He sat cross-legged on top of the mattress, his back leaning against the wall behind him. Even seated, I could tell that he was tall and athletic. He hardly had the frame of a bodybuilder but his late-teenage muscles were still noticeable under his loose fitting t-shirt. His eyes followed me, expressionless, as I entered the living room and accepted his mother’s invitation to sit on the small couch opposite him. His mother sat on the other bed for our conversation – it was hardly the first home I had visited that had two beds in the living room – and began telling me about her experiences raising her son over the last few years.
I kept glancing back at the young man as his mother and I spoke. I asked him all of the usual questions – What was therapy like? What’s worked for you and what hasn’t? How do you get along with your peers at school? – and received the usual one- or two-word answers. His mother supplemented his responses, as mothers often do, but I made sure to look back at the young man frequently as I listened.
It was his life, after all.
His face remained blank throughout the conversation. His eyes sometimes closed briefly – waking up is a longer process for teens, even at 11:30 AM – but they always reopened. He didn’t speak much but I had no doubt that he was hearing every word. I’d seen other workers make the mistake of talking about young adults like they weren’t present; I knew better than to assume that a closed pair of eyes was an indicator of lack of interest.
“I just don’t understand,” his mother was saying. “He has so much potential but he keeps running around with these older boys and taking these risks. He’s been arrested more than once and he has this court date coming up… I’m just worried that he’s going to put himself in the wrong situation one too many times and he’s going to get hurt or put in jail or…”
Her voice trailed off but I knew how she would have finished the sentence.
“Hey,” I said in my best even-keeled, calming, social worker tone, “we’re not going to figure out the answers to every question right now. This is all going to take time and we’re going to work together to get to where we need to be. But we’ll do it.”
The mother nodded, apparently mollified by my response. Her son, however, still wore the same indiscernible expression as he watched our exchange.
“Look,” I began, turning to face the teen directly, “This is the first time we’re meeting. I’m not going to spin you some line of bull about knowing what you’re going through and how hard it can be for a young man your age to grow up. I’m not going to lecture you about court or how you should act or tell you what you have to do or don’t have to do. I’m not even going to talk about the other teens I’ve worked with in the past as some way to demonstrate that I know what I’m talking about.”
His eyes finally met mine.
“I don’t expect you to trust me right away. I’m new, I know you’ve had a bunch of workers in the past and, let’s be honest, you’re probably thinking to yourself, ‘I don’t know what the hell this white guy thinks he knows about me or what I need.'”
The young man’s lip quivered ever so slightly into a smile and he nodded. I heard his mother let out a soft chuckle but I kept my focus on her son.
“I’m going to ask you to tell me your story as we work together. I can get information from your mom or from referral documents or wherever, but the only person who can tell me your story is you. I’m not going to pretend to understand what it’s like to be a young man of color growing up in the city; if you look at my skin and think about my very Jewish-sounding last name, it’s pretty obvious I’d have no idea what I was talking about. But you tell me about your experience and I’ll tell you what I do know and we’ll try to work something out together. Does that sound okay to you?”
He blinked and glanced back toward his mother for a moment. His face gave a quick flash of confusion or uncertainty or amusement, as if to say, So, this guy? But he turned back to me and held my gaze for a second before uttering the longest sentence I’d heard from him by far.
“Yeah, I think we can work that out.”
Excellent post.
Thank you so much, Sam!