Author of 'One Child' sees beauty in imperfection

Author of 'One Child' sees beauty in imperfection

Santi W.E. Soekanto, Contributor/Jakarta

Sincerity is usually the first casualty of the talk circuit for
famed authors out to sell their latest work.

But Torey Hayden, a teacher and the author of a series of
books on children with special needs, was clear and convincing
when she said that what kept her going was the beautiful children
she met in her line of work.

"You see beauty in imperfect people," she told a workshop on
special education in Jakarta on Tuesday.

Here on a two-week visit with a tight schedule of talks and
seminars, Hayden said she found it easier to speak about such an
esoteric issue in an environment such as Indonesia because of the
religiosity of the local people. The Creator, she said, is
perfect and will not make mistakes.

"If we see an imperfection, then there is something wrong with
our eyes," she said.

Such a generosity of spirit is indeed needed when one has to
deal, on a daily basis, with what some people have callously
described as "damaged goods". Hayden has spent most of her life
with the autistic, the mentally impaired, the blind and abused
children. All leave a mark in her life and her mind, and she
turns the experiences into books.

Born Victoria Lynn Hayden in the U.S. state of Montana 53
years ago, she studied chemistry and physics before turning her
attention to special education and to teaching children with
special needs when she was 18. She has had to overcome various
obstacles in order to remain in the field.

These have included her own inner turmoil upon having to work
with a girl who had been raped by two male adults, one of whom
was her own father. Severely traumatized, the child was
practically a mute in Hayden's class and it took five months to
draw her out and teach her to speak.

Hayden, who once said her greatest fear was losing things that
she loved, be they family or something intangible such as
freedom, lives by the proverb: "The time to be happy is now. The
place to be happy is here. The way to be happy is to make others
so."

Grief, on the other hand, is the worst feeling in the world.

"That is just one really, truly shitty feeling," she said in
an interview. These insights have helped her deal with the
children in her care.

"Patience is the key," Hayden said. "What is most important is
that you give yourself to them...listen to what they have to say,
to their feelings, by listening to them, they will feel they are
being cared for...(enabling them) to get better."

Most psychologists know this one: Two shrinks, one young and
the other older, met in the elevator, the former looking
disheveled and harried while the latter impeccable in his attire.

"How do you maintain your distance and be unaffected while
spending hours listening to tales of sorrow from your clients?"
the young psychologist.

"Who listens?" was the response.

Hayden said she went into special education because she got to
spend at least six hours a day with the children, while
psychologists spend only one-hour in their weekly sessions.

"I like this better," she said, despite criticism of stepping
too deep into the private space of the children, whereas
psychologists are trained to keep an emotional distance from
their clients.

Psychologists work on the basis of various theories, and "at
the end of the day, they are just theories ... no one knows for
sure how the inner minds really work," said Hayden, who now lives
in North Wales, UK, with her only daughter, Sheena.

Mayke Tedjasaputra, a University of Indonesia child
psychologist attending Hayden's workshop, good-naturedly accepted
the criticism as justified. She had nothing but admiration for
the teacher.

"She is a humanist, always looking for the potential to grow
and to be good, in any child. We need thousands more Torey
Haydens."