Ruth Stratton looked up at a soft knock at her door. Ruth had been principal of Barnard Middle School for five years. She had about 400 students and her school was one of two feeder schools for Central High School in their Midwestern town.
Standing in the door was Lisa Perkins, her guidance counselor, with a short stack of file folders in her hands. This did not generally mean good news, so Ruth held up a finger asking for a minute; cleared the top of her desk; and then asked Lisa to take a seat.
Knowing that both women were busy, Lisa got straight to the point.
“Over the past few days, I’ve been reviewing some of the students I see on a regular basis and I’ve found something that is really unusual,” Lisa began.
“What’s wrong?” interrupted Ruth, expecting the worst.
“Oh, there’s nothing wrong! In fact, I think something is happening that’s very good and I wanted you to see what I’ve found.”
Lisa slid three student folders across the desk and asked Ruth to take a look at them. Ruth scanned them and commented that it looks like three students are doing very well.
“That’s true,” said Lisa, “but up until last year all three were regular visitors in my office. I like to look at old cases to follow up on the students and these three were just some of the ones that popped out. It’s just not typical to see students moving so quickly from bad behavior to much improved behavior.”
Ruth looked back at the folders and noted, “These children are all in CPS (Child Protective Services).”
“That’s right. We have a total of 17 students right now that are in CPS. These three are doing very well and the rest are performing pretty much as we expect from CPS students. That made me curious.”
“Take a look at the responsible party. They are all under the care of a Roberta Stern. That, in itself, is unusual with a single woman acting as the foster parent. But it gets more interesting.”
“And if you look at the history, you’ll see that most of the unacceptable behavior came when the students were in a prior foster home; and the desirable behavior began about the time that Ms. Stern became their guardian.
“I did a system-wide computer search for students at that address. I found three in the elementary school and four more in the high school. When I call the counselors at both schools, I found the same patterns: troubled behavior moving to good behavior coincident with the child being moved into Ms. Stern’s care.”
Ruth thought about this for a minute. “This has gotten my curiosity piqued. I’m thinking that we don’t spend enough time looking at students who are performing well both socially and academically. See if you can get us an appointment with Ms. Stern. I’d like to know what she’s doing to help these children.”
Meeting with Roberta Stern
When the receptionist announced her 3:30 appointment, Ruth Stratton looked up to see Lisa Perkins in the doorway with a plain, but neatly dressed, woman who appeared to be in her early to mid-forties, whom she introduced as Roberta Stern.
“Ms. Stern,” Ruth welcomed her, “it’s so nice to see you. Won’t you both come in and have a seat.”
“It’s Roberta, if you don’t mind. When I hear Ms. Stern, I want to look around to see if my mother-in-law has come in.”
“Then, I’m Ruth and this is Lisa, who I expect you’ve already met. We appreciate your coming by today. We want to talk with you about your children.”
“Oh, please don’t tell me that one of them is in trouble,” Roberta, her face flooded with concern.
“No, no – quite the opposite. All your children are doing very well, both socially and academically. That’s why we asked you to come by. Your children don’t fit what we usually see with CPS children and we understand that your other children in both the elementary and high schools are all performing much the same.”
“You’re obviously doing something right. We’re just curious about your secret. If all students behaved as well as yours, Lisa wouldn’t have nearly the workload she has today.”
Roberta’s Story
“Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and Mr. Stern?”
“It’s just me. My husband, Sergeant James Stern, was lost in 2004 in Afghanistan to an IED. We had been married 12 years and he was career Army. But we were never able to have children.”
“We’re so sorry,” Lisa interjected.
“Thank you, I am too. But I guess losing him is why I’m here today.”
“We always wanted a family, my husband and I. We both grew up in large families; but I guess those genes stopped with us. After he died, my pastor asked me if I would consider taking foster children into my home.”
“After praying and with the promise of support from the church, I took two kids, a brother and sister, aged 17and 14 into my home. It was pretty hard because they both had some issues. We struggled greatly, but with a lot of prayer, the boy is now in the Army and doing well and the girl is in community college studying nursing.”
“But like I told my pastor and the CPS caseworker, I couldn’t do that again without having a plan. So here’s what I did.”
Roberta’s Plan
“Both my husband and I had learned that there is power in numbers in a large family. It’s much easier for seven or eight to love and support each other than it is for one to love and support one or two.”
“I also knew that there had to be some way to help these children get rid of the baggage they bring with them. It’s unspeakable how some of them have been neglected or abused. And the older they are, the more weight they carry.”
“Children basically want to be loved and to be secure. When that is torn away from them, they can build some terrible walls to protect themselves. Lisa, that’s why I expect you see so many CPS kids here on social issues. Kids’ walls keep getting tangled up with other kids and trouble starts.”
“So I did two things. First, I went to my pastor and told him that I would not be a foster parent for just one or two kids. But I would consider foster parenting a group home with eight to ten kids if I had the support of the church and the community.”
“Then I went to my husband’s Auntie Frances who had herself raised ten children without a husband around. I wanted to know her secret.”
Auntie Frances’ Story
“Auntie Francis told me that all she had learned came from her Granny Sims, who was a child of freed slaves, who heaven knows could themselves have some powerful baggage to carry around. She told me Three Secrets to Success in Life. I teach these secrets to every one of my kids today.”
Three Secrets
Secret 1 – Whenever a thought enters your mind that will cause you pain or tempt you to get into trouble, you say to yourself out loud, “I will not think about that.” When the thought comes back, and it will, you say it again, “I will not think about that.”
Auntie Frances said she didn’t know how this worked until she talked to her preacher about it. He told her that the Apostle Paul said in the Bible, “…we take these thoughts captive,” and that’s what we do when we refuse to think about something negative or tempting.
Later on, one of her children studied some philosophy and told her that Confucius, William Shakespeare, Martin Luther, and others had said pretty much the same thing for over two thousand years.
Secret 2 – When you consistently practice Secret 1, negative thoughts or temptations will come less and less until you really don’t think about them at all.
She told me that one of her grandchildren, who also lived by the secrets, told her how this part worked. She says that we have a part of our mind, called the subconscious, which has the job of helping us be happy and content. If our subconscious thinks that we are happy thinking about negative things and getting all worked up all the time, it will keep feeding us those negative thoughts so we can be happy.
But if our subconscious hears us saying “I will not think about that,” consistently, it will learn over time that we don’t want to think about those things and it will stop sending those negative thoughts or temptations to us. It’s like our subconscious blocks those negative thoughts and temptations automatically.
Auntie Frances said that this made a lot of sense to her and she has four generations in her family practicing the secrets to prove it. She says they have learned to break the habit of stress and create the habit of peace.
Secret 3 – Use your habit of peace to make the best decisions for you and your family.
When we’re not spending all our time thinking about negative things, we have peace. We can use this peaceful time to think about ways to get along better with others, to do the right things, and to better ourselves for the future.
Roberta’s story continues
“I’ll be honest”, she said, “I had some hard times dealing with losing my husband. I began to use the Three Secrets in my own life and I found peace for the first time since he died. I still missed him, but I wasn’t grieving over it to the point that it held me back.”
“About this time, the pastor came to me and told me the church owned a house with six bedrooms and a big lot. It was old, but it was serviceable. He had talked to the Board and he had talked to the neighbors near the house, and all had agreed that if the church would sponsor it, and I would serve as the foster mother, they would petition CPS to open a group home for kids.”
“Long story short, I prayed and agreed; the church petitioned CPS and they agreed; and the next summer, the next four foster kids, who are now in high school, came to live with me.”
Roberta explained that it took some structure to make all this happen; and she detailed how it evolved to what’s working so well today.
Every child has what she calls “settling in” time. This is the time when she teaches them the Three Secrets. She learned early on that you can’t really affect behavior before the demons are removed; and these foster kids are carrying some really big baggage demons on their little shoulders. Secrets 1 and 2 help them get rid of the baggage.
The only chore each child has from day one is doing their own laundry. Roberta had a large storage closet filled with good clothes she gets from the Salvation Army or the church clothing closet. Each child can pick three sets of clothing that they like. She decided on three sets because they would have to do their laundry every three days and that would give her time alone with the child while they do their laundry. The laundry time is when she can spend personal time with each child.
This is where she explained Secrets 1 and 2. Of course, secret 2 is automatic if they do Secret 1 consistently.
She tells them that she doesn’t want to know about their past. There really not too much they could do about that anyway. She would explain Secret 1 and encourage them to start dismissing their negative thoughts.
She uses following laundry sessions to inquire how Secret 1 is working and to encourage the children. That usually takes about the time it takes for the tub to fill; so they spent the rest of their laundry time talking about anything that becomes handy to talk about.
After a month, the habit of peace is beginning to take hold and the child is becoming “settled in.” Roberta then begins talking about Secret 3 – thinking about family and future. It isn’t too hard because the child is usually getting comfortable in the home by this time and with the baggage dropping off their backs.
Her laundry sessions are important. She leads age-specific conversations on a wide range of subjects including respect, privacy, personal space, shared responsibility, sexuality, dating, life choices, and marriage. She talks about finances, budgeting, planning, and taking responsibility.
Roberta picks an older child to be a “special” big brother or sister for the new child. This helps ease them into the family routines which are crucial in a big family.
The older children all share the cooking and marketing with Roberta’s help. She teaches all the children how to clean their rooms and to share in cleaning the house. They all work together to keep up the lawn and shrubs.
If a child starts balking about something, often a big sister or brother will talk with the child about the Secrets and encourage them to think of the importance of being part of the family and the importance of thinking about the future.
Roberta uses laundry time as private time with child. Here she can also teach each child to mend their clothing if it gets torn or loses a button. After laundry time, if they have outgrown a garment or are just tired of it, they can take the clean, repaired and folded garment back to the clothes pantry and select a replacement.
After supper comes study time and often older students will help the younger ones with their homework. The children learn to share their reports with their brothers and sisters and encouragement is the rule. They learn to use computers to research projects. Several have learned to make PowerPoint presentations which they share with the family.
Meal time is used to share events of the day and things coming up. Sometimes kids will bring up issues from school and often one kid would say to another, “Think about the secrets.” But they always listen carefully before they respond. That’s part of the respect they are learning.
Meal time is followed by game time. They don’t have TV or smart phones. They carry a limited-minutes cell phone in their backpacks for emergencies. Their CPS stipend is used to pay for the cell phones.
Every child is responsible for signing out on a whiteboard so everybody always knew where everybody is all the time. With ten kids, it’s easy to lose one.
Roberta teaches the kids to keep a journal every day just as she keeps a journal on each child. She retrieved hers from her purse and held it up as an example. When Ruth asked if she could see it, Roberta declined, saying that all the journals were personal.
If kids start hanging with the wrong people or heading toward some other trouble, brothers or sisters would often try to deal with it kid-to-kid. If that doesn’t work, the concerned child would quietly tell Roberta and that became good laundry-time material.
Roberta isn’t too concerned about romances in the home because the kids really are more like brothers and sisters. They all learn how to dress, talk, and act modestly. Older kids are allowed to date, but the girls couldn’t go out with a boy until he had come over for a Sunday dinner. Roberta laughs at the thought of some of these dinner-table inspections. But the kids feel comfortable dating within the family policy.
She said her kids participate in sports and take music lessons. They attend each others games and recitals. They swap chores when one has a conflict. They have become a family in every sense of the word except genetics.
Over time, the family becomes a secure rock for each child. They know they are loved, respected, and accepted there; and they know that other people are pulling for them as well as depending on them.
They always have a big Sunday dinner. When the kids age-out of foster care at age eighteen, they are always welcome to come back for Sunday dinner. Roberta expects that before long, they’ll have to make this a pot-luck dinner because she could envision twenty or thirty people or more coming back to visit their family bringing their own families with them.
The church is planning to add a guest house on the property so kids coming back home to visit can have a place to stay.
Kids learn how to do minor repairs around the house, googling for instructions and borrowing tools from the church maintenance team. They learn how to plan the project and budget for materials.
They all, boys and girls alike, learn how to change the oil and rotate the tires on their car and van. They clean and wax the vehicles to keep them nice. They check the oil and keep a maintenance log.
Church and community members give the kids jobs. They learn how to set up accounts at the credit union and account for their money. They write resumes to apply for jobs.
Part of their CPS stipend goes into a vacation account and they all go to the beach or the mountains each summer. The kids plan the vacation.
Since Roberta doesn’t have to buy clothes so much, part of their stipend goes to them for spending money.
Roberta ended her story by saying, “It’s amazing what children can do for themselves and for each other once they get rid of the baggage they had been carrying around in their young minds.”
Ruth and Liz sat there totally amazed with what this woman was accomplishing with her Three Secrets; and the evidence was in the folders in their hands. They were almost speechless. Finally, Liz spoke up, “That is utterly amazing, what you’ve told us!”
Ruth agreed. “I would have said the same thing eight years ago. But I have seen the Three Secrets work in my ten kids; and I see them working in four generations of Auntie Frances’ family.”
She continued, “I’m convinced that any family or any individual can succeed in life if they can just unload the emotional baggage most people carry around. I’m just as convinced that people can only pretend to be happy if they can’t dump that baggage.”
“The Three Secrets are letting my kids be free to be everything they were meant to be and I’m just glad to be part of the experience.”
The end.
This fictional story introduces a principle that has been around for thousands of years. In addition to the Bible, philosophers like Confucius, Marcus Aurelius, Shakespeare, and others have written or spoken about our wonderful capacity to train ourselves not to ruminate on negative thoughts and to minimize the effects of emotional or physical pain in our lives. The danger of ruminating on emotional pain is, in addition to more pain, stress, depression, anxiety, emotional issues, and worse.
Your children can understand the simple principles of the Three Secrets. The Secrets work for many negative emotions that result from almost any negative thinking.
This concept is explained fully in an online eCourse called Finding Personal Peace – http://findingpersonalpeace.com. The course leads one through these secrets and covers topics like making good decisions, and dealing with serious stuff like death, illness, abuse, and addiction.
The eCourse leads one through a process of turning a habit of sadness into a habit of peace. You can read other short stories on life issues by searching the category, Short Stories, at the right.
Copyright 2014 findingpersonalpeace.com. Birmingham, Al USA. All rights reserved.
Finding Personal Peace 