I have gratitude today for the courage I know that it must have taken for people to speak very difficult and painful and personal truths. It is what it is.
I feel inspired by this example to attempt to speak of my own. Many people have wondered, I am sure, over the years that I have supported and loved Ani for who he is just why I continue to do this and how I manage to keep doing it. I often wonder myself.
I mentioned earlier that I have learned many things from getting to know Ani and attempting to understand his experience in life. I will speak of a few of them.
It still shocks me every day to grow in awareness of what it means to grow up without parents, without a family, without knowing either one in that intimate experiential way that most of us know who we are and where we came from. I recently watched the first Harry Potter movie again when it was shown on TV and made a startling connection between the part of the story where Harry is taken to Hogwarts for the first time and taken around to shops to buy his school supplies...and Ani's experience. As I put myself into Harry's shoes and imagined what it would be like for him to find a place where he belonged for the first time, and then to find that his parents had left him a room full of money so that he could pay for his own needs himself without having to beg, borrow, or feel obligated to others for everything, it flashed on me that this was Ani's experience. I imagined what Harry's life at this new school would have been like had he not had this money left for him by his parents, if he had been "poor" and everything he needed had to be "given" to him out of charity by someone else who perhaps felt burdened by Harry's need. I saw how much more assurance he would feel that he was deserving and had worth just by being able to walk into a store and have the standing to get what he needed like everyone else. This money, then, made a huge and concrete and very real difference in Harry's internal and external position in life. I saw and felt this all in a flash and I saw that I had been unaware of the meaning of money for Ani and unaware of all that the priviledge of knowing my parents and growing up in their family had endowed me with...not through any effort on my part at all.
It is astonishing what we take for granted and then how blind this makes us. So often when I am interacting with Ani, I forget how different his experience of life is as I make assumptions and create expectations of him. The facts of his experience do not change the realities of life and what it requires of him. But they do change significantly the very important factor of my understanding and thus how I relate to him, how I support him, how I show care for him and how I view the things he needs in order to be able to meet the requirements of life. I don't think he needs punishment. He has had plenty of that and it hasn't given him or society anything of value. Since he is in a place that assumes that punishment is what is needed, and that doesn't look much beyond that, it becomes difficult to make the translation. It has been my experience that most people look at me with blank faces when I speak of trying to do better than we are for his situation - not only to benefit him, but society as well.
It isn't a matter of being "soft on crime" or letting people get away with things. In my mind it is simply helping a person to develop the capability and to have the tools and the resources to become responsible for himself to the best of his ability. Ani missed out on quite a lot and he has a lot of questions about why this happened to him. Growing up as a child, the realities of his life were never addressed with him and the feelings he had about these realities were never listened to or supported. He never developed the ability to express his needs in appropriate ways. In 2000 I had no idea what he needed or what was missing and today I regret that deeply and feel that it is in some ways my own failure. I am not dwelling in that fact, but I am taking responsibility for it and doing what I need to do to take care of it. I am taking off my blinders. I am sharing responsibility with Ani for finding out what he needs to do, what he needs to be given, so that he can take care of the things he needs to take care of. I am engaging systems and asking them to share in this reponsibility as well, or to implement their responsibility to him in ways that are more appropriate and helpful than have been done in the past.
This is what people do.
Jackie
