John Stanford was one of my dearest friends in the world; he taught me a lot about life and living and about leadership and love. One of his favorite expressions was “You’ve got to love them to lead them,” and I used to think it just about the wisest notion I’d ever heard.
John died of leukemia a few years ago after a courageous battle, and lately I can’t think of him without thinking also of the lessons in his legacy. He was a retired army general, and following his military career he worked as the Fulton County manager, an appointed position that basically made him the CEO of the entire county; he later became the superintendent of Seattle’s public schools. One of the many great things about John was his clarity and purpose, the way he could tackle big problems with small, simple solutions. John had a deep faith in his fellow human beings, in the power of positive deed and thinking, and in his view there was nothing we could not accomplish once we set our minds to it. Commitment, to John, was always key—and follow-through. In the county manager’s office, for example, John had draped an enormous banner along the back wall of his reception area with the acronym DWYSYWD emblazoned on it in big red letters. Do What You Say You Will Do. That was John’s mantra and his marching order, and he used to love it when people came to his office and asked for an explanation. They’d see these big red letters, DWYSYWD, and have no idea what they meant, and John would take the opportunity to spread his good word.
Do What You Say You Will Do. Nothing less, and nothing more—although in some cases a little bit more couldn’t hurt. John used to tell people that the world would be a pretty miraculous place if everybody took those words to heart, and I couldn’t help but agree. Think about it: If each and every one of us kept to our word on matters big and small, day after day after day, there’d be no such things as neglect, disappointment, or false hope. Our best intentions would inevitably prevail because there wouldn’t be room for laziness, or empty promises, or pie-in-the-sky dreams pinned on little more than fantasy. We’d set our goals and meet them because it was the thing to do—the right thing to do, the only thing to do.
Do What You Say You Will Do. It’s basic, and it takes me back to the foundation instilled in me when I was a child: Promises are meant to be kept. “Your word is your bond,” my father used to say—and of course, in this, he was not alone. The phrase has seeped into our popular culture to the point where it’s almost a cliché, but we need to look past the cliché to the meaning behind it. And as parents we need to remind ourselves that we can’t expect our children to keep the promises they make to us if we can’t keep the promises we make to them. If we say something to our children, they ought to be able to rely on it, don’t you think? My parents always kept their word to my brothers and me, without fail. My father in particular was a real stickler about it, to the point where he wouldn’t even say he’d make it to a school play or concert unless he was absolutely sure he could attend. “If you say you’re going to do it, you’re to do it,” he used to say. (His words still resonate whenever I make a new commitment.) And indeed, if my father said he’d be someplace, he’d be there; if he said he’d take care of something, he’d take care of it; you could take it to the bank.
Now there’s an enormous sense of security that comes with knowing you can count on your parents. No matter what. No matter where. No matter when. It’s difficult to articulate what it meant to me as a child, but it meant the world. If my father told me something would happen, then I knew it would be so. I could set my clock by him, and it was a tremendously grounding, reassuring thing. He was very particular about this one piece of parenting, very careful with his words, because he didn’t want me or my brothers to ever feel he had let us down or in any way failed to keep his promises, whatever they happened to be. We kids were a priority to him in every respect, but if he couldn’t be absolutely certain he’d be able to do something, he’d be real clear about it. He’d tell us he’d do his best but he couldn’t promise, and to us kids this was the next best thing. It meant he’d make every effort and then some, and the fabric of our lives could be found in the and then some, in the extra efforts he and my mother would make to honor their pledges.
What a valuable gift to pass on to our children. To let them grow up knowing that the adults in their life can be counted on is a blessing that creates endless rewards, and perhaps the most important of these is the responsibility to honor their own promises. We stand and fall on our reputations and, for good or ill, so do our children. Why should your child come to you, or trust in you, after you’ve repeatedly dropped the ball when he was depending on you to do something? I don’t care what it is you’ve promised, you’d better stick to it. No matter what. No matter where. No matter when. It could be something as simple as showing up for your kid’s ball game—but then things pile up at work and you figure you’re better off staying late and knocking off a couple of more pages on your brief. In too many households, too many times, the children are made to wait or to understand disappointment. To some parents, each individual disappointment might seem insignificant at the time, but we must realize the cumulative effect. It sets a pattern, and a tone, and reflects a code of behavior that is frankly unacceptable.
The great side benefit to all this is that a child is a whole lot less likely to test a parent he knows he can count on. I’d see evidence of this in my courtroom every day of the week. If a child realized his parents were constantly failing to live up to their word, he might in turn consider it acceptable to break promises of his own—to break the law even.
Let me tell you about Bobby, my car thief. He’s in the adult system now, in Georgia, and it tears at my heart the way his life has turned out, but what touches me most about this young man’s story is that it turned on a broken promise—or more accurately, on a lifetime of broken promises. No adult had ever kept his or her word to this child, so how could we have expected him to do the right thing on his own? I first caught his file when he was about thirteen years old, and it was one of the thickest files I’d seen. Bobby’s thing was stealing cars. He loved cars, knew them inside and out, and he could hot-wire a vehicle so fast he’d be out of the parking lot in the time it took to turn your head. He was small for his age, so he had to scoot down in the front seat to even touch the gas—a mental picture that made the whole business even more distressing.
Bobby came in my first December on the bench. (As you read on, you’ll see that most of these “touchstone” cases came to me early on in my career, which I suppose has to do with the learned truth that there are rarely any new and improved ways for kids to get or find themselves in trouble, and after just a short while on this kind of front line I had seen a lot.) Bobby had been in and out of that courtroom so often by that time that all the probation officers and assistant district attorneys knew him. They saw this kid coming and considered going outside to check on their cars. The child had his grandmother there to support him on the day of his hearing, and I took one look at this little kid and his sweet grandmother, and I couldn’t see locking him up for Christmas. It may have been what he deserved, but it wasn’t what I wanted—and to be honest it wasn’t what Bobby needed. What he needed was some straight talk and a plain chance.
Or at least that’s what I thought.
I talked to Bobby a bit from the bench, and I talked to his grandmother a little bit, and I’ve got to admit I was impressed by the boy’s charm and good sense. He even had his own kind of integrity, if you can imagine such a thing as a thirteen-year-old car thief with integrity, and I came away thinking that if I could just get this kid to believe I believed in him we could set things right. I laid out a plan that would allow him to go home for Christmas and come back into my courtroom for another hearing just after the new year, at which point we would get to work on some kind of rehabilitation plan.
Juvenile proceedings are closed affairs, but on a delinquent calendar there tend to be a few extra folk milling about the courtroom waiting for their own cases to be heard. Probation officers, caseworkers, assistant district attorneys, public defenders…they all kind of huddle in the back of the court with one ear tuned to what’s going on at the bench. As soon as I said I was thinking of letting Bobby go home for Christmas, I could see all these heads shaking in the back of the room and feel a wave of disbelief, and I caught bits and pieces of under-the-breath murmurings that all seemed to suggest I didn’t know what I was doing.
This may, in fact, have been so, but I was doing it just the same.
The district attorney assigned to the case was a young woman who was herself relatively new to the system. At one point she stood to object to my handling of the matter and said, very dramatically, “Judge, if you let Bobby out, there won’t be a car safe in the courthouse parking lot!”
I thanked her for her comments and ratified my thinking that everybody had written this child off, reaching from the back of this courtroom all the way to the front, and I wasn’t about to see that mind-set rise to my bench. Maybe there was a reason this child kept driving these stolen cars into all kinds of trouble, and maybe the system had become part of that reason. Maybe this child had started to believe that all of us were expecting the worst from him, so he might as well go out and keep up his end of the deal.
I decided to trust my gut and give this kid a shot.
“Bobby,” I said, “I can tell by your file that you’ve been in a lot of trouble, but this has got to stop.”
“Yes, Your Honor,” he said.
“I’m serious, now,” I said. “It ends today.”
“Yes, Your Honor,” he said.
“No more hot-wiring cars,” I said.
“I promise,” he said.
I heard this last and I thought, There it is. And there it was: a promise, something I could hold him to, something I could build this second chance around. I heard my father’s voice again: If you say you’re going to do it, you’re to do it.
“Listen,” I said, “I don’t take a promise like that lightly. I’m willing to take a step of faith with you, but your word is your bond.” I told him how it was with me and my father, how if you make a promise you’ve got to keep it, and I suggested we seal it with a handshake. I motioned for Bobby to approach the bench, to make it more personal. It’s a gesture I’d never seen another juvenile court judge make, and I’d never made it before myself, but after this one time with Bobby I started bringing my kids up to the bench all the time, often with their parents. If you watch my show with any regularity, you’ll see it’s an opportunity to really connect with a child or his parents on a specific point. I thought it sent a very powerful signal for these kids to go nose-to-nose with a judge on a kind of equal footing. Like I said, it made it more personal, more human. And Bobby appeared to respond. We shook hands on it. We even did a little high five to seal the deal.
Fast-forward to the first week of the year. The assistant district attorney could see me coming down the hall and couldn’t restrain herself from a friendly taunt. “Guess who’s back,” she said.
I knew right away she was talking about Bobby, but it wasn’t what I wanted to hear first thing in the morning. She followed me back to my chambers as I took off my coat.
“I can’t talk about it,” she said.
“No,” I said, “you can’t talk about it. It’s an ex parte communication.”
“Anyway, you didn’t hear it from me,” she said.
No, I didn’t, I thought to myself. I wouldn’t.
Sure enough, Bobby was back on my calendar, this time on arson charges. How he’d gone from stealing cars to committing arson I needed to hear. He’d already entered a guilty plea, so he was in for sentencing, and I cut right to it. “Bobby,” I said, “you gave me your word. You promised me if I let you out for Christmas you’d keep out of trouble, come back, get a game plan, start the new year off right. What happened?”
What happened was that he’d set some woman’s curtains on fire. He was selling drugs, this woman wouldn’t pay, and he set her curtains on fire. “I just wanted to scare her,” he said. “I didn’t mean to do any serious damage. It’s not like I burned down her house.”
He copped to the whole thing, and he appeared genuinely ashamed. He hadn’t stolen any cars, he’d held up that end, and he ran with the kind of friends in the kind of neighborhood where selling small amounts of drugs to folks in their acquaintance wasn’t seen as a big deal to a kid like Bobby, but he hadn’t counted on this arson business. He’d meant to keep his word to me, to stay out of big trouble—and yet here he was.
Naturally, I locked him up for a good stretch of time after this, which at this point was a no-brainer, but what I continued to struggle with was the emotional piece of this boy’s story. I couldn’t figure out how a well-spoken child could break such a promise—made to a judge, in court, in front of his own grandmother! It was the most bewildering thing.
Over the years, folks have accused me of being all kinds of things as a judge, from a knee-jerk liberal to just a plain old jerk, but one thing I’m not is naive. I may have been a little bit too trusting early on in my career, but I was never naive. I know the score and I know these kids and I thought I could trust Bobby. He was completely honest with me in my courtroom, almost to his disadvantage. He admitted to every single charge against him. We seemed to have made a strong connection. And yet here he was, shredding his word at the first opportunity.
His file told the story. Bobby couldn’t keep a promise because he’d never known anybody to keep a promise to him. He was born to a mother who was an alcoholic. When he was an infant, neighbors reported suspicions that they could hear the mother throwing Bobby against the walls. Over time there were additional, substantiated reports of abuse, and Bobby was placed into foster care. An uncle surfaced when Bobby was six years old. He took Bobby into his home and repeatedly sodomized him and otherwise abused him until the child was old enough to articulate what was happening and be returned to foster care. Bobby had been in more than a dozen placements by the time he reached my courtroom—so really, it was no wonder he was in the kinds of trouble he was in.
But still, I wondered. Here I had expected it to resonate for this child that I really cared about him and wanted him to get his life back together, but how do you communicate the importance of keeping a promise to a child who has never known a promise kept? It was a foreign concept to him. At every point in his life, at every turn, he’d known one broken promise after another. As parents, if we expect our children to keep their word, we have to understand what it is that they’ve been able to rely on. The same goes for judges. I had to realize that this child didn’t know what it was to have someone believe in him, to have to hold up his end of a deal. Does this excuse Bobby for stealing all those cars? Absolutely not. For selling drugs? Absolutely not. For setting fire to this woman’s curtains? Absolutely not. But why should this child keep his word? No one had ever kept a promise made to him. It’s not excusing his behavior, but it’s understanding it—and you can’t cure a trouble like this until you break it down and find its core. Not to justify the behavior, mind you, but to understand it, to see where it comes from.
Eventually we were able to help Bobby get his life back-—for a time, anyway. We found a surrogate big brother for him, a mechanic we thought would stand as a positive role model and mentor and at the same time appeal to Bobby’s interest in cars. That worked out well, until the logistics of getting the two of them together proved unworkable, and it was at this point that Bobby’s life took another turn. A tragically ironic turn. And while I would never blame this good man who volunteered his time to make himself available to Bobby’s rehabilitation, I’ve never stopped wondering if Bobby looked on the failure of that relationship with the mechanic as yet another broken promise in a long line of adult disappointments. Certainly, after this mentor relationship disappeared from his life, Bobby made another terrible mistake that ended with him being bound over and tried as an adult. He shot a man who was physically abusing his mother—the same woman who used to slam Bobby’s little body against the wall when he was an infant. I thought, How ironic. How sad. How unnecessary. It was the last sad stop on a long road of broken promises.
And it got worse for Bobby. His mother’s attacker survived the shooting, but Bobby was charged with aggravated assault and tried as an adult, and he came before a district attorney who didn’t want to hear about all these broken promises. The judge didn’t want to hear it either, and Bobby was sentenced to twenty years. It wasn’t justice, not exactly, but there it was, and the reason the district attorney sought such a harsh sentence was that Bobby hadn’t shot this guy in the act of abusing his mother. Bobby planned the whole thing, went out and got a gun, arranged the confrontation. It was premeditated, all the way.
It’s amazing what children will do for their parents, isn’t it? I see it all the time. Parents who abuse their children. Parents who neglect their children. Parents who couldn’t keep a promise if their child’s life depended on it—which I’m here to tell you it does. Oh, yes, it does.
Sometimes a single broken promise can set a child reeling. Like the eight-year-old boy who stumbled into my courtroom one morning for his deprivation hearing, my first week on the bench. He’d been abandoned by his mother at a homeless shelter several months earlier. Vowing to return, she never came back. Shelter personnel notified the Department of Family and Children’s Services, which took temporary custody and placed the child in the agency’s emergency shelter, where he’d remained for all this time. Typically, children placed in an emergency shelter are there on a temporary basis until they can be placed into foster care, but in this case the boy had slipped through some of the cracks in our system. It was too long a time for a too little boy to be left in a too busy place like a shelter. Somewhere along the way, this child got it into his head that if he could just hold on until his mother returned he’d somehow be okay, things would somehow turn out all right. His mother had been true to her word before, and he expected her to be true to her word now, and he held on, waiting for the day when she would come back to get him, but she never came back. When the case finally came up and the boy was brought into my court, he must have been told that his mother would be there as well. Clearly he hadn’t known about the court date beforehand, but he was old enough to know what going to court meant and that his mother would know what it meant too. He kept looking around, and looking around, craning his little neck to find her. He just stood there alongside his caseworker, looking.
His look was blank, and I strained to read it. Really, I couldn’t take my eyes off this child, and as I watched him he started to tremble. Without thinking, I came down from the bench and moved toward the boy, shedding my robe on the way. Like I said, it was my first week on the job—October 1990—and a bailiff approached to turn me back. “Oh, no, judge,” he whispered, meaning well, meaning to help. “You can’t come down here. You’re not supposed to come down here.”
I responded with a look that I intended to say, “Get out of my way. This is my courtroom.” And I guess that look did the trick, because the bailiff backed away and gave me some room. Realize, at that point I’d been a mother a whole lot longer than I’d been a judge, and my parenting instincts were pretty much overriding any concern for my judicial temperament.
When I reached the child, he was shaking as if he’d been sent out in winter without a coat, so I did what any mother would do. I got down on my knees and I held him. I didn’t know what else to do. There’d been nothing in my legal training to prepare me for a moment such as this, nothing in my too brief on-the-job training, nothing in my still limited experience. I was going by my gut, and my gut told me to hug this precious child.
The boy wasn’t dressed in his Sunday best or anything like that. He’d been in school, and his caseworker had pulled him out, and he was looking pretty much like any other neglected kid caught in our system. I tried to calm him down as best I could, but he just kept shaking.
Everybody present in my courtroom at that moment had some direct connection to the case at hand. There was the boy’s caseworker, the bailiff, the child advocate, the mother’s attorney, and an attorney for Family and Children’s Services, and all eyes were fixed on this scene. No one moved. No one said a word. No one had ever seen a judge come down from her bench like that.
Finally, I spoke. “I’m not going to lie to you,” I said to the boy, who was still trembling. “I don’t know where your mother is. She was meant to be here, but she’s not here, and I don’t know where she is. I wish I did know, but I don’t. I will do everything I can to find her, though. I promise.”
He wasn’t crying, this shell-shocked little boy, and I remember being almost surprised that he wasn’t crying. It was a lot for a little kid to have to deal with, but he simply stood there—staring, shaking—his mind probably back at home with his mother. He seemed to calm down after a while, and at some point I realized I had a job to do, so I put my robe back on, returned to the bench, excused the boy and his caseworker, and moved to reset the case. The child would still be snarled in the emergency shelter until a foster home could be located, but there was nothing more I could do for him in court. The file told me nothing about the mother, but I imagined the worst.
Ordinarily it would fall to the caseworker to locate the mother in a case like this and bring her into court, and here I’m guessing that there had been no indication that this woman would fail to appear in court until she in fact failed to appear. I wasn’t about to let that happen a second time, or prolong this child’s anguish, so I reset the case to my afternoon calendar—the very same day. Here again the bailiff approached me in gentle protest, telling me we can’t do this, we can’t do that, but again I determined to do things my way. I was too green to know how things usually worked, so I issued a warrant for the mother’s arrest, for failure to appear. All these folks were looking at me as if I was crazy—the bailiff, the attorneys—but I was more than crazy. I was furious. I couldn’t believe that this woman would let her child down like this, whatever her circumstances, whatever her excuse. I wouldn’t have it, not on my watch. And if we couldn’t locate this woman and arrest her sorry ass and bring her down in time for my afternoon calendar…well, then at least we would have tried.
As it turned out, the woman was fairly easy to locate. She was no longer transient. She now had an address. She had a history of employment. (At one point she’d even been a correctional officer!) And she happened to be at home when the sheriff came calling. I was so new to the system that it amazed me that there hadn’t been a more diligent effort before that morning’s hearing to ensure that the mother appeared in court, but the court was overwhelmed with so many cases that it was impossible for the caseworker to make an extensive personal effort with each and every one. This child was just one more case in his caseworker’s huge caseload, and he didn’t surface on his caseworker’s radar screen until his case came up that morning.
The mother was brought in for the afternoon hearing, and she was in a stupor. She was wild and belligerent—a crack addict being told what to do by the authorities. I asked the bailiff to get the woman some coffee. That’s how green I was, thinking coffee would do a thing to still the rants of a crack addict.
The oath of office I’d taken was still fresh in my mind, and I sat there trying to exercise what I could manage of judicial temperament, all the time struggling to keep calm, to keep focused, to keep this woman from rattling me. In this case too I determined to use Christmas to advantage. It was October, and it seemed to me a reasonable case plan to arrange this woman’s treatment, parental visits, counseling sessions, and reviews on the kind of schedule that would allow her to bring her child home for Christmas. Of course, this was a best-case scenario, all the way on the side of hope, but I worked the calendar and set the woman’s review for forty-five days, which would have given her a couple of weeks after a thirty-day drug treatment program to get her act together and get back to court and make a case for taking her child home. If she even wanted to take her child home.
Forty-five days later the woman appeared in my courtroom even more belligerent than the first time around. She hadn’t been to see her child. She hadn’t been near a drug treatment center. She hadn’t done a blessed thing. I could order a drug treatment program all day long, but unless this woman was prepared to acknowledge that she had a problem and that she was determined to do something about it, it wouldn’t matter. If I sent her under threat of arrest, it would be worthless. Even if she went, she would just have been going through the motions. This woman had two years of college. She’d been a correctional officer. I was amazed at her disdain for the court and her disregard for her child and her circumstances.
Well, I just snapped, and I lit into this woman like she had it coming. I’m not even sure she heard half the things I said, she was in such a fog, but I said them anyway. I was enraged. That the woman had made no effort to see her child, to seek treatment…it was unconscionable. The caseworker could only do so much, and back then we didn’t have the kind of systems in place, like our excellent Court Appointed Special Advocacy (CASA) program, that would have allowed for closer monitoring of the case between hearings. So I let my anger spill out onto this woman. I told her that one of two things was going to happen: either she’d get herself into a drug treatment program immediately (and that I would drag her down to one myself if I had to), or I would move to terminate her parental rights. The child was eight years old. “I’m not going to let that boy grow up in foster care because you won’t make the effort to get treatment,” I told her.
“You can’t do that,” she managed to respond. “He’s too old to be adopted.”
I couldn’t believe that with everything else going on, with everything else I’d put on the table, this was the comment she chose to make, and it set me off. It was as if she’d thought things through in such a warped way that she let herself off the hook, that in her crack-addled head there was no reason for her to be accountable for her actions, because her son was too old and she had no one to be accountable to. I stood, and leaned my hands on my desk, and glowered down at this woman.
“I’m gonna come off this bench and kick your ass!” I said. It wasn’t one of the finest moments in the history of judicial temperament, but I was just that angry. “Don’t play with me,” I said, “because I’ll do it.”
And I would have (I think) if reason hadn’t quickly gotten the better of me. After I’d gotten her attention, and after the shock value of my outburst had subsided, I tried to appeal to this woman as a mother. Clearly I wasn’t getting through to her with textbook judicial temperament, so I was up for anything. The woman’s name was Kimberly, and I used it here for the first time. I told her that I had two sons, one about the same age as her son. I told her that this was a really painful thing for another mother to see. I told her that if someone came into my house in the middle of the night and tried to take my children, I would fight for them with everything I had, even if it got me killed. I asked her to look at her drug addiction the same way she would a stranger coming into her home in the middle of the night and taking her precious child, because that’s what was happening. Her drug addiction had separated her from her child, and she was now at risk of never getting him back.
“It’s not a threat,” I said, “when I tell you I won’t let this child grow up in foster care. I mean it. But it’s on you.”
All of a sudden this woman saw me as a mother and not just as a judge, and she started crying. It was a real turning point—this incensed judge threatening to come down from the bench and kick her ass turning out to be just another mother trying to do right by her kids. She was hard-core, but now she was crying, and we were able to move forward from there.
The footnote to Kimberly’s story was that Christmas didn’t happen that year. She went into treatment, relapsed, reentered treatment, found a job, lost it, relapsed again. She got to where she needed to be eventually, but it wasn’t a straight line, and along the way there was such a radical change in her appearance that her own son didn’t recognize her when she was finally clean and sober. He ultimately went home the following year—on Christmas Eve, no less. I may have missed my target by a year, but at least we hit home, and last I heard the two of them had moved to the Midwest to be with Kimberly’s family, and they were finally doing well.
My outburst quickly became the stuff of courthouse legend. I’m told people still talk about the day the rookie judge threatened to come down off the bench and kick some woman’s ass, and I’m here to report that the legend is entirely true. You can’t make this stuff up—but you can learn from it, and the lesson here is that we must sometimes push ourselves to extremes in order to see our way to a solution. My older son, Charles, was about the same age as Kimberly’s son at the time, and I kept seeing his face on that little boy, wondering how he might feel if he was abandoned with a lie. True, to be abandoned with a lie and to be simply abandoned add up to pretty much the same thing to a little boy, but it was the lie that got my back up. It was the fact that this tragedy had grown from a single broken promise. There’s an unspoken promise between every parent and child, that we will do our best for them at all times. No matter what. No matter where. No matter when.
Now on to a more personal tale, to illustrate how vital it is for us parents to keep our word—not only to our children but also to ourselves. Before Charles was even born, I had an idea in my head of the kind of mother I wanted to be. More to the point, I knew what kind of working mother I wanted to be, and throughout my time on the bench I was an advocate for children, working women, and related family court issues. When I began presiding in my television courtroom, these issues remained front and center, especially when I found myself being pulled in all kinds of directions. I had a hectic taping schedule in New York and a full slate of parenting responsibilities down in Atlanta, and there were plenty of times when I felt there wasn’t enough of me to go around. It was the classic working mother’s lament, and underneath the tug and pull was the promise I made to myself as a young mother, to make my children a priority. To be there for them. No matter what. No matter where. No matter when.
My younger son, Chris, was a starter on his high school football team—and in Georgia, high school football is the kind of big deal that unites some towns and divides others. It was a Friday night. First-round regional play-off game against our top-ranked opponent. Under the lights. Three or four thousand folks with their calendars marked, their hearts set to racing, and their lungs primed for some serious cheering. I wouldn’t have missed this game for the world. And then the world came calling. It’s funny the way our values are sometimes tested by the strangest temptations, the way push comes to shove to shake us from our plans. In this case the lure came in an unlikely phone call from a New York casting agent, a few days before the game, wondering if I would appear as myself in a music video with Shaggy, the reggae-styled hip-hop rapper who was coming out with a new album. Don’t get the wrong idea; I’m not in the habit of taking calls from New York casting agents. This was one of those out-of-the-blue kinds of calls, and it left me thinking, Hmmm. It struck me completely by surprise even as it struck a chord. Why? Well, for one thing, so much of what passes for popular music these days is shot through with hateful, disparaging images, but Shaggy has a much more hopeful message to his music, so the chance to be a part of such a pop cultural positive was enormously appealing. (Don’t tell my kids, but I actually listen to all kinds of hip hop music when I am alone in the car!) Plus, for his new single, Shaggy was looking to assemble a group of high-profile, high-energy, high-powered women to appear in the accompanying video, and here they were looking to me. Goodness, I was flattered! And excited! Hey, I’m all for celebrating the accomplishments of each and every successful woman who makes it to the top rungs of her ladder.
As excited as I was, I was careful to put all this into perspective. I knew enough about the entertainment industry to know that at the other end of a long hard day of taping there’d be a split-second cameo that would breeze past so quickly you might have to use a freeze-frame to spot me in the finished video. Or it could be that for all these extra efforts I’d wind up on the cutting room floor. But I didn’t care. It sounded like a hoot—and if they wound up using my footage, it’d be great exposure for the show! Of course I would do it. Whatever it took. I’d rearrange my schedule, fly to New York, sit my butt down in makeup, hang with Shaggy, hit my marks, and fly home. Piece of cake.
Trouble was, the video shoot was scheduled for Friday, the day of the football game, and there was no way I was missing that. We were in the play-offs! All during football season, my producers know to book around the team’s schedule, which usually means I’m out the door by one-thirty or so on Friday afternoons, in time to catch a flight from New York to Atlanta for the kickoff. On this one point, I won’t budge—and why should I? I’ll work as hard as they want me to work the rest of the week, go wherever they want me to go, at whatever ungodly hour they want me to be there. I’ll take a red-eye or an early bird or a two-seater propeller plane. But if it’s a Friday night during high school football season and it’s not happening on the fifty-yard line, I won’t be able to make it. I’m sorry. I haven’t missed a varsity game yet, and I’m not about to start.
Part of the reason I’m so firm on this is that commitment I made to myself back before my kids were even born—to put them first and foremost, whenever practical, whenever impractical. And yet that’s only part of it. I could be more flexible, I suppose, if my boys’ father—my ex-husband—was going to some of these games, but this part of their lives is not on his radar, which means that if I don’t go, they won’t have a parent there rooting for them. But that’s also just part of the reason. Truth is, I love these games! I’ve been doing this for a long time at this point, and I’m going to be one sad cookie when high school football is over in our house. Either I’ll be out there cheering on someone else’s kids or going through withdrawal.
Still, I was torn. I figured there had to be some way to do the video in New York and get back in time for the kickoff—to have my “piece of cake” and eat it too!—and I had all kinds of people making all kinds of calls trying to find a flight that would get me back to Georgia for game time. About the best we could manage was an indirect one-thirty flight to Tallahassee, Florida, which was about a forty-five-minute drive from the stadium, which would have forced me to leave the shoot at noon, but even if I made my connections and the flight was on time, I’d miss the kickoff and the bulk of the shooting day. This was a disappointment—a small one, I should add, but a disappointment just the same.
The more I looked at the conflict, the more I realized it was no dilemma at all. I’d go to the football game and hand off the Shaggy gig to another deserving woman, and I’d probably forget about it until I caught the video on television sometime in the distant future. But other folks weren’t so quick to let it go. Most of the people I work with couldn’t believe I’d pass up a shot at this Shaggy video. They knew how much Chris’s football game meant to me, but they also knew it was just a game. And they also knew Chris. “Ask him what he wants you to do,” someone suggested, quite reasonably, except for the fact that this wasn’t about what Chris wanted; it was about what I wanted; it was about the parameters I’d set for myself and my willingness to stay within those parameters. Of course, if I put it to Chris, he’d have told me to shoot the video. Mom on the fifty-yard line or Mom in a Shaggy video on MTV? He’d have made that trade in a heartbeat, and for him, from his perspective, that would have been the right choice. But not for me.
Chris couldn’t believe it when I finally told him about it, the night before the game. I’d been traveling and managed to arrange my schedule to get me home to see that he got his work done and a good night’s rest before the big game.
“You’ll never guess the call I got this week,” I said over dinner, and I proceeded to tell him about my brush with music video stardom.
“They wanted you?” he said, emphasis on the sweat-panted, T-shirted, messy-haired woman across the table. He couldn’t believe it. “Shaggy wanted you to be in his video?”
I nodded.
My older son, Charles, was equally incredulous when his brother filled him in later that same evening; apparently, turning down opportunities to appear in big-budget music videos with big-name rap artists is not the sort of behavior that passes for normal among teenage boys.
“And you said no?” Chris asked that Thursday night at dinner, making sure he’d heard me right.
I nodded again.
“Why?” he wondered.
“Because we’ve got a game,” I said. “It’s the play-offs!”
“But Mom,” he said, “we’re gonna get our asses kicked!”
He was right about that, but it wasn’t the point. We were playing a team from a much bigger school, with a much stronger football program. Our boys would be out-matched and outsized, but to my thinking that was just another good reason why I needed to be on our sidelines, doing my part. Chris might not think he needs me, but the team does. Of this I am certain. I’m one of our loudest and proudest cheerleaders. I’ve even got my own signature cheer, a simple call-and-response cry that always gets our fans going:
“What do you want?” I’ll yell.
“TD!” the crowd will respond.
“What’s that?” I’ll holler.
“Touchdown!”
It’s not original to me, but I’ve made it my own. (And I’ve got the strained vocal chords to prove it!)
Chris had a point. Actually, he had a few. He could have called me right after the game and given me the play-by-play. His older brother was coming to the game, so it’s not as if he would have been without any family support. A friend could have videotaped the whole game, and I wouldn’t have missed a down. Plus, Chris was just a junior, and there was a whole other season of football games for me to look forward to next year. And we were going to get our asses kicked.
But none of this, really, was the point. The point was that I would not be shaken from the kind of mother I want to be, the kinds of priorities I want to make and keep, the commitments I have pledged to my family and to myself. Each of us—in every day, in every way—must make an endless string of choices that keep us aligned with our hopes and our best intentions. It’s not easy. It’s never easy. But the good things come at a price. Sometimes, as was the case here, it’s a relatively small price, but quite often the cost is steep. Home. Marriage. Career. Freedom. Life itself. The trick comes in the balance.
Chris was right about one thing, though. We did get our asses kicked. Big time. The final score was 14–45. Note, please, the flip-flop on the custom of reporting sports scores with the winning tally first. I don’t buy that, not where one of my teams is concerned. What do I care about the other guy’s score? At least we scored twice. At least I made it to the game. At least the band showed up and no one was hurt. At least we filled our parents’ bus, practiced our cheers, swapped stories on our teenagers for four hours each way, tailgated like there was no tomorrow, and had ourselves a great, good time.
And at least we were all there for our children.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned in all my years on the bench, it’s that parents need to be there if they mean to make a difference in the lives of their children. There are all kinds of ways we can screw up once we’re there, and all kinds of ways we can flourish, but we must be fully present. It goes beyond keeping our word and stretches to keeping our place. Attendance counts—oh, you better believe it!—and there aren’t any truant officers watch-dogging us parents to make sure we do our part. It’s on us.
All of which takes me back to my opening refrain: Do What You Say You Will Do. If you say you’re going to do something, you’ve got to do it. It’s basic. It’s simple. And everything good in our relationships with our children will flow from there. Keep your word, and your child will learn to keep his.
Of course, we live in the real world. Stuff happens. Life can sometimes derail us from our best-laid plans, and I’m not suggesting here that we parents must be foolproof in this regard. Not at all. But let’s get real: “I forgot” is not a good enough excuse for missing out on a promise. “I didn’t get around to it”—also not good enough. Yes, we’re human, and yes, we have to say that to our children, but let’s do our best to avoid these pat excuses. If there’s a traffic jam on the freeway, it’s out of our control. If there’s an emergency meeting at work, it’s out of our control. But we can’t simply change our minds if something better comes up. We can’t say, “Oh, it’s just open school night, it’s not that important.” We must make every effort, at all times. And we can’t start making little deals in our heads to compensate for the deals we drop with our kids. None of this I’ll-make-it-up-to-you-sweetie-we’ll-go-out-for-pizza nonsense. You can’t wash away your broken promises with treats and kindness. If you tell your daughter that you plan to carve out all of Saturday to take her to the skating rink with her friends, then you’ve got to do that, even if your golf buddy calls and he has a great tee time and you’d much rather be out on that golf course. You gave your word to your child, and you are meant to keep it.
And God forbid I catch you saying, “I hope you really appreciate this, honey, because I could have been out on the golf course.” I hate when parents do that.
The bottom line, though, is the commitment we make to our children to love and support them in all their endeavors; to be there for them at all times and at all costs; to build a foundation for them upon which they can start to build their own lives.
It’s all connected, and the thread is your word. Keep it and you’re good to go; lose it and you might lose your kids in the process.