Scout on Knowing/Tamo

 

Tamo had hair that stuck up like it was animated, and probably the biggest eyes that I had ever seen. He used to cry almost every day, and just as often, I would get frustrated. Shouldn’t a six-year-old be past this stage? I wanted him to apply himself, to use the intelligence he clearly had. I taught him and the other seven or eight kids alone for almost a month, and eventually, the crying stopped. I told myself that it was I who had gotten him here, and my efforts had a true effect on him. There I was, feeling so proud about how good he was doing, when he went and started crying again. It hurt me when the waterworks came, and he wouldn’t explain why, just stare at me for periods as if he had something to say. I would ask what’s wrong, and he would shake his head, and I couldn’t do anything to get him back to his seat. Today was different, though; he hardly had any energy to cry. He lay on the floor, watching me again, but something had changed. No matter what teacher or parent I threatened him with, he wouldn’t react. 

I gave the kids a break, and he shot up to join them. I knew it, I thought, his theatrics were just a ploy to get out of doing any work. After he was done kicking around a deflated soccer ball, I convinced him to sit down and trace some words with a dry-erase marker. He was kneeling on the chair when I told him to sit right, and he said that he didn’t have a dad anymore. What do you mean, I asked, to which he answered that his mother told him that he’s never coming back from the hospital. The world seemed to dissolve at those words. They destroyed my faith in what is fair and what isn’t.

 I thought of the times I had looked down on what they ate for lunch, and the amount of candy they always had. I thought of the bags under their mother’s eyes whenever she came to get Tamo and his sister. There you go, I told myself, you couldn’t have used your imagination to understand that there’s so much of a person outside of you. I told myself I would never look at someone again and only see what I know. At that moment, I saw the fear of losing someone so early in life. I saw how little school must matter when the world itself is upside down. I saw how difficult it was to care about what your kids eat when you’re hardly afloat. I saw how difficult it must be to know that people like me won’t understand until reality stares them in the face.