When I recall the little boy who told me one day,
“You know, I really love my mother,”
I don’t think the idea popped into his mind all of a sudden.
It was something that had been welling up in his heart for a long time,
something he wanted to say.
I remember he had cried in class.
Not in front of everyone, of course!
But all alone in his corner, he had cried
because he didn’t understand what they were all talking about.
Besides, at school, he rarely understands anything.
How could he?
In class, they never talk about the social worker
who comes to see his mother and scares her.
They never talk about the little girl next door
who has been put in a foster home,
or about the mother who insults her own mom
because her children have been taken away from her.
“You know, I really love my mother,”
he said, almost thinking out loud.
But at school, why don’t they ever talk
about waiting for “Welfare money,”
or about the cops who are always in the housing project,
or about all those people who can’t work
because they are ill, like his father?
At school, it’s like a postcard,
everything is frozen, nothing ever moves.
(…)
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