How to Speak at Chapel: A Guide for Thacher Parents
When Michael asked me if I’d speak today, his methods of persuasion included flattering me by suggesting that I, after sending three children to Thacher and putting in 10 years as a Thacher parent, might have learned something, that I might have a unique perspective to share with you.
I’m not sure I do. Instead, I thought I’d share my thoughts in the form of a template for those of you unable to think quickly enough to weasel your way out should you be asked to give a chapel talk during Big Gymkhana Family Weekend.
This approach is also in line with my role at Thacher. In addition to putting out a magazine twice a year and helping to keep the website full of news and photos, my job includes ensuring that there is some overall consistency to Thacher communications, which includes setting the guidelines for Thacher editorial style. It’s my job to set policy on burning questions like, do we or don’t we use an Oxford comma? One or two spaces between sentences?
I sense that many of you are now excited at the prospect of hearing me speak at length about punctuation. I’m sorry to disappoint you. However, if you must know, our policy at Thacher is to use the oxford comma and to place only one space between sentences.
What I am going to do this morning is offer you helpful advice should you ever find yourself in my shoes. So here goes...
Guideline 1: Offer Some Helpful Advice
You might want to talk about the ways parents can get involved by volunteering. Or you could give practical advice about how to navigate events like this weekend, such as “always go the the chapel services. They are awesome.” Personally, I wouldn’t say that, as it only puts more pressure on me to actually be part of that awesomeness, and anyway, I would only be preaching to the choir. Literally, to the choir. They are sitting right here.
By the way, did you know the word “literally” is now in Merriam Webster defined as meaning “figuratively”? Mr. Snyder told me that. “Literally now means “figuratively.” Which makes my head spin. Figuratively.
Ok...
Guideline 2: Tell Us About Your Family
We want to learn a little about you, which can be otherwise difficult to accomplish during these busy weekends. So, tell us about your kids.
Here, for example, is what I would say:
Douglas, who graduated in 2008 is the one who paved the way to Thacher for our family. It was only after his freshman year that I realized I’d better get a job here before his younger siblings followed. Three years later, Carson, my second son, joined his brother and it was wonderful for us to watch Douglas, the senior, show his freshman brother the ropes. After three more years, along came Beatrice, who is a senior now. With very different temperaments, strengths, and interests, my kids took their own distinct paths through Thacher, but were alike in finding the academics alternately challenging and inspiring, and in developing powerful relationships with peers, teachers, and coaches.
I have one more child whose name doesn’t get printed on my badge or in the progam. Alexandra, my eldest, has all the curiosity, intelligence, and grit of her Toad siblings. She is wise beyond her years, devoted to helping and healing others, and she didn’t even go to Thacher!
I bet a lot of you know people like that. Some of them may even be your children. It takes nothing away from Thacher to admit it. It’s good for us to be reminded that there are many paths to these virtues, and they don’t exclusively run through our campus.
Guideline 3: Tell Us About Your Experience as a Thacher Parent
Even if, like me, you have learned little from your experience, share it anyway.
When we enter a new community, it is easy to imagine ourselves as outsiders, because... we are outsiders, or we wouldn’t be entering. When we joined the Thacher community ten years ago, my wife, Eleanor, and I had that feeling. Who were we going to sit with at the class barbeque? Are all these folks from San Francisco related? That was before our parent groups were as active as they are today, before the class dinners, etc. that have helped bring parents together. Even with those things, however, the Thacher community of parents can be a hard one to feel you have successfully joined. Sometimes it is awkward to know where to begin.
So, as one is inclined to do when making polite conversation, we fall back upon the obvious and the easy. You would be forgiven, for example, if you were to use your chapel talk to say something along the lines of, “why didn’t my parents send me here?” Or , “what does it take for a person of my age to enroll”? However, if you do choose to put it that way, it’s better to leave it at that and quickly move on rather than allow your audience time to imagine how they would feel about their child rooming with a 50-year-old who has gone back to high school because they have a weakness for soft serve ice cream and the scent of orange blossoms.
When it comes to my experience as a Thacher parent, I feel like I’m in kind of an unusual situation. My kids are day students and, like them, I travel to campus every day. I know what you are thinking, but I want to make it clear that I’m no helicopter parent. I stay close enough to monitor Beatrice on foot. I’m told the term for that kind of parent is “birkenstalker.”
I say that my situation is a little unusual, but I think many if not most of you would say the same. There is no template to being a Thacher parent...or guardian--and this has been my key to realizing that our community of families lacks the intimidating inside I once imagined. Sure, some among us went to Thacher, most of us didn’t. Some went to boarding school, but a lot of us went to public school. Some can easily show up to see a performance or sporting event. Some cannot. We proudly represent many configurations of family, and there are many more ways than these that we are not a monolithic or homogenous group. In other words, each of us begins our journey into the Thacher community from a different place. And while some of these differences are evident, many are not. I also think it is fair to say that some of these journeys are expected to cover greater distances. Yet, to the extent that we are now Thacher parents, we all have made the journey, even if it isn’t always easy to feel we have arrived. But here we all are anyway, some of us, perhaps with more blisters than others. My point is that there is no right way to be a Thacher family, no mold to fit.
I suppose I’m more attuned to this last topic because of the way our family has changed over the time I’ve been a Thacher parent. When Douglas came to Thacher, we were a family of six...mom, dad, and four kids. When Douglas graduated, we were all there, even though Eleanor had lost her hair to cancer treatments at that point. Two years later, Bea was admitted to Thacher, and Eleanor was running out of options. “I can’t wait to meet your horse,” she told Bea. By the time Bea started Thacher a few months later, I was cooking for three: Bea, Carson, and me.
And Bea was riding Dot, who Carson had ridden. Turned out that Eleanor had met Bea’s horse after all.
A year later, Carson was off to college and Bea was stuck with me. We felt like a very different family. Again. How lucky we were to have had Thacher in the mix as we worked through each of these chapters. And how lucky I have been to have shared these last three years with Beatrice.
I have to admit that I allowed my new status as a single parent to make me feel a bit on the outside of things, and it has taken a lot of getting used to. But I also recognize that, to the extent that I thought of our family as atypical, and allowed that thought to prevent me from feeling that we fully belonged, I was foreclosing on our chances of actually experiencing the sense of belonging that seems so strong among the students. So how do our children overcome that?
For one thing, they go through the bonding experiences of camping and the horse program and athletics and academics and performances, where they are repeatedly stretched and challenged, where they learn to care for and to be cared for by others. For the most part, we parents have not had that shared experience. Neither have most of us allowed ourselves to be pushed beyond our comfort zones to the degree that our children have. Not a bad example to follow. Perhaps if we did, we would realize what many of us already actually sense, which is that we are different from one another, but alike enough in our differences in all the ways that can make for a rich and vibrant community, one in which we all might feel we truly belong.
But here I need to insert an important caveat. So far I’ve been talking about ways parents can find a stronger sense of belonging within the Thacher community. But that’s only good up to a point. Michael Mulligan was recently published on the Huffington Post, and what he said reminds me of another thing I’ve learned here. Michael’s piece was called What Our Kids Could Figure Out -- If We Could Get Out of the Way. The post is specific to sports, and how today’s over-programmed athletics have sacrificed a lot of the essential value of the sandlot, where kids made their own fun, and learned how to organize and referee their own games. But the same message could be applied to almost every aspect of teenage development: parents do better when they give their kids what they need and then get out of the way.
My own scientific study confirms it. Eleanor and I always thought that we became better parents with each successive child. Not so much because we were learning anything, but because we were being outnumbered and worn down, we went from double teaming, to man-to-man, to zone, to I thought you had Bea? And our outcomes gradually improved--and Beatrice is the best evidence of that.
Our kids figure out a lot more when we can stay out of the way.
Here’s the deal. As a Thacher parent you will sometimes have the feeling that you are doing it wrong. You may feel unsure about your place in this community, and unsure about how much rein to offer your child. In other words, it’s pretty much like being any other kind of parent. And it’s not a bad problem to have.
Guideline 4: Express Gratitude
There was a whole other section I wrote on expressing gratitude, but this is already too long. However, I don’t want to miss this public opportunity to express my gratitude for the sacrifice of all the parents who send their kids here, because not only is it inherently satisfying to see so many people make such a generous sacrifice for such a good reason, but, selfishly for me, your sacrifices have granted me the opportunity to share the campus with your amazing children, to see them grow, and work hard, and flourish, to see your children befriend, and support, and mentor my children… Thank you for the opportunity to work with them on their senior exhibitions, to spend weeks with them in the wilderness, and to toss the frisbee with them now and then.
While we are on gratitude, it’s never a bad time to acknowledge mothers, but today especially I am grateful to mothers. To all you children of mothers out there, I say hug ‘em if you got ‘em.
But the most powerful sense of gratitude I feel today, nearing the end of my tenure as a Thacher parent, is directed toward my colleagues for giving--that is literally giving--my children a precious experience-- three distinct and precious experiences--for being their teachers, coaches, mentors, confidantes, and friends. To you, I say thank you for knowing my children, for caring so deeply about them, for taking the time to appreciate them in ways haven’t, for stretching them in ways I couldn’t or wouldn’t, for giving them a second or third opinion when my opinion was insufficient,...and for lots of other gifts I don’t even know about because sometimes I manage to follow my own advice and get out of your way.
And thank you to all of you who work here behind the scenes to provide all the resources we need to keep this operation running: this campus, its creatures, our meals, our funding, class after class of new Toads. Though you receive less fanfare and recognition, my family could not have had the experience we have had without your efforts. So I thank you too.
Well, instead of a unique perspective, I have provided a template, which is literally the opposite of a unique perspective. But I also hope I’ve persuaded you that there is no template to being a Thacher family or a Thacher parent. And if there is any advice in this, it is to remember that our children didn’t find their places here without a fair amount of risk taking and a fair amount of trust in the process. And that the best that each of us can do is to cover the distance from where we began to where we are headed with even a fraction of that openness to risk. And a fraction of that trust. So my advice is that you come as you are, knowing that our community is richer for all of our differences, and that our community only happens to the extent that we are willing to share our stories. And if we could just find five minutes between one activity and the next, one of us might even ask you to share yours.
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