Letting in the outsider

A story from preschool

⩩ 49

At the preschool I’m working at part-time, there’s a child who has speech-language issues, both pronunciation and grammatical. Tracy. She doesn’t always use all the words others would to ask the same question or say the same thing, and she drops syllables and slurs words together. The challenges are magnified by the masks we are wearing, which muffle articulation and take away the support of lip-reading.  

The speech-language issues overflow into social issues, since it can be hard to understand what Tracy is trying to say. This is especially true in a group environment, where it is loud, where there is a lot going on, where there is competition for attention. In a classroom of 14 children there is almost always competition for attention. Other children are never far away, and many of them speak with loud, clear voices. Tracy can get neglected. When she says something you don’t understand, and another child behind her or next to her speaks their thought clear as day, it is so easy just to respond to them. In fact, it’s effortless. And Tracy slips away.  

This happens as she plays with other children, and I have experienced it myself. In fact, this was the context for my first memorable experience with her. I was sitting there talking with Tracy who was standing close in front of me, when someone else, Nathan, came up behind her and started talking. Mathis threw sand at Finley. I asked if it was on purpose or on accident and, after a beat, Tracy erupted in front of me with an exasperated cry, “Heyyyyyyyy. Hey! I’m here!” 

This really caught my attention, and, in hindsight, I am so thankful for that moment — for Tracy’s exasperation, her impatience, her anger. I’m thankful she trusted me enough to express herself: her intense need to be seen, her insecurity about and frustration at getting overlooked. Lost in the shuffle.  

That one-one-thousand between my response to Nathan and the start of Tracy’s cry intrigues me and, for reasons I don’t fully understand, brings a melting to my heart. It’s as if, as my mind went somewhere else, her attention also reflexively drifted away, as if as she saw the thing happening she automatically zoned out for a full second before she caught herself and turned around and put her foot down and consciously rejected withdrawal. That crescendoing “heyyyyyyyy” was actually Tracy processing the situation. In that pregnant moment she somehow understood she was tottering on the brink, soothing fantasy on one side, painful reality on the other. She deliberately chose to engage, to feel the pain, and to fight. She chose this side, reality. “Here.” That’s hope.  

What a beautiful example of why I love working with preschool-aged children. The fundamental needs, emotions, and impulses are the same as with adults, but they express them so simply and transparently. I think of Tracy shouting “Hey! I’m here!” and all the situations in which grownups shout the same thing, all the indirect and passive-aggressive ways we express it, and how would shout it if we could be honest and direct and vulnerable enough to do it. The underlying need is the same: to be seen, to be held in attention, to be reassured that you are here. You exist. You matter. You belong. You are loved.  

After that, I paid closer attention to Tracy. I noticed how other children struggled to understand her when she spoke, how quickly they gave up. They never asked her to repeat herself and they rarely spoke back. All in all, I rarely saw her playing with other children. I noticed the same thing with the teachers. I saw how easy it was, in the loud, fast-paced setting of a bustling classroom, for Tracy’s voice to register as noise. Background noise.  

I also began to pay attention to what you might call Tracy’s “emotional disregulation.” She can have emotional outbursts where she gets loud and cries and moves around erratically. She looks wild. She runs around the classroom as the other children look on. This is difficult for the teachers, and what makes it worse is that it is hard to know what set if off. It seems like nothing set it off. That’s just Tracy.  

Then I became aware of the vicious cycle. People get used to not being able to understand her and expect her outbursts. They start dismissing her easily, not even giving her a chance to communicate with them. And it comes from Tracy too. Very quickly, in the process of communication, she loses her self control, she is overcome with frustration, because she knows. She knows the pattern. She’s been down that road before. Difficulty of communication > frustration > outbursts > the expectation of outbursts > premature dismissal > difficulty of communication. As either sides’ tolerance for difficulty in the process of communication becomes lower, the fuse to outburst becomes shorter.  

Then I realized the fundamental situation. She wants to communicate. She wants to communicate so bad and it’s hard for her contact other people. When she gets the sense communication is not working, she gets frustrated, and she goes stiff and her whole body becomes a vessel of intense, desperate, almost violent energy. That is panic. Panic at isolation, abandonment. All the yelling, all the erratic movements, all the wild energy grows out of her desire to communicate. To touch. To stay in contact. Not to be left alone.  

When I understood this, I committed to giving her my attention. One day Tracy was sitting on a big green plastic ball, about the size of those balls with a handle or udders on them you bounce on, but without a handle. I stood in front of her and gave her my hands and helped her boing boing boing up and down. Holy moly. I have experienced joy. She got the hang of it and was having so much fun, us doing it together. After a couple minutes, I told her I was going to take a break. “Okay,” she said, perfectly agreeably. Five minutes later we can back together and she put out her hands and we bounced again. I told her I needed to walk around and she said, joyfully, “Okay.” 

The next week, on Monday, as I turned onto the street of the school, I found the class out on the street, lined up and holding the “donut” string, as they put it, doing a neighborhood walk. Later I learned that Tracy was gone that day, and the teachers told me that that’s why they had done the walk that day. Easier to manage without. I get where they are coming from, with their own interests and abilities and concerns, but my heart cracked when I heard this. If the teachers are relieved when she is gone, what are they feeling when she is there? When she arrives at school? What message is being communicated?

I am reading a book about shame, Daring Greatly, by Brene Brown. One of the takeaways for me is that shame is the fear of disconnection, of not belonging. For example, if I feel shame after saying something at a meeting or conference, I am fearing being rejected by my colleagues, not belonging. But I imagine it also works the opposite way. When you feel you are disconnected, you add shame onto it. Even if you aren’t responsible for it, even if you don’t know why you are disconnected, you feel the shame. “Something must be wrong with me,” you think, “I must be unworthy,” and you feel ashamed.  

Tracy draws. Often, as other children climb on the structure or play in the kitchen or at the water table, Tracy draws. By herself. When she draws, she draws figure after figure. She fills up the page. Her hand almost never stops moving, page after page. When I ask her what she’s drawing, she always says, abruptly, “I donno.” It just flows out of her.  

The work is seriously impressive. I can see it myself, and when I’ve handed pages of it to friends, they do a literal double-take. They see that it’s the work of a preschooler and smile; then their eye-brows go down, they look closer, and become serious. They see that each thing is a figure, each figure imaginative, expressive, subtle. The emotional richness, the expressiveness is extraordinary. 

One day I pointed to a figure and said, “What’s that?” and she said, “I donno.” But then she pointed at the figure and said, “seesaying?” I said, “What?” She said it again. After several more repetitions, I got it. I looked at the figure. “He’s saying, “I’m sad.” “I’m sad,” I said with a sad voice. She pointed to another figure and asked, “’s he saying?” I looked at the figure and yawned and said, “I’m tired. I’m tired.” It has continued to develop into a game for us, as reliable and consistent and rewarding as bouncing together on that plastic ball. 

It is gift to me to communicate with Tracy, insofar as I am able, that there is nothing wrong with her, that she is worthy. She is here. She is real. She is loved.  

I am aware enough that what I give to her I am also giving to myself. We are so much beyond our little selves. The more I can be a gift to her, the more she is a gift to me, and the younger I become. Old wounds heal. Layers of shame fall away.  

In the leading image of this series, the stagestranger comes in in the middle of the play. He breaks the rules and doesn’t fit in. He is weird. In this, he stands for all rejects, outsiders, and criminals, and the reject and outsider and criminal in all of us. He stands for the idea that, that person or that part of ourselves we are tempted to dismiss, reject, consign to the shadows, to embrace it too.

Life is a dinner table, a party, and everyone has a seat.

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You are reading Footnotes, by Garrett Allen, a series of philosophical-ish short essays. You just read ⩩ 49.