Listen to thisMost Child and Youth Care Practitioners have had moments of reflection in which they think to themselves, I can’t believe someone is paying me to do this job. We may be grabbing some snacks at a movie theatre with a couple of young people before heading in to watch a movie we are genuinely interested in seeing. Perhaps we get to share one of our strengths and interests with a group of young people while we plan and facilitate programming. We may have the privilege to sit alongside a young person during bedtime routines as they strengthen their ability to read before drifting off to sleep, feeling completely safe as they do so. While Child and Youth Care Practitioners always strive to focus on and support the needs of young people, these moments likely offer us a chance to (at least a little bit) meet our own needs as well. They feel good. They are the moments that offer us an opportunity to appreciate how lucky we are to have chosen the field we find ourselves in.
But relational practice demands more than these moments, and the young people we support often need us to be there even when we might not feel so ‘lucky’ in the moment with them. A Urie Bronfenbrenner refrain that is commonly understood in our field is that “every child needs at least one adult that is irrationally crazy about [them].” If this is true (which I believe it to be) how do we demonstrate for the young people we share a relationship with that we are ‘irrationally crazy’ about them? Is it crazy to enjoy a movie with a young person who has complete command over their emotions, and laugh together over a bowl of popcorn? Is it crazy to celebrate a success at school by making ice cream sundaes together? These moments might be vital to the strengthening of our relationships with young people, true, but would anyone identify the practitioner as being ‘irrational’ in their commitment to the relationship based on these types of shared experiences?
The reality of our work is that the youth and families we support are ‘edgy.’ They both have edges (we’ve likely all been told to ‘fuck off’ by a dysregulated young person), and they exist near the edges of the group, often with limited access to material resources, and/ or socially constructed conceptions of ‘power’ (Gharabaghi, 2012). In our field, youth have both had difficult experiences, and can create difficult experiences for us as practitioners. It is imperative, then, that in our relationships with those we support we understand the value of ‘hanging-in.’ Indeed, when we commit to ‘hanging-in’ we can seize the opportunity to demonstrate Urie Bronfenbrenner’s conception of ‘irrational craziness.’ If the relationships we share with young people are roads to travel, they are not smooth, straight highways, built for speed and convenience to our desired destination. They are the weathered, crumbling, winding roads. They have potholes, too many turns, downed trees, and many detours. There will be times when our intuitive response may be to stop the car, turn around and find the on-ramp to that divided highway and the much easier cruise control that comes along with them. Hanging-in requires us to recognize this intuitive impulse, and counter-intuitively push past it. The young people we support may have downed the tree that blocks the road. We ourselves may have dug potholes in the road with our values and preconceived notions of relationships and CYC practice in general. Perhaps we share responsibility for the struggles in the relationship. Hanging-in requires us to recognize where a young person is at, explore their needs, and join them without interference from our own expectations or the expectations of the program we are working in (Freeman, Fulcher, Garfat, Gharabaghi, 2018).
Those moments of I can’t believe I’m getting paid to do this will
inevitably be interrupted by setbacks and difficult, perhaps painful,
moments in the relationships we share with youth. It is the painful
moments that we can demonstrate how irrational we can feel for the young
people we care about. “After all, learning and change, indeed healing,
take time, effort, practice, and learning from feedback” (Freeman,
Fulcher, Garfat, Gharabaghi, 2018, p. 24).
The following story might
be difficult to read. It is a story about the manifestation of a young
person’s pain, and a practitioner’s uncertainty, if not determination,
while hanging-in with them. The subject matter concerns sexual assault
and suicide. Reading what follows may require that you to hang-in
throughout. Our field of practice may present us all with the
opportunity to hang-in while experiencing something similar.
Cold Hard Ground
You wake up suddenly, not sure what ripped you out of sleep so quickly.
Your room is pitch black aside from the warm, yellow glow that leaks under the crack of the closed bedroom door. You would say the darkness is a good sign that your internal clock isn’t waking you up because you overslept and are late for your shift, but it’s November and you are above the Arctic circle in Western Nunavut. It’s dark 22 hours a day. It could be 2:00am, 7:00am, or 3:00pm. You haven’t seen the sun fully crest the horizon in the few weeks you’ve been on rotation. You reach over to touch the screen of your phone, and squint at the too-bright greeting it offers you as it springs to life. It’s 2:14am. You didn’t oversleep. You press a button along the side of your phone, blacken the scorching screen, and lay back in the darkness once again, staring at the strip of yellow light at the bottom of the door.
You’re on week 4 of a 6-week shift. The program you work in is a live-in care model. It’s a group care program much like the ones in the South you’ve worked in for the last 6 years. The glaring difference in this program is that, as the name of the care model suggests, you and another fly-in staff live in the program with the young people it serves. Local staff do the awake-overnight shift so you can sleep, and they cover an afternoon or two a week so you can retreat to your bedroom early to catch up on sleep, read, exercise or whatever other form of self-care you’ve set up for yourself. Other than that, you are on the floor. 7:00am-11:00pm.
You close your eyes, glad to have about 5 more hours of sleep before you’re back on shift when you realize what woke you up in the first place.
A loud crash erupts from downstairs. It’s a BANG with a sort of CRUNCH that sounds like wood being splintered. It ends with a metallic rattle.
“Andrew! STOP!” You hear Lorna, the overnight staff, yell in response to the commotion.
You throw the blankets off yourself and open your bedroom door. Crystal, your live-in shift partner, already has her head poking out of her bedroom door next to yours and is squinting at you through the light in the hallway.
You each say nothing to one another, but you both know it’s time to get up. You go back to grab your phone from the bedside table, and step pout through the threshold of your bedroom door in your shorts and T-shirt. Crystal retreats to her bedroom, but you know it’s only to throw on some clothes before she joins you downstairs. You move quickly to the stairs. You aren’t running, but you’re moving as fast as you can without actually doing so.
If you weren’t fully awake trudging down the stairs, the scene you
walk into at the bottom of them pumps you full of adrenaline and you
most certainly are now. Andrew, one of the young people you live with,
is standing by the once-locked door of the tool room. The door is
hanging on by the padlock that secured it, and it’s been kicked off the
hinges. The wood where the hinges were attached is cracked and split.
Andrew is standing beside it holding a handsaw that you hung on a hook
and secured in the room a day prior. You all had used the handsaw to
build a chair, for program, a couple of days ago. Lorna was standing a
few feet away from Andrew, her hands up in front of her as one might
have them to accept a gift. None of the local staff are formally trained
Child and Youth Care Practitioners. Most, like all the boys you work
with, are Inuit, and they have knowledge of, and connections within, the
community. Their contributions to the program are far more valuable than
anything a Southern Qallunaat like you can offer for both of those
reasons. Still, a crisis like the one you just walked into can be
overwhelming with formal training, let alone without. You make note of
the way Lorna has positioned herself physically. Her affect and body
language do not necessarily conceal her fear, but you interpret it as
fear for Andrew, not of him. Very few local staff would be as stoic at
this moment. You silently allow a moment of gratitude that it is Lorna
on shift tonight.
“Give it, Andrew. Really could hurt yourself,” she
says.
“Fucking get back, Lorna!” Andrew screams.
Lorna doesn’t advance, but she doesn’t step back either. She lowers her hands, but keeps them so Andrew can see them, palms up. She looks over at you, and for a flash, her face betrays her shock.
You take a step closer to Lorna, and Andrew seems to notice you for the first time. “You, too! You both! Leave me the fuck alone!” Andrew’s chest is heaving through his hoodie. He’s wearing sweatpants and socks, and, although he was home by curfew and in his room as expected, he looks as though he’s been awake all night. He backs toward the building’s exit, which is a couple of steps behind the tool room, in the back porch.
“Andrew, what’s-” you start.
“Just leave me. The fuck. ALONE!” Andrew bellows in a tone and volume you’ve never heard from him. “I’m fucking DONE! Don’t follow.” At those words he turns, kicks the push handle on the heavy metal security door and darts into the frigid, November darkness. No parka, no wind pants, no boots, saw in hand.
Fuck, you think.
The circumstances freeze you for a moment. Though shock grips your decision-making abilities, and your prefrontal cortex is sputtering to formulate a plan, what’s happening tonight has not arrived out of nowhere. Andrew has struggled with suicidal ideation since he moved in. You’ve written a half dozen incident reports related to it yourself. All those incidents had stopped there, however, at the ideation stage. No concrete plan or timeline. Andrew’s determination and action is new, at least since he moved in, it is.
Your prefrontal kicks back online, and you start shoving on your wind pants and parka.
“Crystal-” You start. You didn’t notice her come downstairs, but when you look up through the glass window into the office, Crystal is already on the phone. “Police?” You confirm, yanking the zipper on your parka up to your chin. She gives a thumbs up in response. You silently thank your team for coming up with a protocol for Andrew leaving the house in this emotional state all those months ago.
You find your boots, sit on the bench and shove them on. It’ll cost you time to tie them properly, but you figure it’s worth it to stay warm and be ready to run.
Crystal pokes her head out of the office, her palm covering the phone’s receiver. “What was he wearing?”
Lorna jumps in, “dark grey hoodie, black pants, white socks.” After she says ‘socks,’ Lorna looks at you and you share a second of eye contact.
Crystal disappears back into the office and repeats Lorna’s description. “Yes,” I hear her confirm to the dispatcher on the other end of the phone, “only socks.”
You focus on your laces. Pull tight. Loop under. Tighten. Hook. Pull. Loop. Bow.
Repeat.
You pull your wind pants over the boot and stand to leave. Crystal is off the phone and hovering in the threshold of the office, leaning against the door frame. “You don’t have to go, you know. We called it in. It’s the middle of the night. He has a saw...” Crystal says, trailing off. “We followed protocol,” she adds.
You know Crystal is right. “I know,” you say. “You’re right.”
A frail grin tugs at Crytal’s cheeks. There is a certain knowing of one another that develops when you spend weeks living with the person you are working the floor with. “I’ll have the house cell right in front of me,” she says. “Text or call if you need us.”
You pat at your pockets to make sure you brought your phone
downstairs. You confirm it’s there. And then you go.
The late-fall,
Arctic air hits the back of your throat as your boots hit the
steel-grated porch. The sound of cold metal vibrating under your feet
echoes into the night as you bound down the steps and on to the tundra.
Ice and snow in the Arctic aren’t like the stuff you need to navigate in
Southern winters. The ice isn’t slick, and other than the freshly fallen
stuff right after a blizzard, your feet don’t sink into soft snow. It’s
more like running over a vast sheet of thick, firm Styrofoam. It
crunches loudly under your feet.
Heel. CRRR- Toe. -UNNNCH
You get away from the house and into the school playground directly behind it. You can see in all directions from here and you turn slowly, scanning the roads and alleys in all directions. You catch a glimpse of movement disappear around the high school about 100 yards away. You’re not sure you saw anything at all. It might have been your imagination. You look left. Then right. Nothing. You look back towards the high school. Maybe it was nothing, just your mind playing tricks in the dark and the glow of the not-nearly-enough orange streetlights around town. You don’t have much time to think, and an imagined blur is a better lead to follow than the utter stillness that awaited you everywhere else you turned.
You head that way. You don’t usually run when intervening in crisis, but you’re running now.
Heel. CRRR- Toe. -UNNNCH. Heel. CRRR- Toe. -UNNNCH.
When you round the corner of the high school, you exhale, and stop running. Andrew is across the street, his back against the locked, front door of the grocery store. His head is leaned back as he breathes heavily into the night’s crisp air. Clouds of steam are bursting from his mouth and the saw is still dangling from the hand that isn’t clutching his chest.
“Andrew!” You don’t quite yell.
His head snaps forward and his eyes are laser-focused on you. He pulls up one of his sleeves and presses the saw to his forearm. “Don’t,” is all he says.
“Andrew-” you start, more calmly this time.
“I SAID FUCKING DON’T!” His chest is still heaving. “My own family don’t want to talk to a pervert, piece of shit. No Qallunaat needs to pretend to give a fuck either! So, fucking DON’T! Just go back!”
You aren’t surprised to hear the word ‘pervert’ out of Andrew’s mouth. It is one that has come up during previous incidents of suicidal ideation. When Andrew moved in it was because of an incident in his hometown. After having sex with an ex-girlfriend, he had taken pictures of her naked as she slept. She didn’t know about the pictures until they started circulating at school after Andrew had shared them with his friends. It wasn’t long before the entire town knew. First, came the legal consequences. After that, the social consequences. When it became unsafe for Andrew to live there, he was flown out of town and moved into your program.
You say nothing in response to Andrew this time and watch his chest heaving while his breath bursts forth and dissolve into the air. If Andrew decides to sink that blade into his arm, there’s no way you can close the distance fast enough to stop him. You use all your focus to relax your muscles. You concentrate on breathing slowly, in through your nose, then out through your mouth.
Andrew stares into you, hypervigilant for any sign of movement. Then, for a split second, he turns his head to the left. He’s looking for an exit.
You take one slow step forward, trying to close the gap between the two of you. But that’s all it takes. Andrew darts again, runs around the grocery store and down the street beside it.
You’re running again. He has a healthy head start, but you are determined to at least keep your eyes on him. You round the corner of the store, too and see Andrew running right down the middle of the road that heads straight to the ocean. Andrew gets to the dock. The water this close to shore is frozen solid and has been for a couple of weeks, but Lorna took her ski-doo out over the weekend and told you yesterday that the sea ice isn’t reaching as far out as it should this time of year.
Andrew gets to the dock, runs the length of it, jumps down onto the ice and disappears in the darkness outside of the last light at the end of the dock.
You pull out your cell phone and text the house as fast as you can: At the dock. He’s running on the ice. Update cops. Send ski-doo. You shove the phone back into your coat and resume your pursuit.
You’ve been closing the distance between you and Andrew as you both approached the dock, and you push yourself to run faster when Andrew disappears onto the sea ice. As you get to the dock you feel the wind pick up and start to slap at the skin on your cheeks and gloveless hands. The thought of Andrew’s bare feet invades your mind. You stop thinking about anything else but running faster. You pay no attention to the medium-sized Navy ship that is perched at a bizarre angle beside the dock, a result of the water that once surrounded its hull freezing solid around it, bending the ship to its unyielding will. You’ve been waiting all rotation to see the Northern Lights, but don’t even notice the bright green streaks shimmering in the clear, black sky above you. You leap off the dock, out of the last artificial light in town, and onto the sea ice behind Andrew. You can see just enough to make out a dark mass pulling away straight ahead of you. The bitter-cold air is encroaching on your throat. You choke down a cough. You can’t stop now.
Your feet pound along the surface of the ice. Aside from the fact you jumped off a dock, there is little indication that you are moving across frozen water instead of frozen ground. Your eyes adjust to what little light the night sky offers you, and you can see Andrew up ahead. He is slowing down. He looks back. You keep your pace. You can’t help but notice the large cracks in the sea ice that remind you of the fissures that form during an earthquake in some disaster movie. Lorna has told you this is just the way the ice freezes, and you shouldn’t worry about falling through. Luckily, your brain doesn’t have the capacity to be concerned about the cracks other than to make note of their presence.
Suddenly, Andrew stops, turns around. “Stop following me,” he states, putting the sawblade back against the skin of his arm.
You stop running. “I can’t,” is all you say.
You both stare at one another, the only sound now is each of your heavy breathing as you struggle to catch your breath in the icy air.
“Just let me die,” Andrew says. “The ice won’t go much further. Just let me walk into the water and die.”
You say nothing, but take a small, slow step forward. Andrew doesn’t move the blade from his arm, but he doesn’t turn to run again either.
“It’s good for everyone if I go,” he states matter-of-factly. “Nobody
wants a piece of shit pervert around anyway.”
“We want you around,”
you tell him.
“Bunch of Qallunaat Southerners paid to be here,” Andrew scoffs.
You take another step forward. Andrew stays where he is.
“What about Josh at the grocery store?” You offer. “Last time I got groceries he told me the shelves would never be stocked if he didn’t have you on evening shift.”
“Could find anyone to move boxes around.”
“OK,” you concede. “What about Atka, then? Who’s going to battle him for the house ping pong belt?”
Andrew says nothing in response but doesn’t move when you take another step forward. You’re trying to get close enough to grab him if you need to.
“And Sammie,” you keep talking. “She’s expecting that chair we made her, and she’ll have your kamiks when we drop it off.” You take one more step, you guess you’re within about 10 feet of him now.
“I’m just a pervert, piece of shit,” Andrew says again, his voice cracking, tears welling in his eyes.
“You’re more than your biggest fuck up,” you tell him.
“Just let me die,” Andrew begs now, tears rolling down his cheeks.
“I’m not going to,” you assure him.
“Fine,” he says, biting his lower lip. He presses the saw blade into his skin.
You bound forward a couple of steps, attempting to get to him before he can drag the blade, now puncturing his skin and drawing blood, sideways along his forearm. Andrew pulls the blade back and swings it wildly at your head. You duck and tackle him across his chest, wrapping your arms around him, and dragging him to the ground with you.
The blade rattles onto the ground beside you. You’re locked into a hold that is most definitely not congruent with the physical intervention skills you've been trained to use as a last resort to prevent harm in a crisis, but Andrew doesn’t have the blade anymore. You just have to hang on now.
He thrashes violently as you roll around on the ground. “JUST LET ME FUCKING DIE!” he screams. “I’M JUST A PERVERT, PIECE OF FUCKING SHIT!”
You lose your grip for a second, and Andrew almost wriggles free. You reach out to grab him, locking your hands together once again. You’ve ended up with your back on the sea ice, and Andrew’s back pressed against your chest. You're pinning his arms to his sides in your hold and squeezing as hard as you can. He’s still thrashing.
Just hang in, you tell yourself.
“JUST LET ME FUCKING DIE! I’M JUST A PIECE OF SHIT!”
You hold him tight.
“JUST LET ME FUCKING DIE!”
Your hands are weakening in the cold, but you keep squeezing them together. Andrew’s thrashing is abating.
“JUST LET ME FUCKING DIE!” He screams over and over. “JUST LET ME FUCKING DIE!” Andrew’s body goes limp and he starts to cry. “Just let me fucking die,” he sobs. “Let me fucking die. Just let me die. Let me die. Please. Just let me die.” He repeats it over and over, and you think he might die from exposure until you hear something else.
The sound of a skidoo. The steady hum of the motor gets louder as it approaches, and its headlight grows brighter and brighter. You’ve never been so happy to see law enforcement in your life.
You let your own tears come now, and you let the back of your head fall against the cold hard ground. You notice the Aurora dancing above you now. It’s the first time you’ve ever seen it.
References
Freeman, J., Fulcher, L., Garfat, T., Gharabaghi, K. (2018). Characteristics of a relational Child and Youth Care approach revisited. CYC-Online , 236, pp 7-45.
Gharabaghi, K.(2012). Being with edgy youth. Nova Science Publishers.
