Case
studies>Talya
and Zelda and their mother - Maya
Children - Talya and Zelda
Talya Talya was fours years old on her arrival at Tzel Koratainu.
An intensely independent little girl, she seemed like an older
woman, trudging on with her life in a solitary and self-involved
manner. Talya refused to allow other to help or approach her.
She was closed within herself and very much a loner.
Talya attended nursery school and kindergarten
while living in our home, showing large deficits in language
and concentration abilities and low motivation for learning.
Talya wanted only to play. She would not participate in structured
learning situations and often interrupted or left the group
to return to her private play. Talya showed little understanding
and integration of concepts or numbers. Assessment by an educational
psychologist had Talya referred to special education for first
grade. Talya, however, was not prepared, emotionally or developmentally,
for academics. After only two months in first grade, Talya
returned to kindergarten where she was allowed to continue
to play out her need just to be a child.
Talya had never had the structure and
security within which she could allow herself to enjoy her
life. Tremendous personal responsibility and independence
had been forced on her at a young age due to the neglectful
and abusive circumstances in which she lived. Yet, Talya had
been emotionally incapable of accepting such independence,
closing herself in to avoid the world.
Given the concern and affection of surrogate
parents, Talya grabbed at the chance to take back her lost
childhood years and live them through happily. She played
out the early years she spent in our home, reveling in the
creative arts, acting and performing, putting off the responsibilities
of academic development and appropriate social interaction
until she felt fully prepared.
After her additional year in kindergarten,
Talya happily entered first grade and capably applied herself
to the tasks at hand. Given the chance to move at her own
pace, Talya opened up beautifully to her peers in our home
and also to those at school. She shed her introverted self
and opened to show the tremendous personality and appeal she
had hidden within.
At the age of nine, an emotionally prepared
and socially capable Talya joined her siblings and her mother
when the family was later reunited in the family home.
Zelda Zelda, the oldest of four children,
joined us at the age of nine. Arriving in our home like a wild,
untamed horse, she was completely undisciplined, loud, and coarse,
expressing her anger by gritting her teeth, chewing on her clothing,
and raging at and fighting with everyone and everything around
her. Zelda had no table manners and stuffed down any food that
was placed on the table. She had various physical complaints
and illnesses that were all diagnosed as being emotionally based.
Physically, she resembled an old lady, wrinkled and bent over
as if burdened by responsibilities she could not handle.
Zelda was greatly displeased at being
taken out of her home, expressing feelings of abandonment
and betrayal at being sent away from the place in which she
most needed to be accepted. Zelda loved her mother but had
never felt loved in return. She took responsibility for her
father's violent outbursts toward her mother and her mother's
lack of love for her, claiming these were her fault as she
brought so much trouble to their lives.
At Tzel Koratainu, Zelda needed to build
her sense of self-esteem and to separate her self-identity
from the events that took place in her home. She needed to
confront her feelings of abandonment, which were the basis
of her disorder, and learn to take responsibility for her
actions and reactions to those around her.
Zelda's progress was slow but steady.
Unable, on arrival, to carry through on tasks, Zelda eventually
learned to persevere and work through her issues to the end.
She developed confidence in her intellectual abilities, something
she greatly lacked after being made to repeat both first and
second grade. She developed a healthy share of independence,
becoming able to take more responsibility for her emotional
needs and to recover from emotional downs in a mature and
balanced manner. Zelda developed a very good sense of values,
understanding naturally what was right and good and incorporating
this into her own behavior toward herself and others. She
learned to stand up for what she believes, becoming able to
assert herself when she felt things were not right.
On arrival, as part of a routine assessment,
our staff had asked Zelda to draw pictures of herself and
her family. Just six months later, when Zelda was shown the
earlier picture of herself, she was amazed. "I was so
ugly when I came here," she told us, "but look at
me now. I am so beautiful."
Real healing only came about for Zelda
when she became able to deal, through the Mother/Child Healing
Hostel, with her deep feeling of abandonment by her mother.
This unbearably painful feeling was mitigated by the love
and acceptance she received from her surrogate parents in
our home, and later by working with Zelda's mother to heal
the pain that had stood between them. Our greatest pleasure
came when we saw the relationship between mother and daughter
develop in a healthy and mutually satisfying way. Finally,
Zelda's mother filled the emptiness that had filled Zelda's
life.
Zelda remained with us until the age of
thirteen when she finished sixth grade. She grew into a mature
and loving young woman, successful at both her relationships
and her home and school endeavors. The coarse young girl who
had arrived was transformed into a charming young woman.
Mother - Maya When we first met Maya at
the caravan community she showed us the hole where her husband
had put his fist through the wall in one of his many fits of
anger. Then she lifted her shirtsleeves to show us the black
and blue marks all over her arms where he had hit her. "Please
take my children away from here," she begged us. "Save
their lives." Even before their aliyah, while still living
in the former Soviet Union, Maya had been forced to run away
from her husband's violent behavior and had spent many nights
out on the streets with her small children. Since their aliyah,
neither parent worked and the family tried to survive on welfare
money which the father, a severe alcoholic, spent on liquor.
The mother wanted the children out of the house as the father
beat both her and them, and did not leave any money from the
Welfare check to support their care.
Maya was not a strong or assertive personality
yet, out of sheer desperation, she had begun the process of
divorce even before the children had left the home. Even once
the government had moved her to subsidized housing, and she
repeatedly changed the locks,her husband found ways to get
in and terrorize the family. She eventually managed to have
him jailed, for a time, for abuse. Zelda, Maya tells us, often
had to act as surrogate mother to her younger siblings as
Maya was not able to function in her miserable life. To us,
Maya repeatedly expressed her concern over her inability to
discipline her children, to help them with their education
and to take care of their basic needs. Zelda deeply needed
her mother, but, without assistance, Maya was not capable
of giving her daughter the nurturing and care she so desperately
craved.
Maya joined the Mother/Child Hostel program
at Tzel Koratainu some three years after Zelda had left the
family home. Here, we were able to help both mother and daughter
heal old wounds of abuse and emotional neglect while working
on reuniting them in a healthy relationship based on mutual
understanding. The presence of her mother in our home, and
the efforts invested in teaching them to work on their relationship,
contributed greatly to Zelda's further progress both at home
and at school. However, Zelda's mother was not a highly educated
woman. Her income, if any, came from transient jobs in household
care and industrial cleaning. Zelda's high level of identification
with her mother, curiously, prevented her from growing academically
beyond her mother's level of education.
By the culmination of the Mother/Child
Healing Hostel program, Maya had moved into her government-granted
apartment and found herself ample work as a care-provider
for the elderly. Zelda was able to rejoin her siblings in
their own home with their mother, a home that is tidy, well
organized, and efficiently run by their now contented and
settled mother, Maya.
