Empathy, noun–the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.

Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in.

Robert Frost

Saturday I heard Utah’s First Lady Abby Cox identify ‘empathy’ as one of the core principles behind her new initiative to create and support a program which provides unified sport competitions in Utah schools. I’d never heard of ‘adapted sports’, but I recognized their value instantly. It’s a pairing of volunteers from across a school’s student body with local students with disabilities. The partners learn to work together so that every child who wishes to do so can compete on the field or court instead of just watching from the sidelines. One of the goals of this budding program is to build empathy for one another’s strengths and challenges.

I was reminded of that when Son #6 told me recently that my twin granddaughters had been the target of some unfortunate bullying at school. This son and his wife adopted the girls as newborns. They were chubby little babies with laughter so infectious that people would stop on the street to listen to them. But they don’t look quite like most of the other children in the neighborhood. Many of their peers had had limited experience with classmates whose appearance wasn’t exactly like their own. And those children could be cruel. Son #6 and his wife have worked tirelessly with educators helping my grandchildren traverse what might have become treacherous waters without intervention.

I know exactly how those beloved little girls feel. I was six weeks or eight weeks into my ninth grade year when my dad was transferred to an Air Force base on the shores of Lake Michigan. Suddenly I went from a school in Detroit seven stories tall housing 5,000 students to a tiny town whose high school had only 300 students total in grades nine through twelve—virtually all of whom had known each other since birth. Our base housing almost always had a couple dozen of we teen-aged “military brats” who rotated through the public school in this rural community, and while their parents relished the increased income a military base provided to the area, the local teenagers ostracized us and left us mostly to flounder around socially for a couple of years until our dads got sent to a new assignment somewhere else.

Being the newest “new girl” was painful for me. I wasn’t an athlete; I didn’t sing. I didn’t know any of the local traditions, and I generally got the best grades in the class, so I was not a magnet for popularity. In those days all students were required to dress in a prescribed uniform for PE. Our locker room was filled with row after row of cubbies separated by benches which ran along the center between the racks. One afternoon I was late getting out of my last class—gym. (The image of that day is so clear in my mind, I can see the slant of the winter sunlight through the bank of high windows above me.) As far as I could tell, I was the only student left in the locker room. All around me was deadly quiet.

Seated on a bench, I was changing my shoes when I heard a group of voices float toward me from the next bank of lockers. There were apparently several girls chattering away. I ignored them until I realized they were talking about me. And they were not nice. After all these years, I still hear them making fun of the “new” girl. One of them ridiculed my religious beliefs; another called me a derogatory slur which I won’t repeat. Stung, I started to cry, but I bit my lip instead because I didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of realizing I was there. I grabbed my shoes and tip-toed in bare feet out into the hall.

It was years before I realized those “mean” girls who had so traumatized me had no idea that I had spent my life moving from place to place, uprooting friendships, having to navigate unknown cities, different schools, and often vastly different curriculums. They couldn’t have known how lonely I sometimes was, or how I wished I could be part of a group of kids who knew each other so well, they didn’t have to explain their jokes. I was the outsider, and they had no need at all to let me in. Now, of course, I understand that they had their own insecurities and uncertainties to deal with. They were, after all, just kids.

Each of us has a back story hidden from casual view—including my young granddaughters and the students with disabilities whom I watched on the Rio Tinto playing field last weekend. First Lady Cox may be on to something. Give students who seem to have little in common a chance to practice and play together–what happens? Students discover a shared love of sport. Social boundaries disappear. While they’re at it, they might be surprised to find value in one another’s stories. In the end, empathy may, indeed, emerge as a balm for society’s current wide-reaching plagues of the heart.