From One Mentor's Perspective

When I began volunteering at a site that specializes in Emotional Behavioral Disorders (EBD) there were things I expected: screaming, the occasional meltdown and a lot of crumpled up art.  Let me tell you—the kids definitely delivered.  But they also delivered some things I didn’t expect.   The experience of watching a happy, calm child become an entirely different, much angrier kid in a matter of seconds was an experience that threw me for a loop.  Of course anyone who’s spent any time with small children knows this happens to all kids, EBD or not but this kind of frustration, at times, is a frustration beyond a broken toy or budging in line.

We have a little girl who does art with us and she loves rainbows, Christmas trees and Wonder Woman.  She is a kid who will draw you a picture of a flower just to make you smile – and it really does make your day if not your entire week.  I keep her drawings in my textbooks so while at school sometimes I get the surprise of a unicorn or a smiling sunshine.  This girl loves art and every day we visit the site she greets us with a giant smile on her face.  She seemed so adept at social relationships and her emotional and behavioral reactions to things were so appropriate that I actually wondered why she was in this school at all.  Then a week came when we walked into the building and could hear the shrieking the minute we hit the front door.  The distress was palpable and I knew that voice.  It was our little Christmas tree loving, rainbow drawing artist.  She did come to our classroom that day (which on many occasions, when a kid is having a tough day, doesn’t happen) but she came as a different kid than I had gotten to know.  She was now tear-stained and silent and she definitely didn’t want to be an artist that day.  She climbed on top of the table barefoot and curled into a tight, little ball in the middle of all our crayons and markers. 

We’re given a lot of good advice on how to handle it when kids are having a bad day but this girl was having no part of it.  She didn’t want to try the project her own way, she didn’t want to talk about her favorite cartoons or colors or books.  So I sat with her, just sat and colored.  Eventually she saw me and silently took her own piece of pink paper and began to draw.  By the end of our session the flowers and rainbows were back.  Mentoring through Free Arts has taught me all the things you’d expect of a great volunteer experience (patience, how to work with different age groups, how healing art can be) but it’s this unexpected understanding that sticks with me most:  No matter who the kid and what the emotional or behavioral issue, that issue is not who they are; it’s what they deal with.  They carry a lot more than I do on shoulders that are a lot smaller than mine -- but first and foremost they are kids and they want to draw and paint and sculpt and maybe, someday grow up to be Wonder Woman.