Stories For 17 Year Olds

[Imelda Matchett]

Asingle look at their striking orange-red petals or one smell of their musky scent, and I'm transported back to the 1980s, to Astoria, New York, and my grandmother's apartment. It was a three-story building with a brick facade and a balcony on the front and back of her second-floor unit. The street was short and sloped down to where it ultimately dead-ended at the East River, the Tri-Borough bridge in view. Like so much of Queens, it was an eclectic street, made up of old Victorians on one side and apartments on the other, with large high rises looming at the top of the street.

But her flower garden . . . those flowers! A bright and colorful spot in a sea of gray and brown, the sidewalks surrounding it washed often. The garden just gleamed. It was in front of that flower garden that I sometimes set up a lemonade stand with my grandpa, selling lemonade and snacks to everyone taking a shortcut to the Astoria city pool.

She planted everything from seed, and so was how I first learned to garden. She planted so many flowers - a rainbow of every color, variety, and size. As for planting, I mostly remember the marigold seeds, a big sack of them in the back of the garage. After we prepared the holes, she'd fill her wrinkled hand and my smooth one with the black-gray seeds, and she'd show me how to not only plant them but also care for them while they germinated. I visited her most weekends, so week after week after planting, I anxiously awaited the first sprouts. Marigolds were constants in her garden and the ones we seemed to plant most often, all summer long.

In my own yard now, I plant lots of things, almost always from seedlings or rhizomes. But I always have packs of marigold seeds on hand, and I always plant a few here and there in the various flowerbeds at season's start.

They never bloomed this year, so I figured it was just was one of those years. Imagine my surprise last week when I was pulling out of my driveway and, from the corner of my eye, I saw the unexpected but familiar burst of orange and deep red.

There are only a few of them, but there they are. And I'm ten again, in Astoria, smiling when those young shoots appear, grateful all summer as I care for them, but even more grateful with my grandma at my side.

This story is part of a series from NPR's Science desk called The Other Side of Anger. There's no question that we're in angry times. It's in our politics, our schools and our homes. Anger can be a destructive emotion, but it can also be a positive force.

Then back in early December, I had an opportunity of a lifetime. I traveled to the Canadian Arctic to report on a story about the Inuit and their remarkable ability to regulate anger. During the trip, I got the chance to hear advice from arguably the calmest, coolest moms in the world: Inuit moms.

For thousands of years, the Inuit have raised children in one of the harshest places on Earth. During that time, they've developed a suite of powerful parenting tools to teach children emotional intelligence, especially when it comes to anger.

In fact, there's no reason for a parent to get angry at a small child, Tikivik says: "Anger has no purpose. It's not going to solve your problem. It only stops communication between the child and the mom."

When a child is misbehaving or having a tantrum, the child is too upset to learn, says 89-year-old Eenoapik Sageatook, whose family was forced to settle in a town when she was a little girl. So there's no reason to scold or shout during these moments.

In other words, cool your jets, Mama Doucleff. Stop blowing your fuse. Stop taking the toddler's behavior personally. And stop thinking that Rosy is "pushing your buttons," says Inuit mom and radio producer Lisa Ipeelie.

OK. I admit that following this advice was really hard. I mean really, really hard. It took weeks of practice (and another trick I learned about anger). At first, I just stopped saying anything to Rosy when she had a tantrum or hit me. I knew that if I opened my mouth, the words would be tinged in anger. So I would just close my eyes to calm myself down and then wait for Rosy to calm down herself.

Instead of yelling or telling kids what to do, Inuit parents traditionally discipline through storytelling, says Goota Jaw, who teaches an Inuit parenting class at Nunavut Arctic College in Iqaluit, Canada.

For example, she says, to get kids to stay away from the dangerous ocean, parents tell them about a sea monster that lives in the water. If you go too close to the water, the parents say, the monster will put you in his pouch, drag you down to the ocean and adopt you out to another family.

One afternoon, Rosy and I were in the kitchen, preparing dinner. I was trying to get her to close the refrigerator door. I deployed my typical strategy: adult logic followed by nagging. I explained several times how she is wasting energy.

After a few minutes, I found myself in the all-too common predicament of arguing with a proto-human. I was ready to blow a fuse when my thoughts turned to Goota Jaw and the sea monster. So I said, with a half-serious, half-playful tone, "You know? There's a monster inside the refrigerator, and if he warms up, he's going to get bigger and bigger and come get you."

1. Sharing Monster: Living up in a tree outside the kitchen window, the sharing monster grows bigger and bigger when little kids aren't sharing. At some point, he could come up, snatch you and take you up in the tree.

4. Dress Spiders: Back in January, Rosy wore the same pink dress day and night for about five days. I couldn't get her to take it off. I tried talking logically: "Rosy, if we wash it tonight, it won't have stains on it for school tomorrow." She looked at me as if I were speaking French.

Storytelling has definitely decreased the yelling, nagging and blown fuses in our home. But the stories didn't stop the hitting. For that, I needed inspiration from another Inuit strategy, which anthropologist Jean Briggs studied for more than 30 years ago.

Then the child has to think: "What should I do?" If the child takes the bait and hits, the parent doesn't scold or yell but instead acts out the consequences. "Ow, that hurts!" Mom or Dad might exclaim, to show that hitting hurts.

The goal is to give the child a chance to practice the proper behavior at a time when the child is open to learning and not emotionally charged. Throughout the drama, the parent keeps a playful tone and a wink in the eye.

With Rosy and her hitting, I definitely had not been reacting in a playful way. Just the opposite: I was stern and serious. So with a hefty dose of skepticism, I abandoned that strategy and gave this playful approach a try.

Each time Rosy hit me, no matter how hard she slapped and how infuriated I was, I didn't get angry. Instead, I said in a dramatic way, "Ooo, that hurts! Goodness that hurts!" to show that hitting hurt me physically and emotionally.

Immediately, this fun tone changed Rosy's behavior. The tension between us melted away, and the hitting decreased. I could see the little gears in her brain churning. "Wait! Am I hurting Mom's feelings?" she seemed to be thinking. (And I could see that Ipeelie was right. Rosy wasn't pushing my buttons. She cared about my feelings.)

So I thought I'd try putting on a little drama by asking her, "Why don't you hit me?" The first few tries were rough. She would wallop me. But I stuck to the script, and slowly I could see her thinking before she struck. She started to play-hit me or stopped mid-swing. After about a month, a tiny miracle occurred.

I should like to tell you of three eighteen-year-old boys. In 1856 more than a thousand of our people, some of them perhaps your forebears, found themselves in serious trouble while crossing the plains to this valley. Because of a series of unfortunate circumstances, they were late in getting started. They ran into snow and bitter cold in the highlands of Wyoming. Their situation was desperate, with deaths occurring every day.

President Young learned of their condition as the October general conference was about to begin. He immediately called for teams, wagons, drivers, and supplies to leave to rescue the bereft Saints. When the first rescue team reached the Martin Company, there were too few wagons to carry the suffering people. The rescuers had to insist that the carts keep moving.

When they reached the Sweetwater River on November 3, chunks of ice were floating in the freezing water. After all these people had been through, and in their weakened condition, that river seemed impossible to cross. It looked like stepping into death itself to move into the freezing stream. Men who once had been strong sat on the frozen ground and wept, as did the women and children. Many simply could not face that ordeal.

Mark you, these boys were eighteen years of age at the time. And, because of the program then in effect, they likely were holders of the Aaronic Priesthood. Great was their heroism, sacred the sacrifice they made of health and eventually of life itself to save the lives of those they helped.

Here at LDSminds, we simply want to provide you with a resource that will motivate, educate, and inspire you to Do More, Be Better, and Become Greater. The key to a successful life in the Gospel is continual learning.

Thus, we hope you will use this site in your personal and family studies, as well as in your preparations for teaching the Gospel in whatever setting. This collaboration of quotes, talks, lessons, poems, stories, and all things of the like are intended to help you grow as an individual and as a student in the gospel.

The other thing to call out is that it doesn't matter to her very much which book she is reading. She does get into a book deeply, but once it's done she immediately picks up the next. She has 10 open books scattered around the house and unless she is really stuck she'll just pick the closest one and starts reading.

a/ She's doing well at school, near the top of the class across all subjects and the teachers speak very highly of her and haven't flagged any concerns (though they have 30 children and as long as she "performs" well, they might not notice?)

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