Minding The Gap
Three significant things happened when I was in fifth grade. They were unrelated, but each jarred me enough that even now, decades later, I recall them and how they made me feel.
Those events, in no particular order:
1. Mount St. Helens erupted.
2. I was bounced out of the spelling bee in the first round.
3. A kid named Mikey, who sat at the desk behind mine, wore a white t-shirt with a bunch of green peas on the front, and a slogan that read ‘Peas Help Me’.
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When Mount St. Helens erupted in 1980, my parents, sister, and I lived 60 miles southwest of it in Vancouver, Washington. My dad was in the Air Force reserves. He was working on a master’s degree using the GI Bill and made regular work trips to McChord AFB in Tacoma for his military duty. My mom was a stay-at-home mom. She made dinner each night and we ate at the table as a family.
For most of my friends, both their parents worked. Vancouver was a blue collar, hardworking town. People felt they hit it big time if they got hired on as a line worker at the Frito Lay factory.
I was ten years old. A volcano had just erupted down the street. The ash plume darkened the sky causing the streetlights to come on in the middle of the day. We had to wear surgical masks to school because of all the ash in the air. The uncertainty of what was happening and what might happen next caused anxiety. Even though it was all rather exciting, it was also scary and a lot for a ten-year-old.
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On the day of the spelling bee, I stood on stage with the other kids. I was the third or fourth kid to be given a word to spell out loud in front of the audience. I was nervous. I did not like being on stage and having all eyes on me when my name was called indicating my turn.
The word was ‘goes’. A simple word to spell, even for a fifth grader. It was so simple, in fact, that I immediately thought it was a trick question. My brain raced. The time ticked away in silence as I pondered the word, all eyes still on me. It had to be harder than I thought. Who would ask a fifth grader to spell such an easy word at such an advanced level of elementary education? With all this swirling in my head, I blurted out my answer. Keeping with the spelling bee rules, I said the word before and after spelling it. ‘Goes. G… O… apostrophe… S. Goes,’ I said.
The music in my head skidded to a stop when to my horror the judge said, ‘Oh, I’m sorry. That is incorrect. The correct spelling of the word ‘goes’ is G… O… E… S.’
I melted off the stage in embarrassment, everyone still looking at me.
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Mikey sat behind me in Mr. Pickett’s 5th grade class. Mikey was the kind of rough and tumble kid who wore the ‘husky’ size jeans with sown in knee pads from Sears. He wasn’t fat. He was ‘husky’. He was sloppy, always seemed to have dirt on his face and clothes. When he got head lice, his dad shaved his head.
Mikey and I weren’t necessarily friends, but we weren’t enemies either. We just coexisted in adjacent desks. He was an angry kid. He slept a lot in class. On the playground he played rough and picked fights. Mikey didn’t have a mom. His dad was a tugboat driver on the Columbia River. He worked long hours and drank a lot. They were poor. His dad was always tired and often drunk. Ten-year-old Mikey was just trying to survive.
After school I went home to freshly baked cookies and a mom who hugged me. Mikey went home to an empty house strewn with beer cans.
When Mikey wore his dingy t-shirt with a Del Monte logo and green peas on it, I didn’t take the phrase ‘Peas Help Me’ on his shirt as an advertising gimmick. I took it as a cry for help. I felt sorry for him. He needed help, more help than a kid in an adjacent desk could offer.
But who helps kids like Mikey? Who helps kids raised in drunk households low money and high on stress? There are millions of little Mikeys out there struggling with anger, anxiety, and depression and sparking against the guardrails when life ignites emotions too difficult for a 5th grader to handle.
Back in the 1980’s, whether you were an Air Force captain’s daughter suffering through humiliating spelling bee flame outs with a mom at home offering hugs and fresh baked cookies, and always secretly worried your dad could one day be sent off to war… or you were the latchkey son of a single dad tugboat driver picking fights in the school yard and worried about where your next meal would come from, there wasn’t a lot of organized effort in ensuring the healthy minds of kids.
Things were different back then. It was perfectly acceptable for parents to ride in cars with no seat belt on and a child on their lap while speeding down the highway. Nobody wore helmets while biking, or wrist guards while skating. For a short period of time, we wore surgical masks to school to protect our lungs from the ash from Mount St. Helens. But for some struggling kids, their hearts and minds often got no tending.
Much has changed through the decades. It is now completely unacceptable to hold a baby on your lap in the car, and there is a legal requirement kids be strapped securely into car seats for their own safety. Advances in bicycle helmets and wrist guards now better protect against bonked heads and broken wrists.
We put a lot of energy into protecting our children’s skin and bones. But what about their hearts and minds? What about their insides? We strap them up in car seats, helmets, and wrist guards. We cover their faces in surgical masks to protect their lungs from volcanic ash and global pandemics, but there is a big gap when it comes to protecting their mental health as robustly.
In Virginia, only one in five children with severe mental health issues is getting the professional help (and resources) they need to heal. That means 80% of kids are often left stranded alone on emotional battlefields anxious, depressed, and like Mikey, just trying to survive.
The Heart Leaf Center in Fairfax, Virginia is working hard to close that gap by improving access to high quality play therapy mental health services for children and families through low-cost counseling and professional education.
After my 5th grade year, we moved across the country. Then we moved again, and again, and again to several different military bases throughout the rest of my school years. We eventually settled in Virginia. I never saw Mikey again or heard anything more about him. But I think about him from time to time. I wonder where he is now, how his life turned out. His trajectory wasn’t promising. Does he still lash out in anger and pick fights? Does he drink too much, like his father? Is he raising anxious and depressed children too? Or did he learn from the sting of his own childhood that “it is easier to build strong children than repair broken men” and seek a way to break the cycle?
It is only when mental health issues are addressed that healing can begin.
Written By: Susan Phalen has held senior communications positions in the U.S. Department of State, FEMA, and on Capitol Hill. She ran specialized public affairs teams at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad for nearly four years, and was the Communications Advisor for a U.S. Ambassador in Paris, France. Susan stepped away from her busy career to help her father care for her mother who is currently in hospice. Presented with the opportunity to unplug from the demanding federal government grind and focus on what truly matters in life, Susan spends her free time (while her mom naps) taking cooking lessons, learning to paint, and is currently writing a book.