Coming Home

The weekend before BGA’s homecoming festivities, we played host to a community event—the Wounded Warriors Soldier Ride.  Many of you have probably heard or read about this bicycle ride that raises money for the Wounded Warrior project and gives veterans and their friends and family the opportunity to ride through beautiful parts of Williamson County.  The nature of their war injuries requires many of these veterans to use modified bikes.  Throughout the ride, the veterans are greeted with demonstrations of patriotism and support.  The event itself was touching—in part because there have been so many BGA alumni over the years who have served in our armed forces, including Trey Ponder '87, who lost his life in Afghanistan.  The patriotism was made more poignant by the tenth anniversary of 9/11.  As Dana, Claire, my in-laws and I witnessed this moving scene of the race’s start, I reflected on some of the war books that I have read and taught over the years: Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, and Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls.  Homer also comes to mind. . . but not The Iliad, the obvious epic poem about war.  Rather, the book I prefer about war is The Odyssey, and I have been thinking about the poem during the Soldier Ride and the past week.

        
       The theme of the challenges of the return of brave warriors to a culture that is ill-prepared to understand their experiences is a humbling one for any of us who have not served in the military.  I was fascinated to hear recently that a clinical psychiatrist and a winner of a MacArthur genius grant, Dr. Jonathan Shay, has written on his use of The Odyssey as a point of conversation and therapy for returning veterans. As one interview noted:

"One of the things they (veterans) appreciate," Shay says, "is the sense that they're part of a long historical context — that they are not personally deficient for having become injured in war."

Shay doesn't like the clinical term "post traumatic stress disorder." He thinks there's a stigma to it. So he speaks instead of "psychological injury" — to make it equal to any physical injury caused by a bullet or a bomb.

"There is a cultural river that says, 'Oh, war will only make you better, if you got the right stuff.' Well, that may be true of some people, but it's certainly not true of many who are badly hurt by it," says Shay.

       In the character of Odysseus, a family man who faced a post-war journey of twenty years back to his home in Ithaca, Shay sees an analogy to many veterans.  Odysseus, admittedly, suffers not only from bad luck and the vengeance of the gods but also from his own failures of character.  Yet, the tale of such an arduous homecoming and the misunderstanding of civilians resonates with veterans, Shay says.  In fact, Shay has written two books dealing with connections to these Greek epics, Achilles in Vietnam and Odysseus in America.

       As we hosted the ride we were, of course, simultaneously preparing the campus for a very different type of homecoming—the return of our alumni this past weekend.  Dana and I hosted a dinner for a large group of alumni who are part of the Blue and Gold society—alumni who graduated from BGA more than fifty years ago, when it was an all male boarding and day school.  Two of the alumni at my table graduated in 1945 and were in basic training when World War II ended.  In hearing the stories of those men--twin brothers--about their experiences, I was reminded about the other facet of military experience, the close bonds that Shakespeare recognized in the famous “band of brothers” speech.  These alumni went through strong shaping experiences during their time at BGA, and it was touching to hear them recount their memories.  I love the humor and candor with which they and other alumni described these experiences.  The tone of nostalgia was often wistful and sometimes accompanied by tears.

       To these alumni, and especially to the veterans who visited our campus for the ride, I wish support and welcome, understanding and appreciation.  Unlike Odysseus, I hope that they encounter smooth seas and safe harbor in their coming home.  I hope they find a sympathetic audience that listens and tries to understand their tales.  We are proud of both groups and feel privileged in our contact with them. 

Skinned knees

                 Welcome to a new blog that I will be writing from time to time to communicate about events at BGA, reflect on readings, and recognize milestones.  There is much to be celebrated and communicated about the first few weeks of the school year, from the opening of the Mary Campbell Visual Arts Center to the fall athletic season to the impressive number of National Merit Semifinalists (six)—an unusually large number for BGA and above nearly all of our peer schools.

                   I thought I would open this blog in a different way, though, by reflecting on a book I read this summer and the opening of school for our three-year-old daughter, Claire.  Wendy Mogel’s book, Blessings of A Skinned Knee, has received a lot of press and accolades for its combination of practical advice, universal wisdom, and gentle humor.  Mogel combines Talmudic teachings and excerpts from the Torah in keeping with her Jewish faith, as well as personal stories and interviews.  The primary theme of the book is that as a culture we risk undermining the resiliency in our children and insulating them from the normal disappointments and failures that accompany growth.  Certainly, in our work with parents in a kindergarten through twelfth grade school, we see the potential results of this tendency.  Mogel cites testimony from college administrators, for example, who point out that there is a rising number of young people who return home during the first semester of college because they are not equipped to live and work independently in that environment.  College deans use the image of “teacups” to describe these incoming students, who are so overprotected and fragile that they tend to crack and break very easily.

                 As parents of a young child my wife, Dana, and I have more than an academic interest in this subject.  On almost a daily basis, we, too, are negotiating the boundaries and trying to find the balance between allowing our young people the freedom to struggle, take risks, sometimes fail, suffer appropriate consequences, learn coping skills, and, at the same time, protecting them from real dangers and risks, providing needed support, offering important advice and counsel.  Mogel reminds us:

Your child is not your masterpiece. According to Jewish thought, your child is not even truly “yours.” In Hebrew there is no verb for possession; the expression we translate as “to have,” yesh li, actually means “it is there for me” or “there is for me.” Although nothing belongs to us, God has made everything available on loan and has invited us to borrow it to further the purpose of holiness. This includes our children. They are a precious loan, and each one has a unique path toward serving God. Our job is to help them find out what it is.

In the daily work of finding those boundaries with Claire and avoiding the temptation to give in to what our own pediatrician acknowledges is a very sweet but “strong-willed” child, Dana and I can certainly benefit from the sage advice of someone like Wendy Mogel. 

As a faculty and administrative team we work together with our parents in the interest of all of our BGA children, challenging and nurturing in a delicate balance.  As we do so, I will certainly refer back to this light and enjoyable read.  In the meantime, Dana and I have an ample supply of Dora band aids, and a little girl who frequently falls but rarely cries; she often reminds us, in one of her predictable responses, “I have a boo boo. .”  She adds, “That’s o.k.  I’m tough.”  To this, I achingly but silently reply, “I hope you are.”   We hope that this resiliency carries with her for many, many years and appreciate, in advance, the wise adults who will help her to grow in that way.