This is a story during my week of attachment with the Paediatric Outpatient Clinics… (names anonymized, of course)
Clarice’s aunt was her carer. She had brought Clarice in due to concerns about her oppositional behaviour at home – trashing her scooter into windows, hitting her brother, skipping school, coming back home late without informing her aunt, and so forth, according to the referral letter.
But walking into the room was a surprisingly rather demure young teenage girl, dressed in pretty pastel colors with a little flowery handbag on the side. Perhaps she was just more reserved around strangers, especially before the doctor?
Her mom was in prison for drug abuse. Her dad had been gone for several years to somewhere nobody knew. Her aunt was single, but was taking care of two more children in addition to Clarice, all whom had to be taken away from their parents for child protection issues. She was really running quite tired, she said in our discussion, coming to her “end of wits” in trying to manage the behavioural problems in her house.
But we didn’t think that Clarice had any “medical problem” such as ADHD that we could address with medicines. The most we could do is to recommend her to give counsellors and child psychiatrists another try. I felt a little bad for what seemed to be like pushing the onus away, but it was perhaps the right thing to do.
At the end of the consultation when interestingly not much else could be said from us, the paediatrician turned to the teenage girl sitting quietly on her seat. “Clarice,” she said, “if there were three wishes you could make and they would come true, what would they be?”
“That I could have a hundred wishes more,” Clarice replied without too long a delay, but she laughed when she realized it was a silly answer.
“Um…, that I would never grow old,” she added with a self-conscious grin, “andddd….”
“… And that mom, dad and I can be together…,” she said after a pause.
