The Power of a Dream

“I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house down!” I belted out in my most gruff and menacing voice.

Giggles and squeals ensued from an engaging seven-year-old boy, challenging me in his best little piggy voice.  One of my many pleasures in life is working with kids in various settings such as the special needs elementary school I found myself in on this particular day.  

A few days later, I walked into another school to tutor a nine-year-old boy that I’ve worked with for over a year; he has lived in America for only a few years. Every week when I have come to pick him up from the playground, he sees me from across the field and his face breaks into a big smile.  He then runs vigorously towards me, open armed, landing into my body to give me a big, endearing hug.  I often feel like all the meaning of my day has been filled to overflowing right there in that pure moment.

However, when this new school year came around and they asked me if I would like to tutor him again, I honestly felt he was so happy, so willing to read and learn that anyone could find success and meaning in their tutoring sessions with him.  I considered that perhaps I should be put with the “harder” cases even though I absolutely adored him. I was used to a lot of rigor in the parenting world of autism and felt that perhaps tutoring a more struggling child was the better use of my skills and experience.

Fortunately, the program encouraged me to continue tutoring him so, along with a few other children, I signed on again.  As the first months of this new school year progressed, we delighted in laughing and reading books together, journaling stories around topics he enjoyed, harnessing his gift to tell a story, learning better how to take details and find the larger themes, and catching up with activities he did in between our sessions.  He always had a smile on his face, enthusiasm bubbling over as he shared stories of a busy and happy home life.

On this one particular day, though, I picked him up by his classroom.  Perhaps because he wasn’t expending energy running across a field to me, he displayed his nervous excitement with intermittent bursts of smiles and laughs, quick bursts of eye contact then retreat, and gestures that displayed an overabundance of feelings spilling over.

“I notice sometimes that maybe when you feel a little shy or extra excited, you kind of laugh and blush a little bit.” I often share my own feelings of shyness or excitement, so as to help him feel comfortable expressing himself both verbally and when we work on reflective writing together.

We made our way to the tutoring room and instead of sitting down he walked over to a map mounted on the wall, eyes fixated on a part of the world he once called home. He traced his fingers along a country’s borders.  I asked him questions as he scaled his finger across a body of water. 

“Here’s where we went on the row boat.  My mother hid me under a blanket at nighttime. I was four,” he spoke matter of factly.

Then he pointed to a new country. After months in this country and moving to many homes, he then said they traveled again. His finger traced across an ocean to America.

We moved to the table and his words continued to spill out of him in ways he had never been able to articulate in the year I had known him.

“We had to grab our things and run as the gunshots came. There was no time. A straw house isn’t strong enough, you know.”

He continued explaining various homes he lived in while trying to get to America.

“Sometimes we slept outside.”

“In tents,” I asked? 

“No, just outside on the ground. I also lived in a garage with other children. That was our home for a while.” His eyes grew larger as the scene seemed to be playing out in his mind.

Not only was I struck by the arduousness of his trek to America, but I also felt nearly speechless in the serendipity of the details. What are the odds of a suburban mother like myself, who was raised in a traditional, middle class neighborhood, who now lives nearly an hour away from this school, being put in the path of a nine-year-old boy originally from a place and culture an ocean away? And what are the odds that I was acting out straw houses and writing about a garage as a depressing metaphor for a blog entry (Breaking Down Walls), while this little boy expressed that he literally lived in both? Is such a moment orchestrated in the realm of the divine or is it merely random chance? I know my own conclusion. Despite the often tremendous struggles of life--his undoubtedly far beyond the reaches of my own experiences--there was a beauty to our union in this moment, a feeling of a higher, miraculous plan.  

As he talked with me, his emotions overwhelmed him as words of pain and trauma incongruently attached themselves to his nervously misplaced smiles. Yet his memories continued to flow forth. I tried to stay calm and composed despite my heart filling with both admiration and intense sorrow for his family’s struggles; at times, I thought I might just burst into tears from the ache of imagining his experiences.  At one point, he even noted that he understood he was awkwardly smiling at times even though he was trying to get out hard thoughts.

He proceeded. “I had a baby sister that died.  We were too poor.  She needed medicine and couldn’t get it.” He then explained how he was helping his parents study for their citizenship test.  He pondered why English comes so easily to him, but so much harder for his parents. He arched his eyebrows while hitting his head with his hand in disbelief.

Suddenly, his demeanor of nervous smiles was replaced with an expression of seriousness, as if other scenes were fluttering through his memory banks.  His eyes welled as he uttered the words, “Sometimes I fear my life is ruined.”

While most days I was always filled with happy anticipation to come work with him and others, on this one particular day I had walked in carrying my own heavy heart. I had wanted to skip our session and go sulk by myself somewhere. My son with autism was struggling more, having some behavioral outbursts that hung in inexplicability, in utter unnaturalness, where meaning, logic and resilience felt drained right out of me. Metaphorically I was feeling the heaviness of seemingly limited choices, a garage-like internal world. His powerful words jolted me to my rawest core.

I stroked his arm and assured,  “No, no! Your life is never ruined!”

He continued talking, and I listened, empathized, and validated him as best as I knew how. It was all my hardest moments in life that prepared me for this moment.  At the end of our session, he looked at me intently.   

“Could you give me homework?”

He had never made such a request before. “Sure, what would you like to do?”

“I would like to write my story of coming to America.” 

He now looked more upbeat.  “When you come to America you can be a doctor,” he said, “and you can have a pet.”

While in the coming weeks, he would share more painful details of his life with me, and additional resources would be brought in to help him through some quite difficult memories, I walked out those school doors feeling utterly alive, emboldened yet immensely humbled. Stepping out into the sunshine, I savored the soul affirming power of human connection, even in the midst of his sharing such unimaginable hardship endured in his mere nine years of life. Upon entering my car, cathartic sobs ensued as I hunched over the steering wheel, every teardrop holding profound empathy and compassion for a young boy and his family’s courageous journey to pursue the American dream; epiphany and gratitude for perspective on my own struggles.

A few days later when my son with autism had to stay home from school overcome by anxiety and fatigue, calling out to me,  “Stay with me, Mom,” I peacefully spent the day with him in his room, holding his hand at times and offering words of encouragement; another young boy’s inspiring spirit also held my hand in tender, fortifying embrace.

While life’s circumstances can sometimes feel limiting, this young boy’s family story reminded that determination and the ability to dream hold a power where borders are transcended, where obstacles are surmounted, where the light of hope and resiliency can illuminate any landscape.