Calvert School Blog

My middle daughter called this week.  She is a homeschool graduate, away at her first year of college and in the midst of an interview process for a n RA position at the college.  In her interview she was asked:  “What singular event in your life has made you the person you are today?”  I think her answer gobsmacked the interview board.  What she recalled may be a funny story for you, but there is also a lesson in it for me – and perhaps for you too.

When she and her younger sister were about twelve and ten years of age, they were really at each other hammer and tongs.  EVERYTHING was an argument – these two could argue about the color of grass.  I finally reached the end of my rope with their bickering.  They had always bickered – but the older they grew the more frequent and intense it became.

So one day, at the end of my wits, I said, “That’s it!  You two come here.  I have a solution to your arguing.”  They came into the school room and I pulled a ribbon out of a drawer.  “Stick out your right hands,” I said.  They looked at each other and then at me.  I took the ribbon, and tied their right hands together. (They were both right-handed.)  They laughed.

“From this point forward, until bedtime tonight, you two will remain tied together.  This is going a concrete experience in working together.  You will do everything together today.”  And then I huffed out of the room.

They thought it was a great lark, for about a half an hour.  Then they came to me an announced that they needed to be untied because one of them had to go to the bathroom.

“Nope,” I said. “The WHOLE day is a collaboration – the good, the bad and the ugly.”  You can imagine the looks I got.  They were certain I had gone straight around the bend.

As the day wore on however, they figured out they had to make the best of it.  They cooperated, one opening the peanut butter jar and the other digging  in with a knife.

Fast forward some seven years to a college interview room, and THIS was the anecdote my eighteen year old daughter chose to recount.  She said had I not taken that action, she doubted that she and her sister would be close today.  But today she counts her sixteen year old sister as her best and closest friend.  She said that the lesson she learned was that cooperation was the key to co-habitation with a sibling.  She said it was this event that caused her to view all of her relationships differently.  Today, at almost 19 – her birthday is in two weeks – she is one of the most level-headed young adults I know.

I didn’t know that my action would be a game changer for them.  But for me this is the lesson:  When I bump up against a difficult situation, perhaps tying myself to it will bring about a resolution.  I hope it will be the same for you.