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 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 Torey'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."