I hail from the land of the syllabi, my family crest is the Zealous Excel spreadsheet, and my talisman against evil is an ancient TV guide.  While my own personal organizational habits may be lacking, structure and coordination run as quick as blood through my veins.  Order has been as much a constant in my life, a pillar of my personal culture, as chapstick or microwaveable meals.  So this past week, working a record number of hours at the Boys and Girls club near my house, I discovered that I absolutely picked the correct career when I decided I’d do anything that did not involve elementary school children.

I don’t want to confuse anyone: I love the kids at my club and I do like my job there.  But after a field trip downtown with fifty-eight children, all under ten years old, I knew without a doubt that God blesses some people with oodles of endurance and patience, and I am not one of those people.  It didn’t help that the field trip itself was disorganized, or that the venue was meant for kids much older than ours, or that the grand finale of the day was all the kids singing along to “Blurred Lines” as it played on the radio on the way home.  But even without those things, I couldn’t have escaped the most painful takeaway: adulthood.

Since I turned eighteen seven-ish years ago, everyone has been dropping subtle hints that I am no longer a child.  My government has asked me twice to serve on a jury, my parents have asked me kindly to get my own cell phone plan, and my credit card company doesn’t ask for my mother’s permission when it sees that I’ve ordered three Disney Channel Original Movies on DVD in the past month.  And, being observant, I picked up what they were all laying down, and began, myself, to believe that I was an adult.  I got a job, made a budget, and stopped eating Lunchables for dinner.

But none of those things rocked my world as much as that field trip, when I was in charge of twelve children, all of whom looked at me and saw a “grown-up.”  Jordan came up to me every five minutes telling me that one of the other kids was hitting her or calling her names.  Joshua looked cautiously over his shoulder at me when he was stealing the straws from the coffee stand, and yelled, “Stop looking at me!”  When I told them to, they all lined up against the wall and sat down, waiting for me to count them off and make sure I hadn’t lost one.

At least, they sometimes did.  Most of the time, I had to yell for two straight minutes to get them to hear me and then, further, listen to me enough to follow directions.  It seems that, throughout my life of orderly structure—my mom setting an egg timer to tell us how long we were allowed to play video games and my dad making a chores chart so that we always knew who had to set the table for dinner—I never really learned how to insta-organize.  When there was disorder, our family took our time and found a lasting solution that we could use and reuse until the next crisis.  But in the Consol Energy Center, full to bursting with after-school groups from around Pittsburgh, there was no way to create lasting solutions, and I had limited strategies for quick ones.  I exhausted all of those strategies within the first five minutes, after half the kids learned that there was a computer game at one end of the hallway, and the other half saw the giant photo booth at the other.  So I resorted to yelling.

And the yelling is where everything came to a head.  The yelling is what reminded me of my nicely-organized childhood.  The yelling is why I’m glad I chose not to be an elementary-school anything.  And the yelling is what showed me, in ways that a phone bill or an empty fridge had failed to do, that I really am an adult now.

I made three kids cry that day on the field trip.  For each child, there was a moment’s hesitation where I watched their face devolve into a crinkled and wet mass of fear and frustration, knowing that I was, at least in part, the cause.  I hate yelling.  I hate fighting.  I want these kids to know that I love my job because I care about them.  I know it’s not important to be liked, per se, but with these kids in this setting, I think it’s important that they know I like them.  And I honestly do.  But I still had to yell.

I think that’s something that comes with authority.  Not so much the yelling, but the enforcing. Enforcing rules, enforcing punishments, and sticking to them even when you’re being told by four or five people that you’re being “unfair.”    Once you’re an adult, the order and stability isn’t always extrinsically created; sometimes, you have to form it out of the chaos yourself.  It’s lonely sometimes, and it’s terrifying too, like when I worry that Jeremiah will never look me in the eyes again because I forced him to clean up his lunch box instead of letting him play the group game.

Those three kids made me cry, too, in a way.  When I got into my car to drive home, I sobbed a little bit, partly due to a release in pressure as I was finally alone again, partly out of hunger because I hadn’t eaten for twelve hours, and partly because I felt, for the umpteenth time, like my childhood was really a memory now, something I could never really revisit, no matter how many times I watched Halloweentown.

The only bright spot that I could see at that moment was that I knew the kids would forgive me.  I had watched them forgive the other counselors for enforcing: for not giving them an extra piece of pizza, or for sitting them on the “time-out” bench.  Of course they would forgive me for yelling at them.  To them, I’m a grown-up.  And grown-ups always yell.

Mary Margaret Healy

Mary Margaret is a 2013 English, history, and secondary education grad who went rogue and became a Social Worker in Pennsylvania’s Child Welfare system. Specifically, she works as a caseworker in the Statewide Adoption and Permanency Network finding families for children and educating the masses about foster care, adoption, and permanency planning. She made it over the grad-school hurdle with gold stars and warm fuzzies and is on to the next big adventure: the unknown of adulthood. Her major writing dream right now is to finish her science fiction novel that explores the concurrent futures of child welfare and artificial intelligence.