Stress and Spirituality

Although I am not a mother, I am a close friend with one mother, my partner in marriage, the Rev. Dr. Leslie Westbrook, whom we refer to at home as the Reverend Mother. From observing Leslie, and from my own experiences as a father, I can say that being a parent is stressful.

One of my early experiences with the stress of parenting occurred when I was twenty-three years old. I was working as a child care worker at a place called "Arizona Boy’s Ranch." One of my jobs at the ranch was to drive the boys to doctors’ appointments in Phoenix. I remember talking to a seventeen-year-old boy in the van as we drove into town to his appointment. Sam struck me as a gentle young man, tall, thin, easy for me to get along with, and enjoyable to talk to. He was soon going to turn eighteen and would legally be an adult. His plan was to hitchhike to Chicago where he had family he could stay with, and where he hoped to find work.

To make conversation I asked him about his doctor’s appointment. It was to see if he should have surgery on his leg, Sam told me. Why would he need surgery? I asked. "I have a bullet in my leg," he explained. One of his chores at home, before the court sent him to Arizona Boy’s Ranch, was to wash the dishes each evening. He admitted to me that he often neglected this responsibility, and he and his mother often fought. Finally (he told me) one night he went over to the sink in the middle of a fight with his mom. He took a dirty plate and smashed it on the floor. His mother got so angry that she got out a hand gun pointed it at Sam and told him if he didn’t wash the dishes properly, she would shoot him. Sam picked up another dirty plate and dropped it on the floor. His mother shot him in the leg. She took him to the hospital, the Doctor called the police, and eventually the family court sent Sam to the Ranch.

I never met Sam’s mother. No one from his family came to visit him at the Ranch. The morning he turned eighteen his bed at the ranch was empty. We reported him missing, but we never heard from him again.

Sam’s story, however, has stayed with me. I try to imagine the events in his mother’s life that led her to the point where she shot her son in the leg because he broke a plate. Parenting is stressful and sometimes the stress can push a parent over the edge and cause them to do terrible, violent acts.

At Arizona Boy’s Ranch we had boys as young as eight, and as old as seventeen:

The boys went to public school during the day. During the days in the summer they worked on the ranch, caring for cattle, pigs and horses. Temperatures in the summer were often over a hundred degrees. We had one spell when the temperature was 115 degrees or more eight days in a row.

I got a job there as a child care worker by answering an ad in the help wanted section of a Phoenix newspaper. The position payed minimum wage, however the Ranch provided room and board for the child care workers. The management deducted this from the salary, which meant that we made about 86 cents an hour working a 40-hour week.

The Ranch was set up with cottages of twelve boys and two adult child care workers called "cottage parents." The idea was to replicate a home environment. The cottage parents got two days off each week, and my job was to move from cottage to cottage filling in while the cottage parents were away. It was just me, one 23-year-old young man, with a different group of twelve boys entrusted to my care every two days. Mostly they were entrusted to my care by court order.

To prepare me do this important work I received no training. Apparently the directors felt my college degree in political science was all I needed. After I was at the ranch for a few days, one of the other child care workers, a former Marine, lent me a copy of a book that he used to guide his work. The book was called Parent Effectiveness Training, written by Thomas Gordon, who just died in August of 2002. From reading Gordon I first learned about the reflective listening of Carl Rogers. I learned how to talk to kids by reflecting back what they said to show I was listening to them. I learned how to make I-statements instead of giving orders, although I found it very difficult to remember to do this in practice. I was inclined to order the boys to clean up their room, to order then to go to bed, to order them to clean up the dishes. Saying "When I am the only one cleaning up the kitchen I get really upset because thirteen of us ate the meal" was harder to remember.

I remember a boy named Luciano. He was eight years old. His parents had left him and his three sisters in front of a police station in Tucson. Luciano was a child with whom I never had any difficulties. He always did his chores. He always treated the other children with respect. He did his homework. He was fluent in both English and Spanish. Luciano believed that some day his parents were going to come back for him and his sisters. His three sisters were together at another juvenile facility for girls.

I tried to imagine the problems Luciano’s parents had gone through that had led them to abandoning their four children. Had they run out of money? Had they become ill? Had they feared that they would be deported back to Mexico? What situation could possibly be so bad that they would leave their children on a street in Tucson? Parenting, motherhood and fatherhood, is very stressful.

I never learned the answers to any of these questions. The last I heard, the state was looking for families to adopt the four children. Luciano missed his sisters as well as his parents, but there was little chance one family would adopt four children.

Parenting is such a difficult job, with awesome responsibilities. I remember another boy in the same cottage as Luciano, named Billy. Billy had been placed at the Ranch by his parents. Billy was ten years old. He was the boy at the Ranch whom the other boys and the staff disliked most.

With Bill I could apply what I learned in my class on behaviorist psychology. A professor had taught me that animals and people work hardest on what the behaviorists call a "variable reinforcement schedule." For example if I am training a dog to sit, I begin by rewarding the behavior of sitting with a small piece of food each time the dog sits on command. Over time I spread out the reward, giving the dog one treat after it sits two or three times. Eventually I reward the dog on a variable reinforcement schedule. Sometimes I might reward the dog three times in a row. Other times I might reward the dog after it sits five or six times. In this way the dog learns to sit every time I say sit.

This appeared to be how Billy’s parents had trained their son to throw temper tantrums. They started by rewarding Billy every time he cried for something. Eventually they began to realize that they were spoiling the boy, and they tried to hold back by not giving into Billy’s requests every time. They unintentionally put their son on a variable reinforcement schedule. So like teaching a dog to sit on command, they trained Billy to throw temper tantrums, to throw himself on the floor and scream and cry until he got what he wanted.

At Arizona Boys Ranch we tried to hold the line with Billy, giving him the same as every other boy but no more. Billy threw many exhausting tantrums, two or three a day at the beginning. However, we found if we held the line, if we loved and cared for Billy, while never giving into his unreasonable demands, his tantrums decreased in number.

One hot night I was in charge of Billy and Luciano’s cottage. Billy was throwing a fit about bedtime and lights out. I had secretly taken the fuses out of the fuse box in the cottage, because Billy kept turning his light back on. Luciano was as usual sound asleep in spite of Billy’s crying and yelling. It was such a strange contrast between a sweet intelligent child whose parents had abandoned him, and a difficult, belligerent child whose parents, knowing that something was seriously wrong, had sought out help. Parenting is stressful.

The Ranch had one very wealthy benefactor. We were the favorite charity of Mrs. Brach, of the Brach Candy fortune. She payed for the construction of Arizona Boys Ranch’s only air-conditioned cottage. Mrs. Brach intended it for the older teenage boys, a kind of reward cottage for the older boys who behaved themselves. The building included an expensive pool table, a color television, stereo, and a $15,000 painting by a famous Mexican-American artist. When the first group of teenage boys moved into this beautiful cottage, they showed their respect by vandalizing the rooms. The Ranch director moved the boys back to the un air-conditioned cottages. He let the poorly paid child care workers, such as myself, live there when we were not on duty. The director warned us that if Mrs. Brach ever paid a visit, he would immediately move us out and replace us with teenage boys from one of the cottages.

The spring and summer I worked at Arizona Boys Ranch the phrase "there but for the Grace of God go I" came to mind. I saw myself in the boys and in their parents, and in the other staff struggling to do their jobs. I could see myself in Billy and in his parents. I could see myself in Luciano and in Sam and in others at the Ranch. My strength and my weakness, as a child care worker, was that I could see myself in everyone.

In some ways Mother’s Day is a mixed bag for mothers and children. On the one hand, most of us liked to be thanked, we like to be honored. Most mothers like it when their children say a sincere thank you on any day, including today. Still, a card, flowers, or a special meal one day a year, hardly touches on the deep, intense, complicated emotional experience of being a child or being a parent.

There were times when I was afraid of children at the Ranch. We would remove a child who violently attacked a staff person within a day. They would be sent to the county youth detention center and would never return to the ranch. Nevertheless, there were still times when I found myself alone and eye to eye with a teenager stronger than I was, with no time to consult my Parent Effective Training book. I did the best I could.

During the months I worked at the Arizona Boy’s Ranch, there were times I could see tears in their eyes. I would suddenly remember, that underneath their aggressive exteriors and their defiant stances, they were still children.

Alone, sometimes I prayed personal private prayers, which I said mostly in my mind, seldom aloud. I did not, do not pray because I believe there is a God listening to me. If there is a God listening fine, but that is not why I pray.

I find it comforting to put my hopes, my wishes into words. I found it soothing and calming. It gave me courage. So I prayed for the boys, whom for a brief time, I was responsible.

I prayed that Sam would make it to Chicago, find his relatives, get a job, and some day perhaps be reconciled with his mother.

I prayed that Luciano’s parents could take him and his sisters back and they would live together as a family again. If that did not happen, I prayed that the social workers would find him a new home with his sisters.

I prayed that Billy would grow and mature beyond his neediness to the point that he could live in community with other children and adults, and he could come to feel good about himself.

On August 8, about a month before I resigned from my job and headed off to school in California, I got the idea of taking the cottage I was responsible for over to the Salt River for a swim. The Salt and the Verde Rivers bring water, from the north and the eastern mountains of Arizona, to the Sonora desert. They are the reason that Phoenix exists.

After dinner, at six I loaded up the twelve boys in one of the Ranch vans and drove for an hour to the river. They went swimming while I listened to the radio. At seven Arizona time, President Nixon came on the radio and announced that he would resign the Presidency of the United States.

I watched over the boys swimming in the river for two hours until all sunlight was gone. They could have drowned or been bitten by a rattle snake or scorpion, but none of them were.

As I drove across the desert back to the Ranch, the fan belt on the van broke. I decided the Ranch director would not like it if I burned out the engine in the van, so we sat at night in the desert for several hours waiting for someone to drive by.

At night the temperature in the desert drops by 30 degrees and it becomes very comfortable. The boys smoked all the cigarettes they had brought with them. We sat in the silence and stared up at the stars and the Milky Way. I would not let them play the radio because it could drain the battery. So we talked. I told them that the Milky Way was a galaxy of stars and that our sun was part of that galaxy. They were not sure they believed me and pretended it was not important.

The moon rose and we could see the cactus around us in a silver light. I wondered if anyone would ever come down the road we were on, but I also thought about how beautiful the desert is at night. I could not rush around or do anything, except wait with my boys and look out at the desert; watch the sky of stars, smell the dry air and listen to the insects and the animals. It was a sacred, holy, spiritual night.

Eventually someone did drive by. We were lucky. It was a graduate of Arizona Boy’s Ranch who lived in Apache Junction. He even had a chain in his truck and towed us back to the ranch. We got home at 1:00 a.m.

Throughout human history fathers and mothers have struggled to raise their children. Each generation has to face its own challenge. Over the centuries our ancestors have struggled with illness, droughts, and wars. For parents in 2003 we live in fear of terrorism and random killings. We worry about AIDS and SARS and the West Nile virus.

Still, there are also moments of spirituality for those of us who care for children:

    when we see children grow,

    when we see children succeed,

    when we see them fail and yet keep going,

    when children forgive us and we forgive them,

    and when we are stuck out on the road in the middle of the night looking at the stars;

—there are moments of spirituality in child care work.

Great stress does come with the role of caring for children. Still when we work with children there are also moments of deep spiritual renewal.

For those moments I give thanks.

Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church
9601 Cedar Lane, Bethesda, Maryland 20814-4099
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e-mail: office@CedarLane.org
Sunday Services at 9 and 11 a.m.
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