Are You Going to Jump?

I Did Not Teach Fear

I stumbled into a great act of motherhood accidently.

My ten-year-old boy is speaking to seven hundred university students about life with cystic fibrosis. They fill an auditorium. They are seated on the floor among piles of knapsacks and raincoats. There are so many students that they line the back wall. Matthew has no notes. He has not practiced. He has a power point photo slide show that I showed him how to use thirty minutes ago. He has a microphone. The lights are dimmed and the hall is so quiet you can hear the students in the front row, two feet from us, breath. I spoke first and introduced the disease and our research for a cure. Now it is his turn.

Matthews public speaking career started early. It evolved naturally out of my own advocacy efforts as a board member for Cystic Fibrosis Canada. When television crews come to our house on several occasions to film a “day in the life” he plays to the camera as a natural clown.

By age nine the television team ask to interview him directly as a segment of a longer interview with me. The camera loves him. At ten he asks to be a super strider for the Toronto zoo walk fundraising event. I am surprised, I have tried not to push him into this. But when he asks I encourage the idea. He speaks to a crowd of fifty event participants on a podium with a local television personality. They pass the microphone back and forth and laugh and the crowd laughs. Matthew is a natural.

He is asked to do another event - a soccer tournament that raises money for his disease. This crowd is over one eighty seated guests. He makes them laugh and cry at the same time. They give him a standing ovation.

Then Matthew asks what is the next biggest fundraiser. I tell him about a university frosh week fundraiser. When I ask the CF chapter staff whether there is something they would like Matthew to do for the university event they love the idea. I have done such speaking engagements myself. They tend to be smaller student leader orientations.

I never dreamed that the CF chapter would have my ten year old speak to all the student participants in this campus. I never dreamed I would be putting my son in front of seven hundred teenagers. But it is done now no turning back. I choose not to make a big deal about it. I explain to Matthew what the group will be like. I explain to him that if he gets shy or nervous while speaking to the students that it will add charm and humanity to the presentation. I tell him that the audience will empathize with him and that what ever happens they will embrace him. I ask him if he wants to practice or write up notes. He says “no mommy it will sound fake”.

 Back in the auditorium in front of seven hundred students, my son nails it. The students in the front row hold their breaths. Tears stream down their faces. Then Matthew starts clowning around and lifts up his shirt to show off the three inch scar on his stomach from surgery at birth. They chuckle and so doing they remember to breath again. Matthew has them in the palm of his hands. He speaks for twenty minutes. When he is done seven hundred students rise as one, thumping the floor, hooting and clapping. The noise overwhelms the auditorium.

I reflect on what has happened. It is possibly one of my proudest mom moments. I didn't teach fear. I didn't impose limits on my son's ambitions. I let the momentum carry forward to action and accomplishment so that my son could rise to his potential without worry of failure. There was no safe place in what we did. There was no hiding. Just jump in with both feet and see what happens.