own settings, rather than at the clinic.

      The only fly in the ointment from my point of view was that the majority of my colleagues were committed Freudians, which boxed in their views as tightly as behaviorism had with my education СКАЧАТЬ