Author & Journalist
Barbara Selke
Street Jagged
Jewel was pissed off. An angry teenage mother, she was locked up in a group home with a dozen other angry teenage mothers and their crying babies. She had come to my office and wanted to use the phone. She’d earned her one phone call for the week by doing what she was told. Jewel had come to collect.
“Okay. Let me look,” I said when she asked me to dial out. Looking mean, she waited while I checked her paperwork and dialed the number. After I made sure it was to the right person, I gave her the phone.
After ten minutes, I interrupted her call and told her, “Time to get off.”
“Just a minute.”
“No, now.”
She turned her back to me.
“Oh, no. You do not turn your back on me. Get off the phone now!” When she didn’t turn around, I said with more authority, “Jewel, you can get off the phone right now or you will lose your weekend pass.”
She turned. With tears in her eyes she said, “Can you ask me? Can you just do that?”
I gave it a try. “Can you get off the phone, please?”
She said her goodbyes and handed it to me. We locked eyes. I nodded, humbled. It was a lesson I’d remember often in my ten-year career in group homes.
In all those ten years I’d looked after hundreds of teenagers. I stood watch as they slept. I fed them when they were hungry. I hugged them when they cried, if they’d let me. I sat in hallways on suicide watch and in bleachers cheering the graduates. I believed in a future for them, and more than a few believed it too.
They were the lost, the runaways, the throwaways. Their families couldn’t care for them, or there was no family—fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers all thrown to the wind. Too young, they became the scared, scared foster kids, pregnant gangsters, thieves, addicts, prostitutes, and predators all placed in institutional group homes.
Join me in comforting the afflicted, and singing the praises of the front line workers.
For 11 years I worked in four group homes, most all pretty rough. I wrote Street Jagged to say, look here, these kids need our help. And to the helpers, I wrote to say, I see you.
It took me 30 years, start to finish, to earn my degree in journalism. Before that, I had had over 70 articles, photos, and various pieces published in three newspapers. I love newspapers, but what I wanted to do when I grew up was to write books.
Besides Street Jagged, I have a memoir where I reveal I have a genie, and an audiobook biography in the works called The Port Advisor, about ex-UDT frogman Frank Foss’ six-year stint running the busiest port in Vietnam during the war for the U.S. State Department. I am starting a new novel dealing with domestic violence.
Join me in comforting the afflicted, and singing the praises of the front line workers.