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115 SEPTEMBER 2008
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moments with youth

'Home'

Mark Krueger


Last month I shared my reflections about place as a sensory, emotional, physical, and social location. Since then I have thought again about the meaning of home, and how it is a place of many emotions, feelings, and associations. A place many of us escape from and return to, a place we all need in some ways but not necessarily a always a physical or good place, which I think is perhaps something we put too much emphasis on with homeless and other kids from troubled or abusive homes. We want to give them a good home. But home is a good/bad, happy/sad, permanent/impermanent place that is real in its multiple meanings, and surroundings, an inner location to be in and out of at times. A place we have to be willing to be in and with kids rather than being preoccupied with finding for the future homes that often do not exist for them or us for that matter. So, in this context, home is more a place we carry with us than a place we go or return to. Further, no matter how hard we try, we can not really, as the famous line from Thomas Wolfe goes, “return home again.” “Why would I want to?” is not an uncommon thought among youth trying to escape to other places, and an even more telling and realistic comment among youth who have been abused at home.

I think I had a sense of this when we tried to create a homey feel for the kids with the “weathered barn wood,” I wrote about last month. Even then in the early days of my career, I sensed that “home” was filled for them, as it was for me, with mixed emotions. When I wrote a chapter a few years ago titled The Quest to Know: One Man's Inquiry into Why He’s Home, and said that I, like others, “felt at home in Child and Youth Care almost from the first day,” I didn’t mean I was in a house someplace. I meant that I was in a physical, emotional, and psychological place that felt as if it was the way being home should be because it was real to me in all its darkness, happiness, and sense of purpose. I was surrounded by others in which my inner sense of home, including the emotions that went with it, could find a way to express itself and be useful in my interactions. When other workers said over the years that they found a home in youth work, my sense was this was that they meant something similar.

“Home” in this context is as much about helping young people experience and understand the meaning of what home is for them, a meaning that allows them to be enmeshed with workers in their experience of home and to learn from it. Or, as Mike Baizerman wrote and spoke with me years ago develop places where workers don’t build trust like carpenters build houses but rather by being with youth in the world in a way that discloses trust a s being fundamental to being together as persons.

Home for many youth is not where the heart is but rather where the broken heart is. The hood, the street, and the gang are home. Not the church, temple, mosque or school where many of them do not feel they belong. Home is a messy place of mixed values, securities, and insecurities. But it is home, as safe or unsafe as it might be. Our job is to create with them a different sense of home. A home that is somewhat dependable and predictable as Henry Maier argued and at the same time a home where nothing is ordinary as Adrian Ward has written, also a home where the rhythms are consistent with each child's readiness and capacity to be there, as Vera Fahlberg wrote about (e-mail me for specific references).

To do this of course we have to feel at home in our work and understand our own sense of home and what it means so that we can be open to the possibility of youth finding and feeling at home with us in these places. As I look back at my writing over the years, place, and home are always somewhere within a few pages. Like the youth workers who write sketches with me of their experiences, I can not see myself with or without the kids outside of place or home. If we are not there, we are always trying to find it. Further, it is as if getting there is more important than the arrival. In our work, questioning these experiences leads to a deeper understanding of their meaning.

As with many things I often find it helpful to express my ideas and feelings about life, and Child and Youth Care in a poem, such as this poem about my sense of home as a youth as I see it in hindsight:

Home

I have never wanted
a home per se

Home is here
outdoors in traffic
where I breathe
in the cool fresh air
and the morning sun
washes over my face
like a warm wash cloth

Rilke’s home
without lamp
or table or chair

a route peddled
all day long where
light enters
the pupils, lingers
and escapes

Voices muffled
in the hum of engines;
crows silent
as I walk beneath them

William Carlos William's
Pastoral of properly
weathered places

houses close together
on lawns
German, Jewish, Italian,
Arab, Spanish, Black, White
families concentrated
inside still”

as I move past

I have always felt more at home outdoors than indoors where, as a runner, I find comfort in the interplay between motion and stillness (existential hum), and this poem helps me understand why. In some ways I think this also opens me to understanding kids who live on the streets. Although their worlds are quite different, there is perhaps a similar anticipation about finding self there outside the sterile, or sometimes ugly, stifling, confines of home. All youth want at times I think to find themselves outside their homes.

Poets and readers of poetry might recognize the reference to Rilke’s powerful The Panther poem above, which is based on his observations of a caged Panther. In reflection as a boy I think at times I tried to escape my cage. Rilke also gave writers some of the best advice ever in his Letters to the Young Poet when he encouraged them to listen to their inner voice.

The following poem by William Carlos Williams, which I referred to in the poem above, helps me when I try to understand why I felt at home in youth work:

Pastoral

When I was younger
it was plain to me
I must make something of myself
Older now
I walk back streets
admiring the houses
of the very poor
roof out of line with sides
the yards cluttered
with old chicken wire, ashes
furniture gong wrong
the fences and outhouses
built of barrel staves
and parts of boxes, all,
as if I am fortunate,
smeared a bluish green
that properly weathered
pleases me the best
of all colors
No one
will believe this
of vast import to the nation

Some readers will note that I have shared these poems before. Often I go back to these places of vast importance to the nation and self, places like the pavilion in the park above Lake Michigan that I often run past. When I was a child we made lanyard bracelets there on rainy days (Def: Pavilion: a temporary shelter; the external ear).

I return to my old neighborhood, see how run down it has become, and hear the sounds of the streets and houses on which I peddled papers early in the morning while I wish for something better for the residents.

I still love the first breath of fresh air when I step outside in the morning and hear the birds chirping the way I did when I grew up in that neighborhood and peddle newspapers. I have a cabin on a lake (I am here now) because in part it reminds me of how we went “up north” when I was a boy, and how I hated it when the vacation was over and I had to wait until the next summer. Now I have a place up north I can return to almost whenever I want. Most kids I worked with did not. I want to bring them here.

In summary, home, like all places, is a phenomenon that calls out as being important to understand in our work, and my life. To know ourselves and our work is to know the place in which we find ourselves with youth and in our own unfolding youth.

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