Practicing Humility

Adults should have a whole lot more humility than they commonly display when dealing with young people, especially teenagers. The reason I’m thinking about this is that I’m reading “Name All the Animals” by Alison Smith. It’s a memoir about her experiences as a teenager after her brother died in a car accident in 1983. She lived in a Catholic community, her parents were Catholic and she went to a Catholic girls school. And, she got a modicum of support from the adults around her. In the first 2 years post tragedy, there were several instances in which an adult reached out to her or noticed that she was grieving. But mostly she was alone with her grief.

I was 16 when my brother died (he was 21, it was a suicide), I don’t recall any adult making an attempt to speak to me or to let me talk about the grief that I held inside. Like Allison, I walked around in a daze. I was the “girl who’s brother died” for awhile at school, a bit of notoriety which soon faded. I remember giving an oral report about mental illness in my health class…the teacher may have asked me how I was doing. But, my “okay” satisfied him that all was well. It wasn’t. My mother and stepfather were caught in the web of their own grief, I had no connection with any of my teachers. Grief counseling was unheard of. I was on my own.

As adults, many of us, especially those in authority over young people, go around acting like we have it all together. And we carefully nurture that idea when we’re with teenagers. They know it’s not true. They can see us leaking our griefs, our fears and uncertainties all over the place. They know that when we’re getting angry at them it has something to do with our insecurities about ourselves. But, we keep up the ruse…gamely pretending that adulthood confers wisdom. The only thing that adulthood confers is experience…more time in the trenches as a human being. How we use the experience and learn from it is up to each individual.

In my experience as a 16-year old I found few wise and kind adults. I had one teacher in four years of high school that seemed like a human being with desires and frailties like me. He had left his wife (rare in those days) in order to marry another woman. Somehow I knew he was in love…perhaps he shared a poem he had written, I don’t recall. But, he came to my house to offer his condolences after my brother died. He stood at the door and told me how sorry he was, that’s all. I was touched by that and I’ve never forgotten it.

The fact is, the majority of adults don’t know how to deal with hard stuff that happens or how to be helpful to teenagers who are going through something hard. And that’s why we should be humble and not act like we do.