Worth the Wait
I will stay in my . . . room until I cool off, then I will come out and do my . . . work!” she screamed at me (expletives deleted), as she slammed the door to her bedroom.
Yes! I think we’ve made it!
I breathed, then waited. Ten minutes passed, then 15—time during which I recalled another such occassion following the slamming of her door. I remembered how, as I stood outside I heard the security screen being lifted from the window, waiting, praying. Then, hearing the sound of breaking glass, I rushed in to see 12-year-old Amelia with blood streaming from her hand, threatening.
She had been in my care for almost a year then. “She has a temper,” they told me. “She is very strong-willed. But there is also something good in her.”
All true.
I’m a residential child-care worker, and Amelia was but one of 14 girls aged 11 to 15 in my care, most of whom were thieves and had been sexually abused.
Amelia neither stole nor lied. Instead she told the truth boldly, and defiantly faced the consequences of her actions. She could defend herself against anyone or anything.
But she couldn’t resist the pain of being a lost little girl. I recalled nights when I would wake up to find a wraith-like form at my bedside: “I’ve been dreaming about my mother.”
We would sit together as she told me about her—her mother who had treated her so badly, blaming her for her father’s desertion, then sending her to boarding school at age seven. Who, when she became ill, brought her back as a nine-year-old to care for her younger half-brother and sisters. Who, on her deathbed, made Amelia promise to care for them, always.
“Why did she start loving me only when she got sick?” she would always ask.
“Do you think Mummy is in heaven?”
“Where can I get money to buy a house so that we can have our own home again?”
Sometimes she would cry quietly, holding onto me. She’s letting me in, I would think. It’s going to get better.
Come the morning, the mask was back. So was the temper. It was as if the night had never been.
For two years things went on this way until the day she smashed the window, when with a shard of glass in her hand, she threatened to cut her own throat if I didn’t promise she and her brothers and sisters could stay.
So believing her, I promised. And the battles went on.
Until one day, someone gave us an old horse. He was useless as a horse, but he allowed the children to sit on him. However, not a step would he take with one on his back. We tried everything: bribery, sweet talk, stern words, Patches just stood there. Not surprisingly, most of the children eventually lost interest.
Except Amelia. She loved Patches and spent almost all of her free time with him. Soon the night-time wanderings decreased and the daytime fights became fewer.
I would watch them through the window, her blond head against his shaggy mane. I wondered what she was telling him.
Until one day she said, “You know, Patches is like me. He just has to get over the mental block in his head, then he’ll see it’s not so bad to be ridden.”
A week later I saw her sitting on Patches’ back and the next day I was amazed as he walked a few timid steps, Amelia astride him. The day after that she rode him along the fence line. Somehow, she’d gotten him over his “mental block.”
I waited almost a week until they’d made it once around the paddock before asking Amelia to do a housekeeping task that I knew she hated. And here I was waiting outside her door. For her, it was harder than for Patches.
Then her door opened: Yes, she’d cooled off and went to complete her task. She’d overcome the mental block in her own head. At last.
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