The Flowers that Bloom

I’ve been working professionally as a social worker for nearly 20 years. It’s not just what I do, but who I am, how I make sense of the world, and a part of how I define myself. After I out grew fantasies of wanting to be an actress in the 80’s sitcom Facts of Life (but let’s be real...I think that was mostly because I both had a crush on Jo and wanted to be Jo,) wanting to be a social worker is all I can remember.  When I was a teenager, a childhood friend of mine struggled with mental health challenges.  While visiting her in the hospital I think the 1st seeds of becoming a social worker were planted.  

I was given the opportunity to work as an intern in a school for students who lived in residential treatment while I was in high school. This eventually lead to my summer job throughout college.  Each year I would return to Detroit and work as a direct care staff with boys who had been abused, neglected, and passed around from placement to placement.  Despite being a “short-term” placement, Greg had been there since he was 3. I think he turned 13 my last summer there.  His smile would light up his entire face, but after being institutionalized for 10 years the only way he knew how to manage his feelings of abandonment was physical management.  Hugging him in the form of a basket-hold became the norm.  Even in an environment that was supposed to feel safe, Greg associated love with violence.

Through another part-time job, I was there when Roy and his younger brother and sister, were removed from their parents’ custody.  I stayed at the foster-care agency until after 11pm that night, feeding them dinner and struggling to comfort them while they waited for the uncertain future of where they would go next.  The following summer I learned these same 3 siblings were living at the residential treatment facility where I also worked.  The two younger siblings were eventually placed into foster care, but Roy was “too old” to be placed and spent at least the next couple of years in residential care.  He was the 1st of many teenagers over time to curl up and take residence in a corner of my heart.  I took him to art classes off campus and played basketball with him when other boys were on home visits with their families.  The last time I saw Roy, was at his football game. He was 16.  I think of him often and wonder about his life.

This is when I fell in love with social work. It was still early in my career, before I knew much about theory, termination, and boundaries. But I knew, deep beneath my layers that the world seemed more right when I was giving.  I grew up with an abundance of love, and sharing the overflow with others just made sense. It wasn’t until the latter years of college, when a thin man with gray, straggly, shoulder-length hair, who looked more like he should be holding a “make love not war” sign than teaching a college course, walked into my life that I also understood how systemic racism and white privilege create these injustices.  He helped me understand that social work can’t just be about “helping the poor,” but that it must also be about social change, otherwise it too is perpetuating the status quo.

I’ve been working as a social worker at my current job for 7.5 years, the longest I’ve worked anywhere.  In the last couple of years I have occasionally wondered if, after 20 years it’s time to spend my time differently.  I’ve recently explored my love for photography and awakening this creative energy makes me feel alive.  Perhaps I should consider a new path.  And then I walk through the neighborhood where I work and I see the mothers of students who are now in college greeting me with stories of their children, or a teenage boy whose conversations with adults are typically about being in trouble, stops by regularly to talk as though he is a butterfly landing just long enough to be reminded he is beautiful.  A high school student recently sat down with some much younger boys after overhearing them speak disrespectfully about others and explained, “This place is my home.  This is where I literally run to when I’m in trouble and I need support.  I would never come into your home and speak disrespectfully, please do the same for me.”  

Last night I worked late with 2 student leaders, (well 1, the other is now officially a staff member,) who care enough to clean and organize, the otherwise falling apart space to remind the students returning from summer break that they deserve something nice. While we worked, I had a conversation about food deserts and the difference between Walmart and Whole Foods.  They wanted to know if “a lot, a lot” of people shop at Whole Foods and if they sell junk food and TV’s like Walmart.  We talked about how racism is not just about the way people treat you, but it also affects the quality of grocery stores in your neighborhood, or if there are even stores at all.  There are also days when a student looks me in the eyes and says, “you don’t know anything about me or what it’s like to be black,” and all I can tell her is “you are right.”  I don’t know what’s it’s like to be black, or brown, or to be poor, or for English to be my 2nd language, or to worry about my children being shot, or how it feels not to be able to see my family because they live in Mexico.  All I can say is, “you are right.”

Sometimes social work is about theory and therapeutic interventions and during those times the letters behind my name come in handy.  Other times its about it’s about offering a safe space for families while they work hard to survive in a system designed to see them fail, and perhaps most importantly, sometime social work is about taking responsibility.  I don’t know if I will work professionally as a social worker for another 20 years, but I do know I could never take advantage of the freedom my privilege affords me and live a life pretending others’ struggles do not affect my life or that my lack of struggle does not affect theirs.  So although over the years I have gained the trust and in some cases the acceptance in a neighborhood so far from my own, I do not forget the flowers that bloom here do not bloom because of me, but rather, they bloom in spite of me and the dominant culture I represent.