When I was between the ages of eight and 10, two things happened. First, it stopped raining. There was a two-year drought that dried up the entire state of Ohio. My father’s hay crop withered and died. With no hay to sell, there was no money. With no money, there was no food. We were a family of six. I was very hungry for quite some time.
The second thing was the beginning of the slow implosion of my parents’ marriage. My father grew sullen and silent, my mother sad and defiant. Though it would be many painful years before they would finally divorce, those years were the worst because the farmhouse seemed to be waiting for something—thunder, lightning, heavy rain, a big fight, some sort of resolution.
As kids do, I soldiered on, not having words or systems to manage any of it. My sisters reacted similarly. We did not discuss it. At the dinner table, we gulped my mother’s home-canned green beans and frozen corn, supplemented with discount-store cans of fruit cocktail. We dipped saltines in water, the better to swallow them with our choked throats. We waited for something to happen.
I didn’t feel seen. I was an outsider to a larger crisis I’d need years to understand.
Then someone saw me.
Miss Troutman pulled me aside before lunch. She gave me two gifts. The first was a ham sandwich. The second was a journal.
I don’t know how she knew. When we talk about it now, my sister tells me the school intervened, perhaps even making a social service call to report our bone-thin legs and dirty, ill-fitting clothing. I don’t know that I believe her; it seems I would remember that sort of thing. I prefer to believe Miss Troutman sensed my loneliness and saw my hunger, and figured out a way to address it without humiliating me or making me talk about my breaking heart.
These days, we are discussing children and trauma more openly and honestly. We are legitimizing how it can feel to be a very young person who is scared, sad, sorry, and ashamed, but still has to get up and wash her face and get on the school bus. We recognize that trauma takes many forms—there is hunger, abandonment, physical pain, loneliness, fear, racism, and all sorts of other horrible, painful things—and kids all feel it differently. They all react differently. Trauma is not, and should not be, a lonely and secretive thing. People—kids—often want to deal with it alone, but that’s not what they need. They need someone to notice, and teachers are often the ones to see it first.
Miss Troutman did it for me with dignity and kindness that still makes me swoon with gratitude: She fed me, and she encouraged me to write. “I made an extra sandwich this morning,” she said simply. She made an extra sandwich every day, apparently, stuffed with chipped ham and slathered with delicious, oily mayonnaise. “And I have something you can have for your very own.” The journal was beautiful, bound in black leather holding scores of unlined white paper. “You don’t need to show it to me as you write. It can be private. Unless you’d like to share, of course. It doesn’t matter to me; you can just use it to write down what you’re thinking.”
It was more than an invitation; it was an escape. I’d long wanted to journal, but didn’t have a special place to do it. If there is no money for ground beef, there is certainly no money for journals. I took the journal home and began experimenting as a poet, a writer, an artist, a dreamer—a little person who could imagine a better ending to the story.
Literacy and Trauma Today
I see teachers helping students through trauma all the time, and many times it’s through reading and writing. Sometimes teachers don’t even know their instructional decisions are guiding students through trauma, but they are. It’s there. Especially when their classrooms always have four important routines.
Freewriting time. In my new journal, I didn’t write specifically about being hungry or about the silence bursting through our farmhouse. I wrote about other things. It was the process itself that helped—the flow of thoughts, the soothing act of pencil to paper, the place to be still. Providing time to freewrite and journal, with no expectations beyond the act of writing, is a safe and gentle way to move students through trauma.
Reading stories. It’s rare that students can’t find a piece of themselves in stories they read and hear. I love when teachers hold a gentle insistence that students read, and visit the school library. It’s a lovely gift—giving kids access to stories of people who feel like they are feeling.
Instruction on narrative. Trauma or not, every kid has a story with characters, plots, and relentless rising and falling action. We live in a world that devalues the opinions of young people, inasmuch as the world, as a whole, doesn’t give voice to them. Teachers can flip that concept around and make their classrooms places where narratives happen and are valued.
Diverse literature. In the larger scheme of things, the importance of diverse literature is a relatively new concept in schools, and I find immense relief that it is something we are talking about and prioritizing. Seeing and hearing that other people, other kids, are grappling with problems and issues, and that they look just like we look, is a level of relief I’m not sure we can ever quantify.
Miss Troutman and I recently reconnected through social media. In a private message, I thanked her for her kindness and for being the person who knew what I needed. She was gracious, demure, and gentle, just as I remembered her. “It’s rare that I can still see the 10-year-old in the face of an adult,” she wrote. “But I can see your face in your pictures. Except I see peace and confidence now. I’m glad about that.” We plan to meet for coffee the next time I go “home.”
For students in the midst of trauma, teachers have tools and platforms available for kids to write and read their way through the dark times. I hope all teachers know how much it matters. Someday, those young people will be in their midforties, and they’ll remember being seen. And they’ll be grateful.
