About a week after the pandemic started and stay at home orders were activated, my ring finger on my right hand started to hurt.
There were days it hurt more. There were days it hurt less.
It slowly became clear that I had some type of inflammation in my joint.
How silly of me not to take care of it. Silly of me not to call the doctor, because once I finally did, when the pain was starting to be unbearable, I was only one prescription away from taking care of it and feeling better.
We are teaching a lot of classes online.
We urge our students to take care.
I say again and again in my class: “Please take care of yourself. Please take care of your heart. Take care of your body. Take care of your family.”
I mean, isn’t what this whole “stay at home/be safe at home” is all about? We are all trying to collectively take care.
One of the classes we teach is family story time. We offer our students at Homeboy Industries something for the whole family. We provide something sweet to start the day and introduce classic children’s stories.
One of my brilliant facilitators teaches this class most mornings, but on Thursday I teach it because she has a conflict at that time.
One Thursday when I got online none of the families I knew or had typically come to this class were there.
Instead, there was one man who had been at one of my other classes.
He was a middle-aged man who had gotten out of prison a few months ago after serving over two decades in jail.
I said to him: “You know that this is a kid’s class. Right?”
“Yup,” he said. “I done it before.”
“Do you have kids?” I asked him.
“Yup,” he said, “but they are grown,” he says.
“Okay,” I say.
We wait, but no one else joins the class. I am not sure what to do. I tell my team we are the constant; we must always show up and be there.
I also repeat again and again that change is singular.
Meaning one person, one kid, one, one at a time.
For the teacher the one at a time thing is hard.
Showing up again and again when no one else does is hard, but, seriously, that is the job. Honestly, it really is the only way change can happen.
“I am going to read this story,” I tell him and show him the book I was going to read.
I also share my puppets. “That’s cool,” he says.
“Yesterday the lady read the story about the cat,” he tells me.
“You know the one with the hat.”
“I love that story,” I tell him.
“I closed my eyes and listened to the lady’s voice. She has a great voice and I really like that story,” he adds.
This man has such a kind face and, I discover, he is also incredibly wise. I think, today he is my one. I will give it my all.
He adds, “That story about the cat is kinda like us being stuck at home now.”
“So true,” I say.
“I am using this time that I am home to learn stuff. Ya know, I got a lot to catch up with,” he shares with me.
“I am blessed. That’s all, blessed.”
I think to myself, anyone who says people can’t change is simply wrong. Anyone who says that a felon is a felon is simply wrong.
ANYONE who believes that someone who made a bad choice at 15 years old cannot come back into society and be sweet and kind is WRONG, simply wrong.
I have the great, and I mean THE GREAT, GREAT privilege every day to see just how absolutely wrong those people are.
I read him the story. He closes his eyes. He listens. I read him Freckleface Strawberry and the Dodgeball Bully. It is a sweet story about confronting a bully. He laughs and loves the story. We chat a little more and I tell him I’ll see him later at my anger management class.
“Ms.,” he says to me.
“Yes.”
“That was great. I love these stories. They help me stay in my lane.”
“That’s great,” I say.
“Ms.,”
“Yes,”
“You take care. Okay?” he said it in a tender voice. He was so incredibly kind.
I was caught off guard.
“Thank you. I will.”
As Zoom goes, click, he is gone from my computer screen in one poof.
I think of the Cat in the Hat and how it starts:
“The sun did not shine.
It was too wet to play.
So we sat in the house
On that cold, cold, wet day.
I sat there with sally.
We sat there, we two.
And I said, ‘how I wish
We had something to do!’”
We are all figuring out what to do.
We are all so busy doing, that we sometimes forget and ignore to take care. What is funny is that to take care can be so incredibly simple.
My doctor on the video appointment looked at my finger. It literally took him five minutes and another five to email the prescription to the pharmacy.
My finger had been hurting for over a month, yet it literally took less than 30 minutes to take care of it.
That cat in the hat messed up the house and then with his special machine took care of it and cleaned up in no time.
“I am doing all these classes, Ms.,” he told me. “Every single one.”
He shows me a notebook where he has written down the times and the name of the classes in careful cursive letters.
“These classes help me take care,” he says and adds, “I am going to take care as good as I can.”
I sit at my desk.
I hear his voice saying to me, “Ms., You take care,” and I know I don’t really take care.
Not enough, and not in a timely manner. I procrastinate. I ignore, and I do not take care the way I should.
I think about it all day and when I start my next class, my check-in question is:
“What have you done to take care of yourself this week?”
“What do you mean, Ms.?” they ask me.
“What did you do for you,” I explain.
“How did you take care of yourself this week?”
They share:
I exercised.
I slept.
I ate.
I took a drive.
I sat in the bathroom for 3 hours and had some quiet.
I went to the beach.
I visited a friend.
I came to class.
I cried.
“Ms., I don’t know what to do to take care,” she told me.
“Yes, you do,” I said.
“You need to be really quiet then you will hear it. You must stop asking and take the time to listen,” I add.
“I don’t have fucking time for that shit,” she says.
“No one does,” I say, “But we need to make the time”.
I hear myself say that. I know that I, too, do not make or take the time to take care.
I share with them that this week we all must find a moment to listen to our heart, figure out what it needs, and try to give it just that.
I promise myself that I will do this exercise as well and do something to take care of me this week.
I hope you will, too.
