Luka hesitated. “I don’t know . . .” he said.
“Just go in and whoever strikes you, whoever stands out to you, just go and hand this money to them. But before you go, I need you to remember something important. Just because we are lucky enough to have a laundry machine in our home right now does not make you superior to someone who doesn’t. Fortunes change all the time, but every human life has the same value—always. So whoever you give these coins to, you look that person in the eye the way you look at your friends, the way you look at me, the way you want to be looked at—with respect, as an equal. Got it?” Luka nodded, took a deep breath, and hopped out of the car.
Inside the laundromat, he saw a woman struggling with the coin machine. It kept spitting her dollar bills back out and she seemed frustrated. He walked over to her, stretched out his hand filled with the quarters, and said, “This is for you.” She looked up at him, confused.
“What?”
“This is for you.”
“But why?” she asked.
He looked back at me, and I gave him the nod—go ahead, just give it to her.
“My mom and I really want you to have this. For no reason. We just want you to have it.”
The woman’s eyes welled up with tears, and I saw Luka’s face soften again. A small act of kindness could make a big difference in someone’s day.
He got back in the car, and as we were driving away, I kept thinking, Okay, we paid for somebody’s dinner and we paid for somebody’s laundry. But I want to teach my kids that kindness and thoughtfulness don’t require money. I want them to know that you don’t have to have a lot to give a lot. We drove around and around until we noticed a store parking lot full of scattered carts. (Because, apparently, people are just too busy to take the necessary ten seconds to return their carts to the designated spot.) I parked the car and said, “This is our next mission. We’re going to clean up this lot!”
Luka protested. “But, Mom, that’s somebody’s job. Somebody gets paid to do that!”
“That’s fine. We’re just going to help them out. If you had a job, wouldn’t you love it if someone randomly showed up to make your day a little easier? Maybe that person would normally have to stay and work late, and maybe now they’ll get to go home a little earlier.”
We got out of the car and returned every cart—about two dozen of them. Right as we were finishing up, a kid who didn’t look much older than Luka came out of the store, saw the pristine parking lot, and said, “Wow. I was going to have to put all those carts back tonight, and it’s my least favorite part of my job. I can’t believe you guys just did this! Thank you so much.”
This game is now on regular rotation in our family’s activities, and not just with the kids. Sometimes my husband and I do it on a date night. There’s so much in this smartphone-centric world that nudges us further and further into self-absorption. I want to raise my children to notice the world and the people around them and consider how the way they move through their lives has the power to make other people’s lives better or worse. Beyond just teaching reactionary kindness, beyond teaching my kids to help others who ask, I want to teach my kids to actively look for those who are hurting, those who are in need.
Sometimes real help can be as simple as a kind word. Or letting someone go ahead of us in line, or walking by a meter that’s about to expire and throwing some change in, or writing a letter to a former teacher who made a difference in our life. Sometimes it’s just looking someone in the eye when they’re sitting on the street, somebody who feels alone and isolated, who is treated like they are not so much a person as an unsavory obstacle.
Did our random acts of kindness cure my teenager of his self-absorption? No. Did it make me immune to self-absorption? Of course not. We will always struggle to balance caring for others with focusing on ourselves. Our own problems will still seduce us from time to time, but embracing creative ways to yank the gaze from our own navels and redirect our eyeballs outward moves us toward the people we aspire to be. Doing one sit-up won’t give me six-pack abs (boo! hiss!), so our empathy workout can’t be just a onetime thing either. We must make empathy practice part of our daily lives.
Last year, I got to work with Andre Agassi, which was one of those pinch-me moments and still feels like an insane thing to be able to say. In addition to being a world-famous tennis legend, Andre is also a dad. As we were chatting about our families, we got to talking about parenting teenagers and he said something that really stuck with me: “We raise our children for about fourteen years, and then we just mitigate risk.”
We only have a dozen or so years to instill in our children the core values we hope will guide them through the rest of their lives. After that, our influence wanes and their independence blossoms. We never really ever stop parenting, but our years of intense influence eventually fade, kind of like how our body’s ability to quickly metabolize desserts fades once we hit middle age (P.S. still very pissed about this). Knowing that it’s natural for our power and influence to diminish doesn’t necessarily make the transition any easier, especially when a teenager stretching their wings can often feel more like someone just whacking you in the face repeatedly.
Sometimes I think of my son Luka as wearing a mask: a mask made of hormones, social pressures, and stress instead of papier-mâché, paint, and string. I have to trust that the son I raised is still there underneath, and that, eventually, the mask will come off and I’ll get to look at the face of the man I raised. In the meantime, I take comfort in the little flashes I see of the boy who once gave a girl a bracelet just to be kind, and try to remember how very difficult it is to walk in a sixteen-year-old’s shoes.
Fifteen
Kids First, Ego Last
My ex-husband slept over. Then, in the morning, my current husband and my ex chatted in the kitchen about football and how equally awful their teams were. As we prepared for breakfast, Ari chased my ex with a toy leaf blower while Philip helped Matea put the presents she made for everyone under the tree. Luka was back and forth between both men, debating Nirvana versus Pearl Jam. It was Christmas morning, and if aliens had stopped by my house for a visit, they would have thought that postdivorce parenting here on earth is a piece of cake.
Postdivorce coparenting is not a piece of cake, though. It’s a large, week-old, seven-layer bean dip made of complications, stress, disagreements, bitterness, scheduling conflicts, compromises, and crap. Divorce sucks. When I left my first marriage, things were ugly. I was bitter; he was bitter. I was hurt; he was hurt. Finding my voice in the middle of that tornado was excruciating. But ending the marriage wasn’t anywhere nearly as hard as figuring out how to coparent after our divorce.
Although it seemed impossible at first, I was committed to giving my kids the best possible “growing up with divorced parents” scenario. Before the divorce was finalized, but after we were separated, my ex would drop by to pick up the kids for the weekend. We wouldn’t say a word to each other. Not one word. It was as if we both knew that if we even dared to open our mouths, something ugly was bound to come out.