Just before Christmas, my friend, Marian, was really ill. Hearing that she was feeling worse one night, I emailed her; my message basically implored her to call her doctor right then. She ended up in the ER and was admitted that night (she’s fine, now). As a firstborn, and fourteen years into being a parent, I am not shy in a situation like that. I’m actually a person who’s quite ready with ideas and game to brainstorm, a networker, what Malcolm Gladwell in his book The Tipping Point would describe as a “hub” personality, a connector.
Being sick right around Christmas, many friends of my friend were out of town. I did the smallest thing for her: added her list to mine at the co-op that holiday weekend. That’s an easy favor to do for a friend.
In that same favor-for-a-friend spirit, over the past weeks, after the December 27th arsons left a number of people without homes, my little town sprung into action, raising over $20,000 almost without lifting a finger. There are more benefits to come. The outpouring offered much more than physical and fiscal assistance. The cascade of efforts has lifted their spirits—and frankly, the community’s spirits—in a kind of intangible, immeasurable, immutable way. Since the earthquakes in Haiti, there has been an astonishing outpouring of support, from school children’s fundraisers to small business’ fundraisers (my new friend, Lynne Banach, is one such business owner; her company, Sakura Bloom, is donating half its proceeds for a couple of days, as is another small company, Baby Hawk). A James Taylor benefit concert at the Mahaiwe Center in Great Barrington was announced and like wildfire, tickets to one and then a second show sold out, and the concerts will raise at least $450,000.
From the largest gifts to the smallest gestures, when you can step back and really appreciate the power of what my kids’ preschool calls “Helping Hands,” you will find a certain faith restored in humanity, I kid you not. Introducing the concept to the three year-olds, each child receives construction paper cutouts of hands to bring home and on each hand the family writes a way that the child has been a “Helping Hand.”
I know it sounds so infinitesimally tiny in the scheme of a world that needs so much, but for me, as a parent, this classroom exercise acted like a really fruitful seed, to see that I could actually teach—encourage, cajole, model, take your pick—my kids to become helpers and what’s more, to see themselves as helpers. (While I can’t say that giving a family a baby is the most efficient way to encourage the older kids to evolve into more responsible roles, there’s no question that each of the bigger three—five, nine and twelve years their sister’s elder—have had to exercise their helping hands since their sister’s arrival, a kind of unanticipated boon to the whole big family equation.)
What’s harder than giving to a friend or a cause sometimes is remaining generous when the person who needs your help is closest to you. There are myriad reasons that this kind of giving—this kind of presence—is so much harder. I’m reminded of how the parents whose kids I cared for as a babysitting teen told my mother how polite and helpful I was and she let her jaw drop in response. Suffice to say I wasn’t always polite and helpful at home!
I had a mini-reminder of this just last night, when my very tired, somewhat pathetic (at that particular moment) sixth grader son, who has been resisting the poetry homework assignment, asked me to be his homework scribe. He didn’t ask, he kind of moaned the request. (Important contextual note: he had returned from a full afternoon of the school’s wonderful ski program at Berkshire East and was exhausted; having balked at the idea of skiing this year (photo, his first year skiing), he—and his parents—was delighted to discover that he loved skiing, and even made a breakthrough—parallel turns, baby—so I was a little more forgiving of this whiny tone than usual. It was also the reason I agreed to do so even though I was really, really hungry for dinner.)
Having spent a great deal of elementary school homework hours assisting Lucien (with writing assignments, he’s had a better grasp on math than his mama starting when he was about five), one of the goals for Lucien (and his mama) this year has been to encourage and support him in being more independent about doing his work. He put in a great deal of effort toward improved keyboarding skills this autumn (an afterschool tutorial with some other sixth graders, led by their wonderful computer teacher, Mary Ann Dassatti). And, overwhelmingly, he’s rising to the occasion of writing assignments.
It’s also true that growth—including as a student—isn’t linear and Lucien is flailing just a tiny bit at this particular moment (I’m guessing it’s the loss of the much loved graduate student teaching fellow from first semester, G-Roz, as they call him, Rozzy, you get the idea, a cool young man). Such small changes as a three-day weekend or finishing a big project can derail Lucien. He’s benefitting from strong leadership in the form of his unflagging and vibrant teacher, Tom Weiner, and so the derailments are relatively small and Lucien’s recovery is swifter and more graceful than ever. If I were to characterize this year, he bobbles but he tends not to wipe out.
Still, when you’re hungry and you have to read to a younger child still and your ‘tween—who has mastered the art of melding pathetic with an acid, near-adolescent tone, if you can even imagine such a thing—the bobble feels oppressive nonetheless.
So, there we were with me typing out some answers that definitely answered the questions but seemed somewhat curt. I tried to draw him out and predictably he protested. I had one of those shining parental moments of calm and I stopped making any suggestions and simply typed. In truth, he hadn’t asked me to help him do the assignment. In truth, sometimes, the best thing you can do for someone is just help with the task at hand, the thing you’ve been asked to do and that you’ve agreed to do. I am not sure why or how I saw that—we’ve tussled over this exact thing before—but I did. Probably, my hunger informed my silence!
He had to answer some questions about an Emily Dickinson poem involving death and a flower. He observed: The sun and God might accept death because it is a natural part of life. Humans sometimes don't view death as part of life. And then he had to answer a question about some strategies for reading poetry. Here’s his response: I learned that to understand a poem you need to understand what all the words and connotations and denotations mean and I thoroughly disagree with this. I think you can figure this out as you go along. Poems should be read beginning to end without pauses to look up words. Right when you hear a word, you make connotations even if you've never heard the word before and those connotations might go away if you look all the words up in a dictionary. If people all interpret poems in the same way, then that is taking away a lot of pleasure of reading poetry. It took until the last sections, but there were some thoughtful answers (or so they seemed to me).
As my kids get older, I will again and again be asked to help with something specific. The hard part will be to do so with a free spirit, to act as a good sous-chef, because my kids will create their own dishes, first in our kitchen and later in theirs. Raising money for Haiti or whatever like that is probably way easier. I’m going to give myself that image of the construction paper hand and try—when I’m being asked to do one task and agree to do that—to envision writing down what I did across the palm. Like last night, when the beautiful insights rolled off Lucien’s tongue, I am looking forward to what I’m going to learn, even if the getting there promises to be challenging at times—complete with bobbles and wobbles and complete wipe-outs—for us all.
