Janelle Evans

Recently, I was asked in an interview if I could recall a moment in my life that changed me.  The story I recanted to that young woman has left such a residue on me, I feel compelled to share it with you.

A fresh graduate from high school, I took a summer job at a camp for the hearing-impaired teaching deaf kids to play all different kinds of sports.  The best job someone like me could have ever asked for—even if I didn’t know sign language at the time.  I figured I could mime my way through any game.  After all isn’t “kick the ball” pretty self-explanatory when your swinging your leg back and forth?  When I got there, I realized how naïve my thinking had been.  Let’s just say, I learned the sign for “potty” real fast.

Throughout the summer, kids flowed in and out of this camp in sessions that lasted for weeks.  By the time the final session came, we had run the schedule enough times I felt confident in my position and the program.  Everything should have run smoothly, but with a child like Forest (named has been changed), a violent bully, you can forget smooth.  Instead, brace yourself for destruction.

After only a few days of wrestling Forest off other kids and sending others to the nurse with teeth marks in their arms, I can honestly say I hated this boy.  The therapists at the camp refused to punish him for his behavior.  “Be patient with him,” they’d say.  Patient?  Patience wasn’t what this kid needed—try a firm spanking.  But they tiptoed around this boy and gave him special privileges—like being allowed to wear a t-shirt in the pool and lake—though none of the other boys and girls were allowed to do this.

Rather than deal with him, I isolated him.  For days, Forest watched the activities from a spot I designated for him—even at meal times.  The other kids soon noticed this and a group taunting began to happen.  I did nothing to stop it.  After all, Forest was a pill who deserved everything he was getting.

One afternoon, while in the pool, the kids grew bold enough to attack.  Again, I did nothing to stop it.  In the scuffle, the shirt Forest always wore in the water came off revealing his back.  Line-upon-line of puckered scar tissue stared back at me.  This boy had been whipped!  And from the look of his mutilated skin, not just once.  Guilt more powerful than I can describe stabbed my heart.  This boy had already endured more punishment than most of us could, yet I had demanded more.  My thirst for justice had left me callused and blind to the faults of my own actions.   

Though years have passed since that fateful day, the effect it had on me hasn’t.  I hope by reading this you’ll be changed as well.  Be careful not to judge too quickly the actions of others, you may never know the ‘stripes’ they carry that provoked it.

Scheduled, organized.  Skills I like to think I have, except when the hectic demands of life converge into one day.  Then even I fall apart.

“No, you can’t have a birthday party,” I told my daughter this year.  “But I’ll make you any cake you want.”  Parties aren’t my thing.  Growing up, I only ever had one that I can think of.  And I don’t remember it with fondness.

Eventually, my daughter got over her disappointment at mommy’s stubbornness and made up her mind.  “I want the applesauce and ice cream cake,” She said, which translates into cinnamon cake roll filled with ice cream and drizzled with Caramel.  Then what’s the applesauce about, you ask?  It’s one of the ingredients. 

This week, her big day finally came.  Unfortunately, so did every other demand on my life plop down on this day.  By the time I finished writing outlines for a meeting I had to attend that night, dealing with finical things as the treasurer for the Henderson Writers Group, and wrangling the small children I watch in my home every day, there wasn’t much time left to make my daughter’s cake.  But make it I did.  I had already denied her a party. The cake had to happen.

 That night, in the hour I had before my meeting, as a family, we sang the birthday song. She blew out candles then opened her gifts.  But the cake had not been in the freezer long enough.  As I cut it, the still soft ice cream inside allowed the roll to flatten slightly into an oval rather than the nice pretty round shape it should have been.  Now this may not sound like a big deal, but in that moment, it upset me more than I can say.  I had failed to deliver the one thing I had promised my daughter to the level I knew I was capable.

When I returned home from the meeting, where I’d spent most of the time internally kicking myself, I went to my daughters room.  Already asleep, I decided not to wake her for the grand apology I had planned.  I adjusted her covers then bent down to kiss her cheek.  Her little arms came around my neck.  “Mommy, I love you,” she groggily said.  Her words comforted my troubled heart.  She still loved me, even with my shortcomings.  Really, in the end, that’s all that mattered.  And next year, I’m building her a seven tiered cake with raspberry filling and a marshmallow based fondant.  Now where’s that Martha Stewart magazine?