It takes all of us.

Recently, I read a book by Karen Zacharias titled Hero Mama. It’s a memoir describing the struggles of Karen’s mother to raise her family after her husband died in Vietnam.

Karen used to write for the Tri-City Herald. I enjoyed her columns for both their wit and colorful descriptions of her siblings and growing up in the South. From her writings, I was aware her dad had died in the war and that she was working on a project to connect with the man who was her father. She wrote about planning to go to Vietnam with a group of survivors of the war, but ran into opposition from her employers who did not see the value in giving her the time off she needed for the trip.

When I read her last column, I wrote to her, told her how much I enjoyed her work and wished her well on her project. To my surprise, her husband Tim wrote back. Karen had already left for Vietnam, but he thanked me for my kind words. It turned out he was a teacher in Oregon and we commiserated over school funding woes.

I finally met Karen on her book tour for Hero Mama. The title came from an experience she had in Vietnam. There were the usual war memorials, but one was different. It was a statue of a woman and was dedicated to the “Hero Mothers” who watched their loved ones go off to war, and then went to extraordinary lengths to maintain their families, community, and culture. Karen realized this described her mother, hence the title of her memoir.

Karen was able to embrace the dysfunction of her family, pull it close, peer into it and see that the dysfunction was imposed by circumstances beyond the control of these basically good people. She could see that while her mother was not perfect, she never gave up and in fact worked extraordinarily hard, doing her best to overcome the obstacles thrown in front of her family.

It scares me to think about the Karens in our schools today. How many are being bulldozed aside by one-size-fits-all curriculum or high-stakes standardized tests? How many are being lost in large classes? How many authors are we losing, or carpenters, or plumbers, or police officers? It’s easy to say we have high standards, but are we providing the resources needed for every student to reach those high standards? It costs a lot less to help someone become a contributing member of our community than to look away and by our inaction push them into despair.

Read the book. It took more than a heroic mother to save the family. It takes all of us.