There are certain classes of movies I generally don’t take well. This movie was lining up through the first third to be one of those. I do not handle portrayals of the neglect and abuse of children well. The movie portrays the youth of now tackle for the Baltimore Ravens Michael Oher. His father was never around. His mother had lost herself to drug dependency, specifically cocaine. He fled the foster care system. He stayed at the homes of friends and was homeless. Eventually he is taken in by a wealth white couple where he gains stability and eventually thrives. It becomes a beautiful movie.
Fortunately for Michael Oher, the story ends well. Most of the time it doesn’t. I am in fact a little curious about the Tuohys. My instincts say that Oher is not the first youth they have mentored in some way, but then again, they are in a class where encounters with unattended youth would be rather exceptional. I have my own experience in this area. My neighbor had recently left the military and was relatively newly wed. His sister had been having troubles at home, and he volunteered to help by allowing her to move across the state to be with him and finish high school. He tried, but within 6 months she had moved back home. Around that time there was a middle school aged girl in the neighborhood that was enthralled with my young children. Her father was out of prison and remarried, living in a community not too far away. Her mother worked quite often and when she wasn’t working was drunk. I would like to claim a central role in this story, but my wife gets to be leading lady here. My wife was home during the day, and this girl became a regular presence in our home. During the summer, I think she ended up eating half of her meals at our home. Even her grades had improved.
But this story isn’t going to have a happy ending. I had been spinning my wheels for awhile and not getting ahead. I had widened my job search, and I got a job opportunity an hour away. We had to eat, and so we had to say goodbye. As the moving day approached, my wife and I had sleepless nights. We agonized. We weighed options. Should we contact child services? From an experience in my youth, I knew Wisconsin courts didn’t care about alcoholism, so there was a very low probability of success. If we were to prevail, she would have likely been placed with her father, who for all we know was living a fine life and would be worthy of placement; however, that wasn’t our objective. (I don’t believe they enjoyed a close relationship though.) The night before we moved, I brought a rental truck, and we began loading our things.
That night her mother came down. We could smell the alcohol on her breath. She thanked us for all that we had done for her daughter. We didn’t have an antagonistic relationship with her mother. We weren’t friends, but we were nice with one another, and she even hosted us for dinner. As is the tendency when people are drunk, her mother got emotional. She didn’t know what she would do with us gone. She even told my wife that she had been more of a mother to her daughter than she had been; my wife corrected her and told her that her daughter would always love her. She confessed her faults, her alcoholism. (She had been in AA.) We listened patiently and tried to offer encouragement where we could. The next day, her daughter helped us finish packing, and we drove to our new home. We hosted her a few weekends, but she had difficulty spending the night, even two nights. (We knew that it was rare for her to stay the night at her father’s even.) Not being blessed with abundant wealth, we simply couldn’t afford to fetch her on short notice and return her quickly. We ended up going down for her Christmas concert (if I remember right) and took her for a treat afterwards. We had a feeling that would be the last time we saw her, and it turned out that it was indeed the last time.
Today, she should be right around her senior year of high school. Perhaps she’s graduated. I would like to think that everything would have turned out perfectly if we would have stayed, but we don’t know that. We were but one influence in her life, and even in our time together we were not always the influence most heeded. And there is also the simple truth that things don’t stay the same. She and her mother in fact ended up moving within a year after we left to another community. With her brothers graduated, they didn’t need a 3-bedroom home. Yet there is the nagging guilt every now and then. There is also the simple curiosity of how things are. Having spoken with others about this, they tell me that she will be thankful for the times we had together. I would certainly like to think that. I certainly hope that she has found others to take our family’s stead. But I’m not an optimist by nature. Lord knows I can’t save everyone. And we never will know all the people’s lives we have touched. So perhaps this film serves as a reminder to offer a prayer for her and others like her.
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