Joyous Holidays! Huh?

As I sit here, just a few days past Christmas, I’m thinking about all the children and adolescents who are inpatients in psychiatric hospitals all across America. And all the many Christmas eves and Christmas days that I worked on such units. Typically, the unit census would go down … way down … at Christmas, or just before, as if all the problems that the kids had the rest of the year had, well … evaporated?

I’ve had a pretty nice Christmas this year, with my sister and nieces and nephews and all. There are some people that I would have liked to have had around, but didn’t because they were unavailable, or were, well, dead. But, no complaints.

On a child or adolescent psychiatric unit, the days are filled with anticipation over the holidays. Typically, the teens are wondering whether or not they’ll be discharged before Christmas, and if they’re told that they won’t be, there may be disappointment expressed as yelling and lots of swearing–often aimed at the nursing staff. As if we really had anything to do with it.

Younger children in the hospital often spend a lot of time looking at magazines and print advertisements from places like Toys R Us or Target. You know what I’m talking about here–bright, full-color, glossy print ads with more toys than you can imagine outside the old Sears catalogues or at FAO Schwarz.

There was one little boy that I worked with in Connecticut a few years ago. He was about eight years old and his name was … let’s just call him Frederico. He was beautiful and his parents were from someplace south of the border. He spoke with a Latin accent. Neither parent was available to care for him: Dad was in prison and Mom was in her umpteenth rehab. And Frederico was with us.

All the staff fell in love with Frederico, for reasons you could understand if you had ever met him.

Anyway, one Sunday morning in the weeks before Christmas, The Hartford Courant carried one of those big, thick, glossy advertising inserts with oh-so-many toys. I pulled it out of the newspaper and slipped it into my work bag, thinking to myself how much Frederico would enjoy it. I wasn’t disappointed. He took it and ran to his room–which was a private room for behavior reasons–and jumped into his bed and immediately started pointed and choosing what he wanted and was sure that Santa would bring him. He wanted a big, red fire truck, if I remember correctly.

He kept that crumpled, very wrinkled advertisement for weeks, obsessing over what he saw that he wanted and what he saw as un-obtainable by normal channels but that Santa could bring him. When I say he obsessed, I really mean obsessed. Every other word that came out of Frederico’s mouth was fire truck. (Yeah, I know that’s two words, but give me a break here. It’s Christmas.) Daily, the advertisment was shuttled not-so-gently from Frederico’s hands to the floor beside his bed and back to the top of his bed.

I was tucking Frederico into bed on the night before Christmas and Frederico touched my face and pulled me toward him to whisper into my ear. “D’ya know what I really want for Christmas?” he asked. Then, “I want to go home and live with you, Debbi. Can I please? I can be your little boy.”

I waited a couple of seconds–and I tell you I would have loved to have Frederico as my child, in my family, to give him a new start, and I tried to think of how I could possibly do that, because I had grown to love him in the months that he had been with us–but we were in different roles and the hospital and the profession itself dictated boundaries–and so I explained that I coudn’t do that because I already had two sons of my own.

He, of course, protested that he was sure that I still had room for one more boy–please, Debbi, please–but I tucked him in and gently kissed his forehead. I returned to the nurses’ office and finished my shift. The night shift would later distribute the donated toys that had been wrapped by other staff, and I would hear the next day about the gifts that Santa had brought.

Frederico didn’t receive his fire truck that year, and he didn’t get a new family either, at least not with me. That saddened me. I continued to see Frederico every day after that for months, but things were never quite the same. He had opened up and told me what he wanted and I couldn’t give it. He didn’t want to risk doing that again, at least not at that time, in that place, with me.

As I think of Frederico today, I hope he finally has a real family and that he had a good Christmas this year. Maybe someday he’ll understand how much the staff at that hospital cared for him and wanted the best for him that Christmas and for all Christmases to come.

Merry Christmas.