Right Start Blog

Grandparents & Special Friends Day 2018

By: Neil Mufson
For those unable to attend Grandparents and Specials Friends Day this year, you don't have to miss Mr. Mufson's speech.
It is always a pleasure to welcome you here to celebrate Grandparents and Special Friends Day and the precious cross-generational connection you share with our students, a link that I continue to be convinced is amongst the most special of human bonds. 

The fact is, you impart incredibly rare gifts to our kids. These gifts are not related to material things. Instead, they spring from the way you make available your authentic self, and the way you give your time and focus, to your special friend or grandchild. It can be difficult to sense the underlying value of these gifts, in our fast-paced, acquisition-focused, screen-dominated, hyper-marketed world. 

It’s easy to miss what matters most, particularly since kids generally do like stuff, at least for a while. But what creates much more lasting meaning are not the material gifts but two other precious gifts that are often overlooked but that I believe are essential to creating healthy, balanced, confident, competent, and compassionate young people. Those gifts are these:  first your presence — spelled   P - R - E - S - E - N - C - E, pure & simple — and second your genuine, authentic encouragement.

I hope you won’t mind if I talk a bit about something highly personal that has led me to want to underscore the value of presence and encouragement, these two simple but profound and potentially transformative gifts. Some of you know that the week before Christmas, my seemingly happy, cheerful, well-adjusted, well-loved 20 year old son Charlie took his own life without showing any prior signs of distress to anyone we know of.I don’t need to tell you about how devastating it has been. But I want to tell you about two things that have made a significant difference as I have begun the healing process, and they’re what I mentioned earlier: presence and encouragement.

Five days after Charlie’s death, I returned to school and spoke to our kids at our holiday assembly not because I was feeling in the holiday spirit but because first, I wanted them to know I was going to be okay and second, selfishly, because I knew seeing all of them sitting in front of me, where all of you are sitting would be helpful to me, would be balm to my soul. I knew that just their presence, just being within their auras, just their faces would matter. Similarly, the visits with friends and acquaintances which have been the most helpful have been the ones when the friends were just there with me, just present.

I’ve also realized that of the verbal or written messages people have sent, the ones that have done me the most good have been those have simply offered authentic and pure encouragement; those that acknowledge the tremendous challenge but suggest that one way or
another I possess what it will take to adjust to my new reality.

Because my main job at this school has to do with trying to create the best possible environment and culture for your grandchildren and special friends, I got to thinking about the value of these two gifts in everyday circumstances, those not tainted by tragedy, not charged by emotion or heaviness, those moments that are in actuality the main stuff of our lives; those moments John Lennon captured in his song “Beautiful Boy” when he sang, “Before you cross the street take my hand./ Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”

Your grandchildren and special friends are in the stage of their lives that can be summed as “Before they cross the street.” An incredibly powerful way you can offer them your hand, is by being present. Of course you already know this because you are here today. Every one of you has made an effort just to be present and your presence has an impact far beyond what you may suspect. Presence has to do with showing up, with expressing an interest, but mostly with genuinely being there for what comes up. That’s it.  It doesn’t imply a planned activity or a fancy destination, though you certainly can be present in such zones as well.
 
I, of course, was raised in a different Age, when change happened mostly at a pace people could absorb. There certainly were personal and societal challenges, but just as certainly there was less rushing, less anxiety, fewer means of communication and entertainment, but maybe easier means of true connection that our souls really crave.

I grew up in a northern suburb of Boston, ,and on many Sunday afternoons, my parents piled my sister and me into our mint green Buick station wagon and we went for a drive to some town or area we weren’t familiar with. As they say, the journey was the destination. By being in one space together, without the need for distractions or iPads, things would come up.

My father would share something about a project at work. He worked at a precursor to an IT company, so he always had something interesting going on. My mother would share her gardening plans or stories about her childhood with my colorful, risk-taking, and hot-tempered grandfather and my practical but salty and remarkably resourceful grandmother. I would tell about my dream of going into space, or some invention I was hoping to come up with. My sister would often talk about stuff going on with her friends. My mother would usually soak it all in and ask questions that would add depth and substance to our stories and dreams.

I don’t remember the specifics of anything we discussed. But I believe that by my parents simply being present, my sister and I knew that we mattered, that we were all connected and there for each other.  We were reassured that in that connection, our parents could discern our joys and our challenges, and we gained a certain comfort in knowing we would be sure to gain adult perspective on them, even if we questioned that perspective more and more as we grew into adolescence.
 
Another powerful way that presence made a difference in my childhood had to with visits from NY from my Uncle Sidney, who was a decade older than my father. Uncle Sidney was deaf since birth and he progressively lost his vision so that he was deaf-blind by the time I have any recollections him. Despite his challenges, Uncle Sidney had a strong presence. He had learned the manual hand alphabet to communicate when he could see and once he lost his vision, we would spell words into his hand and he could almost at once know what message we were heading toward spelling out.
Of course a lot of time with Uncle Sidney was spent in silence. He would read his braille newspapers and books, we would punctuate the silence with periodic hand conversations, and with games. When were quite young, he would pull a handkerchief from his pocket and fashion it into either a rabbit or a mouse. With either creation, he would tell silent stories about the rabbit’s or the mouse’s adventures, which always ended with the rabbit hopping down our arms to bite our fingers and the mouse getting flicked far off into the room.

When we were older, we would put into his hands scrambled letters to words. He would repeat each letter, and then unscramble them in his head and come up with the word while I could barely remember the letters we gave him, let alone manipulate them in my head. But most of the time, Uncle Sidney seemed incredibly content simply knowing we were nearby or holding one of our hands. He taught my sister and me deep lessons about patience, about human differences, the power of the mind, and how compassion and intelligence and caring and love could be communicated without speech, without complex activities, really, just by being present.

Encouragement is another powerful but overlooked source of human connection and growth. What I am talking about is genuine, sincere encouragement, not empty proclamations of  “good job” or our society’s tendency in child-rearing to heap on overly abundant praise, praise that is often offered for very little.
Goethe wrote in a letter in 1786 “Instruction does much, but encouragement is everything.” I remember that some memorable teachers in my elementary and middle school grades offered the kind of encouragement  that led me to want to push myself harder, explore deeper, and question what I thought I knew. A couple of teachers still speak to me today, both literally and figuratively, because of the unique encouragement they offered in quiet, personal moments.

This past spring break, I actually reconnected with two of my former high school teachers who were instrumental in encouraging me to start teaching after college. I hadn’t seen them for something like 35 years, but Rick and Carol had been two very hip, very attractive English teachers who had recently married and who had a following when I arrived in their elective classes as a high school junior. They manifest a passion about their subject, a deep interest in their students, a desire to make a difference, and a questioning attitude toward convention that I found appealing as a  long-haired, quietly rebellious student who fancied himself future writer and photographer.

 Rick and Carol had me to their New Hampshire farm home several times over those years. Sitting in front of their fireplace, or walking the farm, we would discuss books, they would talk about why they taught, they would critique my photography or short stories, and they encouraged me at every step of the way.

I kept up with Rick and Carol when I was in college, when I decided to major in comparative literature, and when I ultimately tried my hand at teaching. Over the next years, I kept in touch about my moves, they offered their encouragement, and they shared news of their young son, who very sadly over the years developed a number of emotional problems. I was still a young teacher and didn’t know what to do when they shared news that at age 23 he  had taken his life.

We soon lost touch and then they found me through the magic of Google, once I was already a Head of School. We exchanged occasional emails over the years but when I knew that I would be spending this spring break in the Florida town in which they lived, I reached out and we arranged to meet.

They came to the house where we were staying, and a short planned visit morphed into the hours passing very quickly. The conversation was easy, they were still attractive and mesmerizing, and eventually, of course, they did what they had done best in my early years: they offered me encouragement as they sketched out how they managed to survive their son’s death and as they expressed confidence in my ability to find happiness again.

So presence and encouragement are powerful — for children and for adults. They require focus and commitment, time and heart, but nothing fancy, nothing expensive. They’re uniquely powerful and potentially transformative gifts that touch the soul unlike anything material.
In thinking about your joining us today, I asked our children to reflect on how your presence and encouragement have made a difference in their lives. Here is some of what they said.From the first grade: “When my grandparents are around and things go wrong, they make things happy for me. “ Another six year old said, “When you don’t have anywhere to go, they take care of you.” And an older first grader summed it up by saying, “They help you to be a better person.”

A second grader said, “When my grandparents are around, they help solve problems that I get stuck on.” A third grader noted, “When I’m around my grandparents, they always know what to say and how to say it.” Another said,“My grandparents encourage me to try my best and to crack coconuts the right way.” And then this second grade made this observation about your influence: “My grandfather had some really serious surgery.  When I was around him afterwards,  I thought, wow, he is doing really good, he could do anything; and if he could do anything after all that, I thought I could do anything, too.”

A fourth grader said that her grandfather encouraged her to always show a smile. Another remarked, “My grandparents taught me how to shoot better in basketball.”A different fourth grader remembered that her special friend “taught me never to burp and hiccup at the same time because you can faint.”

Listen to theses responses they have to your presence:  “Being around them simply makes me happy.” “They give me hope.” “Every time I see them, my heart leaps with joy!” “They always show up and are always believing in me.” “My grandparents and special friends don’t make just me happy; they have the power to make everyone happy.”Another fourth grader said, “We have a tradition we share.  We go out on their dock, we lay down on our backs, and we look up at the stars.” Then this 4th grader remarked, “My grandparents have taught me so much, I have already forgotten half of what they taught me.”

A fifth grader said, by coming to Grandparents Day, “my grandparents make me feel like they are interested in what I do every day.”Another shared, “Every time I see them, they make me feel like I’m the only one there.” There were comments like these: “My special friends are the people who are happy about everything I do.” “My grandparents make me feel like I belong in the world.” “They have always been proud of me, even if I know I could do better.”And then these powerful observations from a fifth grader:  “My grandparents make me feel good inside, just like melted chocolate.  They have taught me to make sure I don’t trip on my shoelace and how to picket  a good orange.”

A sixth grader noted, “When my grandparents are around, I feel overwhelmed with happiness.” A seventh grader said, “Being around my grandparents lets me see new things about myself that I may not have known.” An 8th grader said, “My grandparents have helped me learn to be optimistic and to have fun every chance you get because you never know what will happen."

And finally, this piece of sixth grade wisdom:  “When I am with my grandparents, they help me realize how much love can be in just one cookie.”
Thank you for your presence today and always, and for all you do to encourage your grandchild or special friend. 
 
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