Take care of your own backyard.

As an impassioned 22-year-old volunteer teacher I was ready to fix the world in a year.

My mother slowed me down with six words from her grandfather — a career restaurateur and barman who greeted the world with a smile and conversation — "Take care of your own backyard."

It took me 20 years, hundreds of students, and 3 kids to realize what she meant.

My mother was a child development major — a major she invented with the dean inside Boston College's Carroll School of Education because she wasn't going to be a teacher or social worker, and her course selection evaded classification. She worked with adults with disabilities before moving 3 times with 3 young kids took over our lives. She knew the psychology and development frames, and had the training that made me later ask her "Why don't you run a school?" She didn't need scripts, routines, and frameworks because she had something better: she had agency and intent.

In a single look your direction, she was resilient, patient, gentle and demanding. Her love was the grace and space that allowed us to feel safe in our mess, and a quiet confidence that we would do the right thing for others and in so doing find ourselves.

What she meant, when she reminded me to "take care of my own backyard," was that the single most important thing I controlled was the way I showed up every day — because the measure of a life is in human relationship.

We give them our full attention. We are grateful for all parts of them. We don't worry about the return or the outcome because the giving is the living.

She never said any of this to me. She just taught it to me when she sat in the dark with me and listened. You can do that too — it's simpler than you realize.

So try this this week: give yourself permission to leave your phone in the other room, sit at the dinner table with your kids for way too long. Or sit on their bed in the dark well past lights out, and listen. And when you see them next, just be glad they are there.