I saw this text just a few minutes after it arrived.
It was from Tara.
Tara is my oldest friend.
I first met Tara in 1994 when she was hired to work where I’d been working for a year already.
My B.A. in philosophy hadn’t been in high demand when I’d returned to Massachusetts from Purdue in May of 1993, but I’d managed to find a job listing (in the Help Wanted section of the Sunday Boston Globe) that required “effective written communication skills.”
When I called about the job on Monday, the director wanted to interview me immediately, like that afternoon. With no ready resume to hand over, I scheduled the interview for the next day and spent Monday at my Smith-Corona trying to put together something to make me look like more than a recent college graduate with irrelevant summer jobs.
It wasn’t until midway through my interview at Judge Baker’s Children’s Center that I realized the job had nothing to do with the law, despite the center being Judge Baker’s. It also occurred to me, as I agreed to take the job—for $18k/yr—that I wasn’t going to be working anywhere near children either.
Instead, I’d be hearing stories about children.
Bad stories.
My fresh-out-of-college job required me and my co-workers to answer the telephones at the Child-at-Risk Hotline when the people who did this work—Monday-Friday, 9:00-5:00—were not on the clock.
Young liberal arts graduates in the evenings, on weekends, and on overnights (all seven) would pick up the phone with “Child-at-Risk Hotline” and engage in an interview of sorts:
How do you know the family? Who’s in the family? What’s going on?
Callers who knew the children through the work they did (teachers, police, doctors) called the Hotline because the law required them to. Callers with a different relationship to the children (neighbor, extended family, friend) called out of concern. These callers didn’t have to give their names, though they usually did. Occasionally, false reports came in, and these weren’t always easy to spot.
I was assigned to train Tara. I wasn’t her first choice, apparently, I “scared” her.
During the mandatory two weeks of training, it was clear to me after just a couple of days that Tara had all the “effective written communication skills” that the job required. And, get this: she also had an actual interest in this sort of work. She probably knew well before her interview that she’d be working shitty hours, listening to the horrors of child rape and malnourishment. And she showed up anyway, doubtless with a smile on her face.
Only authentically good people have an interest in this sort of work.
Tara is a bona fide good person.
So when she—someone who would go on from the Hotline to do deep and meaningful work with people who have experienced unimaginable trauma—asks if I have “time to chat,” I drop what I’m doing and call her.
People like Tara rarely ask to “chat,” that is, rarely ask for help. This is because Tara is a “helper,” so skilled and competent in her care of others that to ask for help for herself must feel unsettling, must feel foreign. It’s not that she’s ashamed to ask for help, it’s more that she’s unpracticed.
In the three decades of our friendship, Tara’s only asked me to “chat” maybe four times. Each and every time I’ve done my best (however fleetingly) to rise to her level of goodness and strive (imperfectly) to be a good person for this actually good person.
And that’s why I’m in Montana.
To persuade Tara to do something good for herself for once in her life—to put herself first, to pivot toward what she’s here on earth to do, which is, for starters, not starting a job that she already knows she’s going to hate first thing Monday morning.
I’ve got just under 24 hours.
Jenna Brownson 