I traveled to Barrow last week for high school graduation. My friend Greta was graduating and, after sitting through innumerable grade school Christmas pageants in which she was only visible as the ponytail in the back row, I wanted to be front and center for her final bow in the Barrow school system. It was a Barrow graduation which meant it went on for three hours in the high school gym with little kids running around, a constant flow of traffic in and out of the gym and a procession by the graduates to the rhythm of Eskimo drums while they passed under arches of baleen.
To say this was different from my graduation back when we were etching diplomas on rocks with chisels is to grossly understate the situation. I grew up in a more formal time and went to parochial school. At graduation, we were still expected to be more seen than heard. And those of us allowed to speak knew without it ever being explicitly stated that the talk had to be adult, serious and formal.
At this graduation, I watched as one student after another got up to speak and was once again amazed at how self-possessed and mature today’s graduates are compared to my generation. These students got up and spoke with almost breezy self-assurance. They were funny, self-deprecating, relaxed and clearly having a great time.
If any student speaking at my graduation had tried that, we would have looked up from our notes on the podium to find a group of nuns and priests rushing the stage with steam blowing out of their eye sockets while our parents tried to hurdle over them to get to us first – and they weren’t doing that to protect us. They just have wanted to get in the first whack.
Part of the Barrow ceremony was a look back in pictures at each of the graduates. Each student picked up to three pictures from their past to be shown. Most elicited oohs and aahs from the audience as the graduate suddenly appeared on a large screen in diapers or a high chair with food smeared from one side of their face to the other. Young men who came in from whaling to attend their graduation were seen as young boys dressed to go out on the ice at a time when they were too young to go out without their mothers.
One of the graduating students had once been on my GAL caseload. She was one of the lucky ones. She’d found a new home with her siblings in a stable and loving family. When her pictures came up, there was none of her as a baby or young girl. Her life in pictures didn’t start till she was well into her teens.
This isn’t unusual for children in state custody. Often their birth family is lost to them and with that loss goes the loss of their earliest history. And if they bounce through foster or group homes while in the system, little if any history follows them. Some programs that work with these kids try to create life books for them that they can take with them as they move around. But a life book just isn’t the same as a family photo album.
So many kids in state custody enter the world at 18 with no real family history to ground them. Of course, these kids usually have such a jumbled history, strewn with relationships failures, family breakdown, substance abuse, violence and criminal neglect that it’s a wonder they would ever want to remember their past.
Children raised in foster homes and group homes don’t have photos of them opening presents under a Christmas tree while still in their Dr. Denton’s, their parents beaming in the background. They don’t have pictures of them blowing out candles on a birthday cake surrounded by balloons and family. They have little to look at to tell them that at some point in their lives their were loved and cherished.
Amidst all the joy of that graduation ceremony, the greatest I could find was watching that adopted young lady walk up to the podium to receive her diploma. She may have little record of her past but she has the hope of love and joy in the future because now she has a real family.