There have been a few people, in a life cram-jammed with the opposite message, who have told my second son that he was smart.
One of them, Donna Mahr, a math tutor in our tiny town, was the first.
She died just a couple of days ago.
How many lives did Donna Mahr change in her not-so-very-long life? (I believe she would have been in her 60s, and lost a stout-hearted fight against breast cancer with grace and quiet calm.)
How many lives did she transform?
How big are the boundaries of the universe? For every child she believed in, she gave comfort to a family whose heart was broken at the core. She gave hope to a family who knew, who KNEW, that their son or daughter had gifts that didn’t fit the traditional mold, who suffered a scalding anger and shame every time they were told that their child just “wasn’t on the ball, just didn’t get it, needed more than special education, was lazy, didn’t care” and later “wasn’t college material, should consider the military if they’d take him, maybe a sheltered environment.”
She taught kids – some small, some tall, some eager, some not so much. But she mended families who didn’t know where to turn.
Despite the best efforts of the rather nice public school system in our town to prevent this, our son graduated with a low B average, in part because of Donna Mahr, who was an angel before she ever got her wings. The low B resulted from failing the final exam in English as a senior, because of an accusation that he had cheated. Teachers said a “kid like that” could not have grasped Tim O’Brien’s ‘The Things They Carried,’ particularly the parts about Chaucer, which our kid read when he was thirteen. When we objected, the administrators told us that his teachers, whose opinion it was that Dan hadn’t done his own work, were the ones who knew him best.
One said, “We can’t let him get away with this. We’re the ones responsible for the kind of person he will be.”
We, however, thought that we already had that job.
In fact, although certainly he was “a kid like that,” he read all the time, three and four books a week, and it saved him. Donna nurtured this, and helped him fill in the gaps where he will never shine – math and spelling and handwriting, with the assistance of another tutor. Handwriting is impossible for this son. Told over and over that he just had to “try harder,” he instead felt disgust when his writing was more formless and illegible than his eight-year-old sister’s.
Once, an associate of Donna’s passed the special needs room where our son went each day for guided study. He was seated on a high stool, receiving a lecture for losing yet another paper. The sarcasm and cruelty directed at our student, and his shame, literally brought tears to the man’s eyes. He was being told that needing extra time “wasn’t fair to the other students,” a refrain we often heard.
Donna always questioned that. Why was giving a kid who needed extra time to do the right thing somehow doing a disservice to kids who didn’t need extra time? Why did there have to be fault?
Her piercing reasonableness cut through so much denial. But it wasn’t until he left high school behind that we saw her work in action.
Though it has been a challenge, heaven knows, because our son has as many learning disabilities as I have fingers on one of my hands, he now is a college sophomore – a young man with friends and a future.
But this isn’t his story.
It’s the story of one remarkable woman, whose legacy to the young lives she touched was one of gentle civil disobedience: She taught kids whose trajectory for failure had been drummed into their hearts and minds long before she ever met them. She taught them math, but also she taught them that it would be they who defined themselves, not doctors, experts, teachers or even parents.
And she did this with such absolute conviction that the kids could not contradict her. They came away believing in her and thus believing in something they’d been taught to doubt – their own capabilities.
When I last saw Donna Mahr, she was pale but happy, at a table surrounded by great friends who’d been part of her book group for years. She asked after our son, as she never failed to do. At the moment I write this, he doesn’t know that she has died. Studying to be a chef, he had wanted to cook her a special dinner. Now, he won’t have the chance to do that. But already, even with false starts and do-overs, he has done her proud. He has looked inside himself and seen what Donna saw there. Donna Mahr didn’t leave a fortune or a foundation or a building named for her. She left a pyramid of better lives, a monument that will grow and thrive forever.