The Tiger's Child: Whatever Happened to Sheila?

 

The follow-up to Torey Hayden’s 1980 book One Child: The True Story of a Tormented Six-Year Old and the Brilliant Teacher Who Reached Out , this true story chronicles a now teenage Sheila, as she’s reintroduced into Hayden’s life after Torey’s efforts to locate her.  What follows is a reality check for Hayden, as she realizes that the fairy tale storyline she may have imagined of how Sheila’s life would be positively impacted by their past close relationship as teacher and student, isn’t playing out quite the way she’d hoped. The book isn’t doom and gloom, but it is difficult and messy.  We see a girl who not only hasn’t shed the demons of her past trauma, though she’s courageously trying to, but is still steeped in more than her fair share of it.  We see a girl who, like so many other kids with hidden stories, has suffered abuse and betrayal at the hands of adults and a life of instability, never having solid ground to stand on for very long.  Unable or unwilling to bond with peers and struggling to trust the adults around her, she’s in full-on survival mode, which sometimes leads to choices that further complicate her life.

It can be argued that Hayden should never have gotten this close to Sheila, in effect, becoming a de facto mother figure to her, but it’s hard to blame her for wanting the best for a child she knows has so much potential.  Does it burn Hayden?  Yes.  A number of times.  It’s one thing to handle the behavior of a six-year old with relatively few resources, but it’s an entirely different thing to anticipate and manage the behavior of a street-smart, sometimes manipulative teenager in survival mode, who literally has nothing to lose.  There’s love and hate and everything in between as Torey and Sheila struggle to redefine their renewed relationship, and like any story involving conflict, it’s not always a smooth ride.  Despite the difficulty, it’s rewarding to see how Torey and Sheila’s relationship evolved, and to see Sheila’s efforts to understand and move on from her past.  I only wish I could see where she is now, considering this book was published 25 years ago.  

Final note: If you haven’t read One Child, the first few chapters of this sort of bring you up to speed, but honestly, I wouldn’t bother with this book unless you read that first.  You can’t get the emotional impact of Torey and Sheila’s relationship in a few synoptic chapters, and the first book is worth the effort.

★★★★