RAVENNA — Jane Ryan has big plans for Ravenna.

The screenwriter, novelist, nurse and counselor from Grand Island is assembling a cast and crew to film her independent movie “The Boarder” there in July.

“We want people to participate and be excited about it,” Ryan, 64, said. “The final product, the movie “The Boarder,” will be distributed to film festivals worldwide and to professionals and anybody we can distribute it to.”

The movie, based on Ryan’s screenplay of the same name, is about an interracial family coping with reactive attachment disorder. 

“The reason I became interested in it is I am the mother of two of those children. I have four children, and two are very healthy and happy, and the other two are severely disturbed. I’m an adoptive mom, and they showed symptoms from the time they came home as infants,” she said.

RAD is the result of a child experiencing trauma in its first two years of life. “It could be a traumatic separation from the mother. It could be abuse. It could be due to drug addiction — anything that interrupts or interferes with the relationship between mom and baby in those first two years,” Ryan said.

Children suffering from RAD do not respond normally to love, affection or discipline. Ryan said they can become dangerous, and symptoms can include harming other children, killing family pets, setting fires and threatening people, especially their mother.

Ryan said she got her master’s degree in counseling hoping she could help her kids, but medical professionals did not begin to recognize the disorder until years later.

In 2002, she wrote her first book, “Broken Spirits, Lost Souls,” to educate more people about RAD. The book was a collection of interviews with parents of RAD children from across the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom.

“I think I’m the perfect person to do this and to write about this disorder because I love my children and I understand this disorder. I survived it, and I can teach it. I can share what we went through. We went through hell. Our house was hell on earth for years,” she said.

 “After I wrote that, I thought it would be good to have a movie made of it,” she said. “It just so happened there was an article in the paper about a big-time screen writer named Lew Hunter. He’s a Nebraska boy who went to L.A. and was in Hollywood for 40 years, so he moved back to Nebraska and has what he calls the screenwriter colonies.”

Ryan attended one of the two-week sessions in Superior. Her teacher was Valerie West, a writer from the movie “The Lion King.”

“I learned a lot because I had never even seen a screenplay until like the third day I was there,” she said. “It was a wonderful experience.”

Within about a year, she had finished her screenplay for “The Boarder” and had submitted it to several film festivals.

Ryan said she tried for years to interest directors and filmmakers in her script without luck. Frustrated, she decided to write the novel version of “The Boarder” and booked a room at The Printed Page bed and breakfast in Ravenna last spring.

“I had seen the house and started writing the novel into rooms in this house. I started describing what the rooms looked like,” she said. “So it just started making sense. I would go for a couple walks each day, and I would find something from the script.”

Ryan said she talked with Mayor Gerald Reimers about shooting the movie in Ravenna. “I told him we’ll have to bring people in from Omaha, and he said ‘That’s fine, we’ll do home stays.’”

Ravenna’s churches have offered to help find places for the cast and crew to stay while in town. Ryan said she has already assembled a cast with actors from Omaha, Minneapolis and Kansas City.

She plans to have auditions for smaller parts in March and said she hopes Ravenna, Kearney and Grand Island residents will get involved as well.

“I really want people to get to know each other and be like a little family while we work on this,” she said.

“The Boarder” tells the story of a family with one biological daughter and an adopted daughter. The father, a Baptist minister, finds an 11-year-old boy, Carl, who suffers from RAD, living on the street and brings him home.

“They take him in off the streets, and the story is about what happens to their previously loving peaceful family once that child joins their home,” she said.

“Practically all the symptoms and all the circumstances that surround RAD show up in one way or another in the script. The movie will be an independent feature film that’s meant to be in theaters, but it also will talk to professionals. It will talk to parents, because a lot of children now have some attachment issues. They’re not always full-blown like my children, but they have issues. This will talk to all of them.

“It’s called ‘The Boarder’ because one of the British moms who I spoke to who had one of these kids said, ‘They’re like boarders in a boardinghouse. They sleep in your home and sit at your table, but you really don’t know who you have.’ These kids are always a surprise,” Ryan said.

She said there will be a fundraiser meal and auction for the movie at 1 p.m. Feb. 7 in Ravenna.

“I don’t have deep pockets at all,” she said laughing. “There’s a lot of excitement about this. I have people calling me up and saying, ‘I want to participate in this.’ Hopefully, people will be excited enough that they take out their checkbooks.”

Ryan said so far, everything she has needed has fallen into place. “I believe it’s true that this is God’s project. If it’s supposed to happen everything will come, and so far it has.”

e-mail to:

betsy.friedrich@kearneyhub.com

Betsy Friedrich reports for the Kearney Hub.

What is Reactive Attachment Disorder?

According to mayoclinic.com, reactive attachment disorder is “a rare but serious condition in which infants and young children don’t establish healthy bonds with parents or caregivers.”

Children with RAD are typically neglected, abused or moved multiple times from one caregiver to another. “Because the basic needs for comfort, affection and nurturing aren’t met, the child never establishes loving and caring attachments with others. This may permanently alter the child’s growing brain and hurt their ability to establish future relationships.”

Almost 40 years ago, writer and counselor Jane Ryan of Grand Island adopted two children with RAD. 

“Nobody knew what it was then,” she said. “The saddest and scariest part for all of us is that nobody believed me when I said that, because one of the things these kids do is they hide their negative behaviors from the world, so the only one who really knows about it is the mother who is the focus of their wrath.

“One of my children was a fire setter and killed animals and was doing that around the house. My other child was a knife wielder, so I had slits in my furniture from knives. She would wander around the house at night with knives. She would stab the woodwork on the way up to my bedroom,” Ryan said.

“I could only manage them as long as I was physically stronger than they were. … They would have these hours-long rages where I would have to hold them so they wouldn’t harm the other children.”

Both her adopted children left her home for institutional care by the time they were 11 and 12. She said she hasn’t seen either since they were teens.

“If somebody had told me that they would have those problems, I wouldn’t have believed them, and I would’ve been certain that I could love those things away,” she said.

Ryan said by the time her children received care, they were too old to reverse their behaviors, but there are things parents of children with RAD can do.

“Certainly hug them and snuggle with them and have good eye contact, even when they react badly to that. … These children often do not like to be touched and do not want to be cuddled. They are often quite satisfied in their cribs by themselves. I tell parents to stay in their face, to get right in their face and talk to them, smile at them.

“They have a real negative version of mom that’s neurologically bound into their brain. If you stay in their face, then you’re giving a different picture. Also, parents need to learn to set very clear boundaries with children and to not take all that stuff personally. It’s not personal. They would do that to any mother, because mother is a bad word to a traumatized child.”