A Note to New Leaders

I am reading Jewell’s memoir, aptly titled Jewel—Never Broken.  The book is long and meandering; the writing exposes the thinking of an immensely talented, intelligent, and self-studying artist.  She looks deeply at herself with a critical but fair eye.  It's pretty great.  And I found a lot of what she says resonates with me as I think about leadership.  Yes.  Really.  

Like when Jewel explains how she grasps a motto she’ll try to live her life by:  Hard wood grows slowly. 

Jewel remembers those words as a reminder that if she wanted to grow strong and last, and not be brittle or broken easily, she had a duty to make decisions that were not just good in the moment but good for long-term growth.  She noted, “It also meant not using cynicism to cover my real feelings of anxiety of vulnerability.  In a world of cool, casual, hip, and snarky, I knew if I indulged in these feelings, I would sink to the bottom of my life like a stone.  I had to respond to my life with vulnerability, sensitivity, and honesty, because they were my only real defenses in this dangerous endeavor called surviging life.  I vowed to try to remember to take the time to grow slowly.  To take the time to make notes and study.  To stay in my body even when I was in pain.”  The motto helped “with countless…decisions that shaped not just the kind of artist but, more important, the kind of human I would become…it helped give me permission to discover and actively create who I was, not who I felt pressured to be.”

 

Man.  That stopped me right in my tracks.  This is a tough world, and living life is, in large part, surviving it.  There’s a lot of crap—far beyond the cool, casual, hip, and snarky Jewell references.  Of course Jewell is speaking in reaction to the things she deals with as a famous and independent be-true-to-thyself artist, but I think it applies in leadership as well.  There’s a lot of crap in leadership positions.  Snark is only the beginning.  That’s why new leaders sometimes feel really breakable, no matter how hard they try to hide it.  It takes time to be the type of strong leader that can’t be crushed by angry people, ridiculous policies, community and staff politics, or the emotions that come with being the one in charge of a flawed, difficult, ever-changing.

So, if you’re new, I say:  Be patient. 

You’re learning every day. 

Hard wood grows slowly. 

Home #3: I Just Want to go Home

So I'll stop yapping about it after this blog post.  I promise.

The real reason I’ve been thinking about the word "home" is this: I’ve noticed that when children are in a place of vulnerability—they’re sick, tired, scared, in trouble—they openly express that they just want to go home. 

Home can be the top floor of an apartment, or a small cabin on a country road, or a big ol' house in a crazy-rich neighborhood.  It could be a farm or a city or a nondescript suburban allotment.  Doesn't matter, really.  Home can be anything.  Regardless, it's where warmth and safety can be found.  Where you feel right when you walk home.  Where you'll recognize the smell; where you breathe into your pillowcase and the sheets feel right.  Where you feel better, somehow.

A few months ago, a third grader was sent to my office for using foul language on the playground.  He was calling people nasty names and throwing out some pretty filthy words.  He thought he'd get away with it because he was cussing in Spanish, but there were a couple of other fluent Spanish-speakers in the class, so it didn’t take long for him to get himself tattled on and sent to see me. 

But when he came in my office, his demeanor surprised me; rather than regretful or remorseful, he looked furious.  He threw his little body into the chair and crossed his arms defiantly over his chest.  His chin quivered; his face was a bright, blotchy red. 

“Um…” I looked at him.  “What's going on here?  You’re in trouble.  Why are you acting mad at me?”

“I want to go home,” he spit out.

Of course he did.

Home.

But where was home?  This boy had been in our school for less than two weeks.  I knew from his enrollment papers that he’d been born in Mexico and lived there with his parents several years before moving to India. In Dubai, he attended an international school for three years, growing fluent in both Spanish and Arabic.  "He doesn't want to be here," his father had explained when I first met them.  "When I told him we had to move to Ohio for my work, he was angry.  But he'll be okay.  In time."

Watching him now, sitting in my office, my heart melted for him as I watched him do all the things little boys do when they don’t want to cry.  He bit his lip; he glared; he squinted; he jiggled his knees; he shifted back and forth in his chair.  He glowered at me.

Yeah.  He was angry.  Really, really angry.   

I made a quick call to our Spanish interpreter, a lovely woman who understood the anxiety and fear that comes with being placed in a culture that is entirely new.  We sat down next to our new student.  We talked to him:  we told him we knew he was angry and that we understood that he was feeling alone.  I rubbed his back, feeling his  muscles slowly unclench.  He cried in a deep, gaspy way for awhile.  Finally he began to speak, switching back and forth between English and Spanish, as if he was trying to pick the best way to make us understand.

And we did.  We understood that he had no idea what he was doing in Ohio, for Heaven’s sake, and especially in the principal’s office in Ohio.  He wasn’t home.  He was where I felt at home, sure, but this wasn’t his.  He felt as far from it as one could possibly ever feel.

We didn't talk about his foul language that day.  I didn't give him consequences or ultimatums. To me, the foul-language problem was secondary to the real one—that he felt unmoored and misplaced.  So, instead, we let him talk and cry and be angry.   I hooked him up with our guidance counselor, and they spent a few hours making plans for how he would build some friendships and become part of our school community.  His teacher gave him some special jobs in the classroom and let him talk to his new classmates about his experiences in Mexico City and Dubai.  In time, he began to feel proud of where he'd come instead of angry about where he had arrived.

This is just one story of a time a kid told me he just wanted to go home.  But it happens at any other type of vulnerable time, too.  When they have a fever or when they are missing their mama or when their father has been away for awhile.  Or when they forget something important.  Or when they are in trouble, or scared, or their throat really hurts.  All those times, they say, "I want to go home."

Home can be anywhere, really, and it can mean anything.  For a little person, though, home mostly means the place they want to go when they need things to be okay.

Home #2: Why I Let the Ferns Die

I let $40 worth of hanging ferns die this spring.  On purpose. 

They were those gorgeous kind, floofy and floppy, gigantic and summery.  I loved them.  I get two of them every year and hang them on our front porch, watering them every other day or so.  They last all summer and deep into the fall, adding this great splash of deep green to the front of our house.

But this year, within a day or two of hanging them, both had become home to a big, strong, sweet nest of bird eggs.  The nests were built down in the deepest part of the fern, beneath the complicated criss-crosses of the stalky part of the plant.  The first time I went to water the plants—both of them!—I was started backwards when a mama bird came whooshing out, she herself shocked and startled. I peeked in, and there were four little eggs lying in wait.  In each fern.

So I stopped watering.   I just left the ferns alone, only peeking in two times to check on them.  The first time, the eggs had just hatched a grayish brown pile of scrawny babies, their mouths opening and closing in a silent cry.  The second time, they were plump and feathery, just a few days from learning to fly.

And the ferns?  They were decidedly dead.

My kids noticed this the other day.  “Why do those plants look so bad?” my son asked.  

I told them the story about the birds and how I’d decided it was worth replacing the ferns in order to give the birds a good home.  “When birds build a nest for their eggs, they work really, really hard to make it strong and safe,” I explained.  “It takes them days.  It's hard work. And then they lay their eggs, and then spend weeks sitting there keeping the eggs warm.  Then the eggs hatch, and the birds hustle around—for weeks, again— getting food for the baby birds until they’re big enough to figure out the learn-to-fly thing,” I said.  “I couldn’t bear to be the reason that the whole process got stalled.  That the grown birds worked that hard, or that the babies didn’t get to grow into big birds…”

My kids were quiet, thinking.

My husband chimed in, clear and succinct. “Here’s the thing.  Everything on this earth deserves a chance, at least.  A fighting chance.”

“What’s a fighting chance?”

“It means that all of us should be safe and protected by someone or something until we are big and strong enough to fight for survival on their own,” he said. 

He’d explained it better than I had.  Yes:  everything deserves a fighting chance.   And to those baby birds, their fighting chance was a place to be born, to grow, and to get the strength to fly away on their own.  A few ferns had to die a little earlier than expected, but the gift they gave—the gift of home, the gift of a fighting chance—was well worth it. 

Home #1

So…

I have been thinking a lot about home.  About what we mean—what we feel, really—when we talk about home.  About going home, being home, staying home.  Leaving home.  Missing, creating, remembering, moving past, adjusting our understanding of home. 

It’s is an enormous word—a weighted one, thick with individualized meaning, heavy with comfort and safety and, sometimes, pain.

The older I get, the more I love just being home.  This is a change back to the youngest me, the child, the little girl who loved being home.  I didn’t need to be anywhere else.  Of course I went out and about in the world and did the things people do to turn into grownups, but I felt my best when I was just home.  Before I was 18, I lived in one place—one little house on one little country road outside of one little town. 

But after high school, by my own choices and circumstances, I lived in ten different places from age 18 until 28.  A move a year, roughly.  I lived alone and I lived with roommates.  I lived in dorms, apartments, houses, and—my favorite—a rented mobile home on a rough, unkempt lot with six other mobile homes ($215 a month, thank you very much).  I even spent a few months on a ratty, smoke-scented couch, crashing the apartment of two high school buddies who had become regulars in the pub where I was a bartender.   They offered their couch, and I took it.  When I arrived the first day and knocked on their door, a black garbage bag full of clothes in my hand, I knew instantly it was a mistake.  The guys greeted me enthusiastically, albeit a bit slurred and red-eyed, and I swallowed the lump in my throat that was asking me, How did this happen?  How did your path lead to this?  I did everything I could to avoid the place, only going there to sleep, but sleep was largely elusive because of the ongoing reel of country music videos on the television and the constant smell of Budweiser and Marlboros in the air.  When I did sleep, it was only because I’d cried myself to a place of complete exhaustion. 

There.  That story just happened, didn’t it? 

Here’s the thing about home, for me: Each home has its own story, and they all come together to tell my story.  Each “home” defines a place in my life.  A mindset, really:  where my head was, and how I was figuring out my path.  Each home was a specific mark on my own timeline.  Maybe a place of a stumble, or victory, or stability.  A place of clarity; maybe a place of confusion.  I could go on and on about each of those places I’ve lived, give specific details about each front door— and how I felt each time I walked through it. 

I think most people have a complicated story to tell about home. 

I started thinking about home because I have noticed the deep meaning behind some of the most common ways we talk about home.  We have all said or heard one of these things:

I just stayed home.

I couldn’t bear to be at home.

I really want to go home.

It just feels like home.

It never felt like home. 

I’m never home.

S/he’s never home.

S/he’s always home. 

It will be good to be home.

My first home.

Our first home.

Our next home.

And so on.  Think about it.  When people use the word home, they really mean something.  They’re saying something important.  Something that should really make us stop and listen.

Next time, I’ll tell the story of one of my students, and how his request to go home stopped me cold.  

I'm Sorry

There’s this awesome scene in Parenthood where Adam tells his brother, Crosby, to just suck it up and apologize to his mother-in-law for something that had happened. 

“For what?  I didn’t do anything!”  Crosby protests.

Adam answers, “It’s just… you know what?  You’re a man.  It’s just what men do.  We apologize.  I say three ‘I’m sorry’s before I get out of bed in the morning.” 

Smart.  It’s true.  Sometimes, you just apologize. 

But Adam is wrong about the man thing.  I think it’s an everyone thing.  It’s certainly a leadership thing.  When you’re a leader, apologizing isn’t at all about if you’re right or wrong.  It’s about something simpler.  It’s the right thing to say.  I’m sorry.   Sorry for a situation that sucks.  Sorry for a bad decision on someone else’s part.  I’m sorry.  Just sorry.

Not long ago, a couple students got into some silly scuffle.  These two have been classmates for several years now, especially if you count their time together in preschool, and they are sick, sick, sick of each other.  They actively seek ways to get on one another’s nerves.  They each wish for nothing more than for the other one to get in trouble for something.  Anything.  So, on this particular day, we had yet another version of the same story that has been told between these two kids for months now:  Kid #1 took an item from Kid #2 and threw it in the trash.  Kid #1 didn’t admit it, in spite of a long and involved search for said item.  Another kid ratted out Kid #1 and the item was retrieved. Kid #1 got in trouble for being mean. I called her parents; they understood, promised to deal with it at home, everything good.

And then, with a sick feeling in my stomach, I called the mother of Kid #2.  This woman is challenging; I’ve had enough interactions with her to know it wasn’t going to be a pretty phone call.  I knew she’d be really, really pissed.  And she was, but this time, she went even farther off the reservation than I’d ever predicted she would.  She screamed at me.  Screamed.  Said she’s sick of Kid #2 picking on Kid #1, she’s sick of her kid being bullied, she’s sick of this school, she’s sick of me.  She’s sick of me putting her kid in danger (!??!), sick of me not expelling Kid #1 (!?!?!), sick of the whole *&$@%( school (!?!?!).  She said a whole bunch of other things, too—mostly about my incompetence.

 

“I’m sorry,” I said, about five hundred times.

I had nothing to be sorry for, if you got right down to it.  I wasn’t even in the building when this particular incident happened.   I’ve done everything exactly as I should have with these two kids—investigate, intervene, communicate, make a plan for going forward.  Of all things, I shouldn’t be sorry, for cryin’ out loud.

But I recognize that it’s my job to be sorry, to apologize, to recognize that this woman was frustrated and angry and needed someone who would take her fury.   I knew there was nothing I could do to make her feel better—except, maybe, apologize. 

I do it a lot, just like Adam says he does. I say I’m sorry.  Three times before getting out of bed, it seems.  And all throughout the day.  It’s what leaders do.   We be sorry. 

Sick

There's this great Minion meme that says, "Being sick is your body's way of saying you're way too awesome, and you need to slow down, so everyone else can catch up."

Not so with me.  Being sick is my body's way to tell me to freakin' stop already.  Period.

I got sick this week.  The kind of sick where my body felt like it had been in some sort of accident.  Like I'd been shoved to the ground and kicked a few times.  My muscles ached.  Little portals in my body had masses of... just... hurt.  Even my armpit felt like it had a bruise.  My armpit.

I stayed home from work Wednesday, alternately watching Netflix and trying to keep up on the endless emails that come into my work account.  I wasn't much better the next day, but I mustered my toughness and bungled my way through another day of work.  It was fine.  Not good, by any means; I felt like crap and looked even worse, and I blew my nose so many times it grew red and raw.  But I just kept telling myself I felt okay.  It was okay.  I was okay.

That night, I made dinner and we all sat down and ate, all civilized and stuff.  Afterwards, as the kids played on the trampoline, I cleaned up the mess, like I always do—it's a comforting habit, really, making my way through the lists of tasks:  I clean the dishes, store the leftovers, wipe the table and countertops, and then sweep the floors.  Except this time, as I worked, I started feeling worse and worse and worse.  About halfway through, I just started to cry.  I admonished myself several times:  Oh, stop it.  You're fine.  Why are you crying?  Stop it!  STOP IT.

But the tears kept coming, even as I picked up the broom and finished up the cleaning, even as I kept reminding myself I wasn't actually crying about anything.  And by the time I was completely done, I was so achy and cry-y I couldn't do anything except... ache and cry.

I went to our back patio, where my husband was watching our kids jump and play.

He looked at me.  A look of alarm crossed his face.  "What is it?" he asked.

I shook my head.  "I just can't," I said.

He jumped up.  "You're still sick," he said.  He took my shoulders in his hands, turning me back into the house and murmuring something about getting me to sleep right now. "I'm sorry," I said, feebly apologizing for leaving him alone with the bed-and-bath routine with the kids.  "Don't be ridiculous," he snorted. He lifted back the covers and nudged me in, pulling the blankets up around my head and tucking them around my shoulders.  I closed my eyes and just let go.  I heard other noises—there was the shake of an Advil bottle and a water bottle filled up, placed on the bedside table "just in case."  I think the kids came and kissed me goodnight.  I can't say for sure.  I was done.

And I slept.

A couple hazy days have passed.  I'm not yet feeling well, but I'm past the break-down-into-nothing stage.  I'm ready to tackle the last month of school, with all the ridiculousness and fun that comes with it.  I can do this.  I've had my shut-down; time, now, to power back up.

No. More. Decisions.

I read somewhere that the human brain only has a certain amount of energy in it.  It can be used up, so to speak.  So after a long day of work or play or conversation or whatever, the brain needs us to go to sleep so it can regenerate itself.  It's why we wake up in the morning with strength and resolve and we can make sound decisions; but it is also why, after a long day, we kind of lose ourselves.  We lose control.  And willpower.  And common sense.  Which is why evening is the time stupid decisions are made and stupid arguments happen.  'Cause our brains are all used up.

There's some real science out there explaining all of this, but I don't really want to go find it to quote it here.  So let's just say I know it's out there and I believe it.

Every Friday night, I believe it more.

Fridays exhaust me.  On Fridays, I feel like I will never, ever, ever catch up.  They make me feel like a tree that's got a whole flock of woodpeckers on it, peck-peck-pecking away at me.  Like this past Friday:  I don't even want to go into what all happened.  I can't.  It's too much.  I don't even remember it all, even.  I woke at 5 a.m. and went like gangbusters all day.  I had tough conversations.  I mediated.  I planned.  I made decision after decision after decision.  I pinch-hit and bunted and struck out, boom-boom-boom.  Kicking ass and taking names.  Except really just whirling around punching at the air and decidedly not taking names.

So when the day wound down and my husband and I met back at home with the kids, the Friday night script began.  It's the same every week.  My husband starts it off.

Want to eat out or make some dinner here? 

I don't care. 

Well, which would you prefer? 

I don't care. 

Well, if we go out, we could just walk up to Donatos and have pizza.  It would be easy. 

I don't care. 

Or I could just grill some brats and you could make some rice and a vegetable.  That would be easy, too. 

I don't care.  


You don't care?  Because, like, both are fine. 

I don't care. 

But what do you think?  You've got to think something. 

Which is when I stop whatever I am doing, look at my patient and persistent husband, and say:

I. Do. Not. Make. Decisions. On. Friday. Nights. 

And he laughs, and shakes his head, and says:

Yes, that's right.  You don't.

And then he'll make the decision.  Which is why this past Friday night, like most of the Fridays before it, we walked up the hill to our local Donatos and ate pizza.  It's what he wanted to do anyway, I don't care.  Not on Friday, I don't.  Because my brain is all used up.

I have come to adore Donatos pizza.  Its cheesy, greasy, piping-hot goodness represents a simple end to a long week and a long day.  It represents the teamwork of my family.  It represents a break from the pace of a regular week.  And most of all, it represents a decision I didn't have to make.