Sun Obscured By Dark Clouds

They're a lovely young couple, devoted to one another. They added a beagle to their family soon after moving into the house about seven doors up from where our house stands. For several years the beagle acted as surrogate child. It is a dog with a personality to match those of its humans; sweet-natured, friendly to a fault and responsive to being appreciated.

Their house, whose previous owners were also fairly young but childless, now rings with the boisterous laughter of young children; a little boy of six, and a younger girl of four. Both of those children are possessed with the graciousness of nature's protocol of gene-selection, with Gallic/Mediterranean physical appearances of surpassing grace and beauty. They are the joy of their parents' hearts; quick to learn and loving children.

Their mother is a schoolteacher. She teaches Grade 3 classes. And as much as she adores her own children she has room in her concerned intelligence for the welfare of the children whom she sees on a daily basis, year after year, helping them form social connections and exposing them to learning situations, guiding them in those early years of intellectual exploration and social intermingling.

There is one child in particular who has drawn her concern in her current class. A little boy so unlike the other children that it grabs at her sympathy for him, fearing that something is fundamentally wrong in the child's life. He will sit at his desk with his head in his hands, or lower his head to the level of the desk and sometimes fall asleep. It is as though he is fixated on deliberately obliterating from his mind the presence of others. If she says something that offends him he will rise and wordlessly, with a thunderously dark brow, exit the classroom and refuse to return.

When she attempts to draw him out, hoping to discover something that he has an interest in, something that may create a bond of trust between them, something that energizes him, enthuses him, she finds nothing she can grasp at. She scheduled an interview with his mother and sat there with the woman, roughly her age equivalent, for three hours, trying to persuade her that her son may be suffering from clinical depression, that it might be a good idea to schedule an appointment for him at the Children's Hospital to find out what motivates him to deep depressive moods so evident in his daily life.

The little boy's mother unleashed a torrent of woes of her own, that her mother, when she was twenty and discovered her daughter to be pregnant, tried to persuade her to have an abortion as an unwed mother, but she refused and had the child, the result of which represented the topic of discussion between them. And then, with another man, she became pregnant again, and had another child. The while, she lived with her mother in her mother's house.

And then, several years ago she became attached to another man, a man whose marriage had failed and who had custody of his own two young children. They became a melded family, living with her mother in her mother's house. No one disciplined the children; they ran amok, heeding no one. Her contempt for her mother was so blatant the children mimicked it, causing the grandmother no end of grief as she tried herself to give some order to the children's lives and to discipline them but no respect was forthcoming and no one listened to her. The grandmother was on the verge of mental and physical collapse.

And the young schoolteacher, the unwilling but fascinated recipient of this story of family dysfunction, understood that for all her concerns and all her attempts to pacify something within the little boy's psyche, her efforts were destined to fail. And so, she fretted and despite knowing how futile it was, continued to focus on the little boy's well-being, and continued to become frustrated with the abysmally negative results of her efforts.

The condition of the child, and with the newfound knowledge of the family background bedevilled and frightened the teacher. She tried to imagine what would happen to those four children as they grew older, in particular the little boy whom she personally felt she was obligated to help, however she could. Yet she could do nothing; that became abundantly clear to her, and she despaired.

She spoke of the child constantly, to her husband, to her own mother, her aunts, whoever would listen and everyone commiserated but no one held, through the years of their own experience, the merest inkling of a solution. She was urged to look upon the situation as one where she has tried her best to make a difference, but the situation she was looking in on was complex, of long-standing and seemingly intractable.

At night she feels particularly vulnerable, her sleeping mind haunted by nightmares of children reaching out to her for help, and she sees herself tangled in a skein of societal indifference, leaving the children to fend for themselves, their blank eyes and gaunt faces like horrible masks thrown over the sweet trusting faces of her own children.