Listen to thisDear Kid,
You must not expect that when you leave here we will plant you out into a neat, clean middle-class world filled with angels, apart from your parents and your neighbourhood and the hurt and the tough experiences or, later, away from the battles of work and unemployment and survival. The bars and the bottle stores are not going to disappear, neither are the people that you know. Those who hurt others, or get involved in petty crime, or bully or push or tease or commit adultery are not going to disappear. It would be easy if we could promise to bring you into this children's home and keep you until all these things go away and then only let you go back. But this would be unrealistic. All that we can say to you is: Here is a place for you to rest a while, a place where you can gather you resources and gain strength before you go on your way. While you are here we will feed you and clothe you and support you at school. We will help you to make way where you stopped growing, where you froze in the classroom and in your making of friends. We will accept you for what you are, the way you are and even though you may not feel too good about yourself and the way you were before, it doesn’t matter to us. You are OK kid, and you matter to us; you count here. We know how it is to feel screwed up and sore. If you need to wear big boots and act tough to cover up your smallness and your scare inside, it’s OK. Maybe we can help you, and you can drop the smokescreen and be the real big you that we know is really you.
While you are here you will find that we won’t try to take the place of your Mom and Dad, for no matter how much they may seem to have let you down, we know that inside they are the ones that really count, the ones whose love is the ache you have, the longing that hurts. Instead, from us, you can expect that we will want to be your friends, to accept you, warts and all. We will warm to you and the tangle that the others have been wringing their hands over, or shouting about your ears, or blaming on you. We will not meet you head on; instead we will turn around and walk your path with you. While you are here, we will show you that we can feel what you are feeling and that we can respond to you, instead of reacting to what might be going on inside us. We don’t need you to give anything back to us, nor to show that you love us, because we are big enough to not want you to meet our needs while we are busy with the important thing in our lives here – meeting yours! We don’t ask you to make us feel good “we don’t want you to owe us any emotional debts. While you are here we will not be blown about by the whirlwind that you can make and which you know has turned everybody else around on their heels. We will set boundaries that you can handle, and we will hold you to them because we care enough to be firm. While you are here we will not always protect you from the consequences of your own decisions, even if we have to stand by, knowing that you have chosen a way that will not be easy for you. While you are here we will not stand over you and constantly hold you in check. Instead we will build conditions around you that will eventually lead you to stand on your own and to be a decision maker for yourself. Our lessons are not for our own comfort now, but for you, later, when we are no longer here. For us it is not important that others may look at us as parental figures. They don’t understand that it would be easy for us to form you to the way we want you to go, yet we choose the less comfortable and more difficult way, and that is to stand by you as you make your own choices, and interpret with you the consequences of what you have chosen, to allow you to learn from that for life.
Look kid, the world has not been very kind to you, and you have not really managed to come through all that hardship without some scars. We want to understand what hurt you and what you are really experiencing inside there, and why it is that you are finding it difficult to handle it all. If we can understand this together, you can learn to cope with it. So we would rather that you looked at what we can show you, and practise the skills that we can teach you, so that you can go back into your own world and live out a life in an ordinary street and neighbourhood with the man in the vest smoking a pipe over his barn door, the shop on the corner and the auntie who smells of peppermint. It won’t be easy, but we can teach you to cope, then you will become your own man with your own roots and your own identity. You can learn how to see others and how others see you. You can feel deep down that there are things that you would rather not do, although others are doing them. You can learn to put away your own socks without anyone standing over you. You can walk tall without an adult breathing down you neck making threats and brandishing sentences. It’s better that you go out there and show them that you are a man and feel the wind in your breeches and smell the cabbage cooking in the passageways, because out there it is your world. We are here for you kid, and we care.
Love ...
