When We Stop Believing

 

As I sit to write this latest blog post, all is finally quiet in the Hughes house. Well, as quiet as is possible with four kids, two dogs, and two in-laws in a pear tree. It’s Christmas evening, so all the kids are busy with their new presents. The adults are slowly passing out from the exhaustion of getting ready for today. As parents, we spend far too much time worrying about making everything perfect even though perfection is an impossible concept to reach.

Christmas isn’t the only time, we as parents, do everything we can to give our children the best.  Maybe it’s driving them to the seemingly endless list of activities. Some of the them they ask us to take them to, while others we get them involved without any expressed interest on their part. We want to give them as many opportunities as possible to find their likes and dislikes. Other times, we try to protect our little ones from hurt and even disappointment.

As parents, we carry on traditions passed down from our parents, religion, or society. If you are reading this around your child, now might be the time to make sure they are not reading along with you.  Warning…Spoilers ahead! Some of those traditions involve taking on the duties of magical creatures like the Tooth Fairy, Easter Bunny, and ole Saint Nick. From the time we discover Santa and his friends aren’t “real”, the holidays seem to lose some of their magic. But when we have our first child, the holidays come with a greater importance.  We now get to be the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy. No one ever tells you how to do so or what to do, but the magic seems to come back when we now can see it through the eyes of our children. We want to preserve their innocence and the feeling of joy we get from seeing their smiling faces as long as we possibly can. Time passes ever so quickly.

This week I experienced a loss of some of that joy.  A few days ago, I walked into my oldest daughter’s room, Jenna.  She was talking with her older and only brother, Evan. You know that gut feeling you get when your children suddenly get quiet and seem to be up to something?  Well, that happened right then.  Of course, they said they weren’t doing anything, but a parent knows when there is a disturbance in the Force. The next day, I found out what caused the disturbance.  They were talking through how there could not possibly a Santa Claus. My son used his new found middle school logic and maturity while Jenna used her personal skills to deduce that Mom always changes the subject when asked about Santa, the Tooth Fairy, etc. She also let me know that she knew the Tooth Fairy wasn’t real for a long time, since she was nine. She turns 11 in February 😊 While she was excited to help keep the secret and move the Elf (thank you for wanting to move the evil Elf!) for her younger sisters, I could see some of that innocence leave my son. Man, it did not feel good. We knew this would happen someday. Well, that and the hair growing on his upper lip and the deepening voice have been recent other clues. But it’s still a gut punch to realize your first born is no longer a little boy. 

The recent events caused me to reflect on what it means to believe in Santa and other traditions. It led me to think about how we don’t have to stop believing in childhood experiences as our own children get older or as we slowly turn gray. That the traditions we experienced and now pass onto all of our children are truly about hope. Hope for the a better tomorrow. Hope for their future and ours. It’s the same kind of hope that has kept educators going during tough times in the classroom and especially during the pandemic.  I’m not saying that as educators, we must believe in Santa or other fictional characters. What we need to continue believing in is the innocence of childhood, hope for their future and our role in creating smile generating learning experiences.

Tell Me Your Story

 

Have you ever met someone that tells a good story? As they tell the story, you are just pulled in and can imagine being there in the middle of it all? Sometimes the story is funny, while at other times it’s filled with challenges and tragic events. We all might not be gifted storytellers, but every single one of us has a story to tell that deserves to be heard.

As educators, part of our job is to tell stories. Some of us do this in the classic way of weaving together historical events to help students better understand what and why things happened the way they did. Other teachers use the written word through the perspective of various authors, past and current, to provide context that can be factual or fictional. As a biology and chemistry teacher, my goal was to tell a story by leaving out key bits of information. Missing information requires students to follow a path of scientific discovery to formulate a hypothesis and then conduct research to determine the most likely reasons why things happen the way they do. The same process can be applied when assisting students to uncover their own feelings and stories.

One of the most significant tasks for every educator is building a connection with their student while helping them to uncover, understand, and appreciate their own stories. While we might experience some similar events during our lifetimes, each of us has our own unique story. As human beings, our brains evolved to look for patterns. The concept of “average”, or a single typical example representing the whole, comes from our need to identify patterns, even if they are wrong. This concept seems even more prevalent today. If someone falls on either side of debate, they are either a Republican or a Democrat or pro-this and anti-that. Once they are categorized as one party or the other, far too many of us assume that everyone in that party thinks and believes the same thing. Every person put into a pattern grouping is the exact same despite their inherent differences and personal stories.

As someone who grew up in a rural farming community in Western New York, almost everything was homogenized, whether we realized it or not. Only after being exposed to the greater world, did I begin to truly realize how different each of our experiences can be. Differences from one community to another, from one neighborhood to another, and one person to another provide us with much needed varied perspectives and understanding. These perspectives come from the different stories each of us live. Some of the components in our stories will be similar, even when we come from very different places, geographically and culturally. The challenge is to listen and truly hear the stories of those with different lived experiences, without being dismissive, even if we may not agree with some of their perspectives, opinions, or ideas.

When we don’t acknowledge the stories of others, we do irreparable harm to not only the people who are sharing them, but ourselves. How can we truly understand ourselves if we fail to recognize the stories of others? By failing to do so, we further isolate ourselves from other perspectives, which in turn, reaffirms the beliefs and ideas of the circle we most often tread. The concept of isolation in this context was a powerful realization for me. I have Dr. Marck Abraham to thank for that. I not only consider Dr. Abraham a colleague on a shared mission of making this world a better place, but also a friend. We may come from very different lived experiences, but the passion we share binds us together. By actively working to break down real and self-created barriers to our isolation, we can begin to empathetically listen to each other’s stories without looking to fix others. If we can open our ears, minds, and hearts to others it means we are willing to affirm their truths thereby providing a far richer story for all of us to share as one people.

Yes, Thankfulness is a Real Word

 

It’s hard not to think of this time of year as the in-between time. The Thanksgiving holiday is behind us with Christmas, Kwanzaa and Hannukah starting or about to very soon, quickly followed by a New Year. As a Dad to four children, it feels like there is never enough time to do everything that needs to be done during the holiday season. Time to pull the decorations out of the attic, check the lights, put up the tree, get the kids to please finish their lists for Santa, shopping, and baking (well the last two are helping hide the gifts and tasting the cookies more than anything else) but you get the idea. We hope that we can do everything to make it through the holidays just to maybe get a breather. Do we ever truly take time to just relax and take a deep breath?

This season causes so many of us to lose a part of our minds. There’s the crush of Black Friday, even though the pandemic seemed to lessen the normal rush and battles seen on the local news. The issues with the supply chain have us nervous that we won’t be able to get the exact gifts our loved ones really want. Despite record job growth and low unemployment, rising prices have us all feeling worried. Then add on top of all that, the latest news about a new COVID variant, it’s no wonder we all feel more stressed than ever.

All of this got me thinking about what is means to be grateful. As defined by the Oxford dictionary, grateful is an adjective, whether feeling or showing an appreciation of kindness. To be grateful, there must be a corresponding act from someone else. In other words, we can’t truly be grateful unless someone else gives us a reason to through their actions. This left me a bit complexed. Growing up, I always heard from adults, teachers, my church, and others that you should be grateful for what you have. By definition, the well-meaning push for us to show gratefulness, would be wrong as it requires us to respond or rely on others in order to be grateful.

I’ve spent quite a bit of my time recently reading about mindfulness, well-being, and our connection to others. From a biological perspective, human beings need to feel connected to others despite what Spock or Sheldon Cooper might say. The problem arises when we rely on connections to be happy. All of us have experienced what it feels like to be in a toxic relationship whether with a friend, significant other or family. If so much of our happiness relies on the connection to others, even those that aren’t good for our overall well-being, how can we also rely on others to be grateful? This would mean our personal mental health also relies on others.

I believe there is a much better way. Yes, we should be grateful but why can’t we focus on thankfulness? Before you ask, I did check to see if thankfulness was a real word as it just sounds wrong because we don’t use it. We tend to use gratefulness instead. So, what is the difference? While the feeling of being grateful requires someone or something outside us to trigger it, thankfulness is an act we initiate. We can exhibit thankfulness anytime we want instead of waiting for an outside stimulus. If we think about it long enough, wouldn’t our daily interactions and those around us be so much better if we all began with a thankful mindset? With stores advertising and stocking Christmas items before Halloween was even over, it’s no wonder that our hearts and minds are displaced. We are far too focused outwardly, on the consumerism and politics that surround us, instead of being thankful for being who we are and having connections with others around us. Maybe if we all started with thankfulness, much of the stress, trials, and tribulations we all allow ourselves to experience so readily would matter less. We and our children would be better for it.