A recent study say teens who get fewer than eight hours of sleep on school nights are more likely to get involved in risky behavior. Well, that’s most high school students.

The authors of the study say it’s difficult to know if teens are drinking, using drugs or exhibiting other behaviors because they are not getting enough sleep or if the risky behavior keeps them from going to bed earlier. Either way, according to the study, a change in a teenager’s internal clock makes them want to stay up late and get up later.

Getting to bed at a decent hour has been a challenge in our household since my 16-year-old started high school. Here in Charlotte, high schools start classes at 7:15 a.m., which means that students have to get up mighty early to catch buses if their parents can’t drive them to school. And, in the evenings, there’s plenty of homework.

I’ve insisted that my daughter aim to be in bed by 10 p.m. on school nights. Sometimes she is, sometimes she isn’t, depending on the school workload on a given day. She gets up at 5:30 a.m. so she can get to the bus stop by 6:20 a.m.

It’s a difficult situation. Teenagers everywhere don’t get enough rest. And parents everywhere worry about them.

Is there a solution?

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My 16-year-old is signing up for driver’s education classes set to begin in a few weeks at her high school. Meanwhile, I’m practicing how to remain calm when it’s time for her to do her practice driving with me in the passenger’s seat. I’m also developing plans for some classes that she won’t be getting in traditional driver’s education. My father gave me these special classes when I was 16, and I hated them. But she’ll probably look back on the lessons one day, as I do, and be thankful that she got them.

Before my father allowed me to drive alone, he set up three or four classes on Saturday mornings in our driveway. The first was learning how to change a flat tire. It took a while but I finally mastered it and he moved on to basic maintenance skills: how to check the oil and other car fluids, how to check the air in the tires, how to check air filters. He talked to me about the necessity of getting the oil changed regularly and overall car care.

I didn’t like these Saturday sessions at all. A boy I liked lived a few doors up the street and as a teenager, I found it embarrassing to be outside working on a car. But a few years later, I understood the value of my father’s lessons and why he insisted that I do them. While driving to visit my parents one weekend while in college, I had a flat tire. I pulled over to the side of the road and changed it. I can still see my father’s pride when I shared the experience with him.

Over the years, I have relied often on these basic car maintenance skills. For my daughter, I’m going to turn to a mechanic to do the teaching. She’ll grumble, I’m sure. But at least she’ll be inside a garage.

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But I think he would be honored by this national memorial and urge us not to get stuck in the controversies over the various aspects of its construction but to keep pushing for change and equality. And these days, as our political environment reflects a troubling chaos and anger, we must heed his call to pursue the day when “people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

My 16-year-old daughter and I were in Washington a few days before the memorial officially opened, and in the spirit of those who make pilgrimages to someplace sacred, we found our way to the Tidal Basin and the 30 foot tall statue of King. After having not lived in the Washington area for a few years, I didn’t exactly remember how to get to the Tidal Basin and there were no signs along the way to serve as a guide. I’m hoping the lack of signage that day just means that they hadn’t been put up yet, not that they won’t be put up at all.

But we strolled through the monuments, enjoying the specialness of the Washington Monument, the Vietnam Memorial, the World War II Memorial. We gazed over at the Jefferson Memorial as walked along the basin under the cherry trees. And when we saw the King monument, both my daughter and I nearly gasped.

Oh, how can I describe the pride. I began talking to my daughter about my memories of King — watching him on the small, black and white television sitting on the dresser in my parent’s bedroom, hearing my parents talk about him over dinner, and crying when I heard that he had been assassinated. I told her about the riots, the pain and anger.

A fence kept us from getting close to the memorial, so we gazed at it along with other people who had made the pilgrimage too.

The memorial is not perfect, and neither was King. But his legacy rightfully deserves to be recognized among Washington’s treasures. I’ll go back to see it during my next visit to Washington. And every other time that I’m in the area.

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As the women gathered around tables to begin the discussion, the moderator asked the black women, “How many of you have someone in your family who worked as the help?” All the black women raised their hands. Nearly all the white women raised their hands when asked if black women had worked for their families.

It was a profound experience, one black woman said, to watch the movie that celebrated the courage of black women who worked as the help.

Three large churches — two mostly black and one mostly white– arranged the event to help create better dialogue and understanding among women in this southern city.

In two sold-out theaters, the women laughed and cried as they watched the movie about black maids working in a Mississippi town in the 1960s and their willingness to risk their lives to share their stories to a white woman who compiled a book about their experiences.

One 51-year-old black woman, who grew up in a rural area of South Carolina, said she started working as a maid at age 12, when her mother dressed her in a white shirt and dark skirt and took her daughter to her job. It was the early 1970s. Later, the same white family helped her go to college.

A 58-year-old white woman stood up and told the group, “I grew up in an area where everyone had a housekeeper. Now, at 34, my youngest daughter works as a maid.” I overheard a black woman say, “Now, they’re called nannies.”

There were many more stories of mothers and grandmothers who worked as the help, of the irony of the relationships between the black women and white families.

“We really want to help build better relationships,” one of the moderators told the group as the session ended. Most in the group agreed that coming together around the movie “The Help” was a good start.

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My 80-year-old mother worked as “the help” for many years in the 1950s and 1960s, cleaning the homes of white families and taking care of their children. She worked for one family with three children then practically raised another girl after her mother died when the child was four years old. Later, she helped take care of a disabled man.

“I didn’t have any choice,” my mother said about her work for white families. “It was hard to get jobs doing anything else.”

My mother told me she did not like having to be a servant. She didn’t like that the white families just took her services for granted. She didn’t like feeling that she was invisible to the people who ate her food, slept on the sheets she washed and left for work confident that she would keep their children safe. (Publicity photo from The Help shows actresses Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer who portray maids in the movie.)

The white family with the three children, she told me, regularly got home after the 5 p.m., when my mother was supposed to leave. But they offered no apologies, extra pay or the option of changing her hours. So my mother left home early and returned late to her own children and dealt with the disregard for her time until she found another job. The $18 a week she earned helped pay the bills and buy food at our house, which my parents bought in 1957.

“You never had to go through that,” my mother told me. “You never had to have white people telling you what to do.”

So the mantra in our house when my sisters and I were growing up was this: Study hard. Get a good education. Do your best.

All of us went to college.

I will watch “The Help” with heartfelt respect and gratitude for the black women who bravely and quietly did what they had to do to help their own families.

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My youngest sister was with my 80-year-old mother and called the rest of us after dialing 911. All four of us were in our hometown after returning from a family reunion so we rushed to my mother’s house, arriving moments after the ambulance.

The emergency workers were able to revive my mother and took her to the hospital emergency room, where we spent the next few hours waiting for examinations and tests to figure out what had happened. In the end, the prognosis was good. A visit a few days later to her primary doctor resulted in a change in some medication.

But the experience was unsettling. Through it all, I prayed, not only for my mother’s health and comfort but for steadiness as my sisters and I deal with the challenges of taking care of an aging parent.

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I suppose that’s what high school reunions are, an interesting mix of the past and present. They’re a time to recall memories of adolescent relationships and to reconnect as adults with a lifetime of widely different experiences. For a period of time, we are, in the eyes of old friends, the people that we used to be. So we call each other by the names we knew 40 years ago.

I went to the high school reunion of a class that isn’t mine, officially. I graduated from a predominantly white high school just as the school system in my North Carolina hometown was slowly accepting integration. Most of the people I grew up with finished from what was then the high school for black students.

If it wasn’t for nametags, many of us would not have recognized each other. But we laughed it off, all the while looking for familiarity in middle-age faces that had lost the innocence of youth. We talked about the friends who have passed on and those who are struggling with illness. And we tried to capture, for the people that we shared our dreams with long ago, what has happened so far on our life journey.

It was a wonderful celebration. 

Do you have memories you’d like to share of a recent high school reunion?

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It is the reunion of what used to be the “black high school” in the North Carolina city where I grew up. During the years of segregation, it was a pivotal part of the black community and remains so today.

I graduated from a predominantly “white high school,” choosing to ride a city bus across town when school officials took their first steps to implement the Brown v Brown desegregation case. It was the late 1960s, nearly a decade after the United States Supreme Court decision, and the school system offered what was then called “Freedom of Choice.” It was a baby step toward equality in the schools; students could pick any school in the city but they had to make their own arrangements to get there. So integration began slowly, which was what the policymakers obviously preferred.

At the time, I was dreaming of going to college and thought the resources available at the “white high school” I attended might help me reach that goal. The black students and white students had to learn how to be comfortable with each other, but I had an interesting high school experience. While I was involved in school activities and clubs, most of my relationships didn’t move outside the school campus unless we were involved in a school-sponsored event.

By the time I graduated, my neighborhood buddies were finishing too, as the last officially segregated class at the “black high school.” The following year, busing began as a way to integrate all schools in the city.

Over the years, I’ve stayed in touch with some of my friends from the “black high school.” Some of us went to college together and I’ve run into others at various times over the years.

I’m looking forward to connecting with friends that I knew in elementary and junior high school, friends that I went to a junior high school dance with when the school principal banned Afros, friends who will always be a part of an extended family that helped shape who I am.

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At first, I thought she was joking, but then she told me it would be too painful for her to go to her beautician. She ignored my protests that I really didn’t know how to straighten hair, that I didn’t want to burn her hair or her skin, that my niece would do a better job. But she insisted and I agreed, reluctantly.

Straightening hair has created many memories in my family over the years and my three sisters and I still chuckle about some of our experiences. As a young woman, Mom had dreams of being a beautician but didn’t get any formal training. She did the hair of friends and then, she had four daughters. Bingo! Of course, our hair was always pressed and styled.

On Saturday evenings, we would wait our turn for my mother to wash our hair and sit us with our backs to the stove so that she could better reach the smoking and sizzling straightening comb. It seemed that she didn’t want even the smallest hint of hair to escape the heat. We were always uneasy that she would burn our ears or neck; a few times she did.

By the time I left for college, attitudes about black hair were changing and I embraced the I’m-black-and-I’m-proud movement toward natural hair. So I’ve worn my kinky hair since my freshman year, moving from the Angela Davis-style big Afro to shorter Afros and then to locks. I haven’t straightened my hair in 40 years. It took my mother a long time to accept my decision. So it was ironic that she turned to me to straighten her hair.

On Hair Day, I could hardly believe it when my mother pulled out the same straightening comb she used during our childhood. She sat in the kitchen, with her back to the stove. She gave me some instructions, and I went to work.

I remained calm. I didn’t burn my mother. I didn’t go after the tiny hairs around her ears and neck.

When it was done, my mother was satisfied. But as soon as she’s able to walk better, I urged her to go back to her beautician.

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Things didn’t go as well as hoped after the surgery and my 80-year-old mother had a few complications in the hospital. My sisters and I were anxious but we did our best not to convey our uneasiness to our mother. We had a few sleepless nights.

My mother made it through the crisis but is still being monitored by her doctor. At the rehab center, she worked hard with the physical therapists and was walking relatively well when it was time to go home. She’s facing weeks of physical therapy.

I can’t tell you how many hugs and kisses I’ve given her over the past few weeks. And how often I’ve prayed.

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