Lori Ranfeld, LPC

I was eight years old when I decided the world would be better off without me.

I grew up in a little Iowa town called Lockridge. One stop sign. Rural school, kindergarten through sixth grade, then everybody got bussed into the bigger school for junior high and high school.

My mom and dad both had what you’d call middle class jobs. My dad liked to drink, and he liked to spend. Horses, cows, pigs, hunting dogs, whatever kind of animal you could name, we probably had it on that property. There was always money for feed. Not always money for food.

My sister and I were the kids who wore long sleeves and long pants in the summer. We got good at covering the marks.

There weren’t school breakfasts, so some mornings I just came to school hungry. My sister was nine years older than me and did a lot of my raising, but she couldn’t feed me what wasn’t in the house. I remember my first grade teacher saying something to my parents at a conference about me coming to school hungry. My dad was so embarrassed, so furious, he threatened her. Told her to mind her own business.

My sister took the brunt of it. We got good at the stories too. I fell off the horse. I tripped. I learned early that you don’t say anything, because somebody you love gets hurt if you do.

My sister was my buffer for years. When she turned eighteen she met a man and decided she was done. She left, moved out of state, and it was just me.

I was eight. All the work that had been hers to do was suddenly nobody’s, because there was no way an eight year old could carry it. So my dad started bringing in men who were just getting out of jail to do chores around the property, for almost nothing, a little cash or beer at the end of the day.

My mom, I know now, was clinically depressed. Checked out. She slept a lot, or buried herself in a book. She wasn’t watching.

What I’ll say is this. When you’re eight years old on a rural property with no one watching, and the men coming and going are men nobody is watching either, things happen that should never happen to a child.

My mom caught on eventually. She told me I could never tell anyone, because if I did, my dad would kill somebody. He probably would have. And she wouldn’t be able to take care of me if he was gone.

So it was on me to carry it. Because telling could hurt someone else.

I decided the world would be better off without me. Or maybe I’d be better off without the world. I started thinking through all the ways an eight year old’s mind can come up with. Jumping out of my window. A whole bottle of Flintstone vitamins. There was a cornfield behind our house that had train tracks cutting across, and I thought about sneaking out and lying down on them.

I started the third grade.

Mrs. Hinkle didn’t ask a lot of questions. She just paid attention. I wasn’t keeping up with my hygiene anymore, and she noticed the things you notice about a kid who isn’t okay. She started keeping me in at recess. She brought food from home, sometimes even cookies she’d made herself. She had a rocking chair, and we’d sit in it, and she’d read a chapter book that was just for the two of us.

Sometimes she told me stories about her own childhood. I think she was hoping I’d tell one back. But I’d already learned you don’t say anything, because if you do, someone you love gets hurt. She was somebody I didn’t want to see hurt.

She kept a toothbrush there for me. She’d comb my hair sometimes. We’d eat together, and I felt like I was the teacher’s pet in that room.

She didn’t fix anything. Only God did that, over years. But she saved me. She gave me a feeling of worth. She made me feel loved. Seen.

She came to my wedding. She told me she still had poems I wrote in third grade, kept all those years.

My family couldn’t afford college. I was offered a full ride nursing scholarship at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, and that was that. I went in as a nursing major.

My husband was in Bible school across town at the time, not my husband yet, just a guy from back home in Iowa I sort of knew of but didn’t really know. We ended up together while we were both there.

By my third year I knew hospital nursing wasn’t going to be my life. The hours were long, and something about it didn’t fit. Every so often they’d pull me from the ortho neuro floor to cover oncology when they were short staffed, and those patients, a lot of them just needed somebody to sit with them. Somebody to listen. I discovered I really enjoyed being there. Listening.

I switched my major to social work. That meant we had to start paying for school ourselves, which was its own conversation with my now husband. But it was the right one.

We got married, moved back to Iowa for a short stretch, and then came down to Missouri to help a friend start a church. My husband has been a pastor there ever since.

I stayed home with our kids for a few years. When I was ready to get back into the workforce, I wanted something with the same hours the kids had at school. An opportunity came up. If I went back for my master’s, I could work as a school counselor. So I went back to school. I spent more than twenty years at Maplecrest.

My daughter teaches music at Maplecrest now. My son is a youth pastor at the church where his dad preaches. Neither of them had to grow up the way I did.

A couple years ago I moved to the alternative school as counselor and became the district’s homeless and foster care liaison. Officially I’m the homeless and foster liaison for the whole district, plus the therapist at the alternative school.

People think the alternative school is where the bad kids go. It’s not. Half our students have IEPs and are earning credits through job placements around town, parks department, food service, places like that. The other half are credit deficient, but not because they’re bad kids. It’s fifty moves in ten years. It’s trauma. It’s missing chunks of school because life happened and nobody was watching. Twenty two percent of the kids who walked across the stage at graduation this year came out of alternative programs. That’s not nothing.

We go pick kids up when they don’t have a way to school because they don’t know where they’re sleeping that week. Food insecurity is a big one for me. We keep a classroom stocked as a pantry. We partner with Convoy of Hope, Ozark Food Harvest, L-Life. When the snow hit hard this past winter, we knew those kids would be home with nothing, so we sent them out with bread, peanut butter, jelly, macaroni and cheese. Whatever it took to get them through.

Eight hours a week I also do mental health work at the jail. A lot of the people I see there are parents of kids I’ve had in school, or kids I had years ago who ended up there themselves. I sit with families and ask what they really need. What can the school do to help them. Because kids read better and focus better when they’re on a path to reunification, no matter what their family has been through.

I know what it is to protect the people who hurt you. So when I sit across from a student who’s shut down, who’s missed weeks of school, who everybody’s already decided is a lost cause, I don’t see a bad kid.

Somebody noticed me once, and it changed everything. Mrs. Hinkle didn’t fix my life. She just kept showing up, kept paying attention, kept a chair open for me. Now I’m the one keeping the chair open. For the teen who doesn’t have a ride to school. For the parent trying to build back a relationship with their kids.

For whoever sits down and needs someone to notice them.

Lori Ranfeld, LPC
Lebanon R-3 Schools
Homeless and Foster Care Liaison