As part of One Book, One Chicago, we're featuring a series of original essays titled Chicago Heroes: Real & Imagined! Each month through spring 2015, meet a local hero as introduced by a local author. Chicago authors will reflect on heroes from the past, present or even imagined in these new short essays. This month's essay is from Brigid Pasulka.
Brigid Pasulka was born and raised in rural Illinois and has lived in Poland, Russia, Germany and Italy. Her debut novel, A Long, Long Time Ago and Essentially True, won the 2010 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award and was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection. Her second novel, The Sun and Other Stars, was an Indie Next pick for February 2014. Brigid lives in Chicago with her husband and son and runs the writing center at a public high school.
Chicago Heroes: Real & Imagined
By Brigid Pasulka
After college and a year teaching in Poland, I ended up working at Mercy Home for Girls as a “youth care worker,” which meant that four nights a week and Sunday mornings, it was my job to convince 15- to 19-year-old girls going through ordinary and extraordinary issues that what they really wanted to do was finish mopping the floor.
I was 23. I have no idea why they hired me. I was a double studio art and English major, and I’d spent most of my childhood in a farming township of a hundred or so people, far from the city. And though I was a tomboy with a few emotional scuffs, I had nowhere near the toughness of the girls I was supposed to be helping and supervising.
My direct boss was a woman named Monti Clayton. My first day of work, we sat in the windowless six-by-six cell she ran the program from, and she explained my duties as I tried not to seem nervous.
“Your first few days,” she said, “don’t say a lot. Just sit back and observe.”
I didn’t understand the advice, but I did it. And it worked. The girls wondered who I was and why I wasn’t trying to suck up to them, to pity them, to be their best friend. Somehow that gave me enough authority to get them to do their homework once in a while.
I paid close close attention to Monti after that and learned much of what I know about relating to teenagers and everyone else I come across in life: Let somebody see that you’re glad to see them in the first millisecond that they walk into a room. Ask frank questions. Have high expectations, especially for people no one else expects much from. Project fearlessness. Be fearless.
Good, solid advice for the rest of us. But Monti was already working on a different plane. Watching her work with teenagers still sticks with me as one of the most graceful things I have ever seen in my life. She was the Carl Sagan of emotional intelligence. She somehow knew when to push the girls and when to leave them alone. She knew when to choose the harsh word and when to use the softer one. She knew when to be the wise aunt, the loving mom, the iron fist and sometimes, the patron saint of second and even third chances.
And she knew that every once in a while, you have to do or say something completely unexpected. Once, a girl started swearing up and down the halls right before dinner. The fine for each curse word was 50 cents; within the first five minutes, she could’ve opened up a 401K. Monti opened dinner that night by asking if someone would pass her the f****** potatoes. The rest of the staff quickly caught on, and we kept it up until all the girls begged us to stop and promised never to swear again.
I look back on that night and laugh. And that is my lasting, blurry impression of those three years—that even through the meds and the DSM-IV diagnoses, the therapy sessions and the weekly community meetings and the teary conversations, the trips to the police station, the chore lists and fine sheets, the DCFS paperwork, the mind-numbing log we had to keep, the case files that read like telenovelas, I laughed harder in those three years than I have before or since. This was, of course, another one of Monti’s unspoken principles—don’t forget to have fun. If all you show teenagers is the drudgery and obligations of life, why would they want to learn the life you were trying to teach them?
So she would push us to take the girls out for some fun after one of the hard weeks when all we wanted to do was slink away to the office. She started impromptu dance parties and fashion shows with the Goodwill clothes people donated. Practical jokes were encouraged. Laughing at yourself was mandatory. Monti made sure every girl who wanted a prom got one, complete with the dress, the limo, the photos in front of the fireplace and all the fussing.
Sometimes, after all this, they’d break our hearts.
“Remember, it’s just a job,” Monti would say. “The most important thing is to keep showing up. That’s already a lot.”
And I’d stare back at Monti and know that this was a woman who was the farthest thing from a shower-upper. This was a woman who had found her calling.
After about three years, I got tired. Tired of seeing the same girls and the same problems, tired of driving home in the dark when my roommate was already asleep, tired of working every weekend and having to check my conversations because I’d grown so used to talking about suicide and sexual abuse, abandonment and gang-banging. The pay stayed the same. The girls seemed to get rougher. We went through a patch when most of us talked about moving on. Even Monti. I eventually left to live in Russia for a while. Russia. That’s how much I’d burnt out on my life in Chicago.
That was in the spring of 1998. Since then, I’ve lived six other lives. The girls I remember from Mercy are in their 30s now. Monti, however, is still there. Same girls, same problems, probably only marginally higher pay. Still showing up every day.
She is my hero.
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