Four years ago, I mopped the floor with Jeremy Lansing while playing his residence hall-room Playstation. On Thursday nights we took tequila shots right out of the bottle and cruised down to the girls’ floor.
When you’re trying to take somebody’s life in a video game, you never imagine that one day he’ll save lives. When you’re taking shots with somebody, you never imagine that someday he’ll help people kick their alcoholism.
After four years of drifting away from each other, that’s what I’ve come to find out. That’s what Jeremy Lansing does, or tries to do, every day as a counselor for the Cottage Grove Family Relief Nursery.
Other people think about changing the world. Jeremy Lansing changes it.
The Relief Nursery is an organization aimed at preventing child abuse before it happens. There’s a nursery in Eugene, but Lansing works for the Cottage Grove version. He likes the rural community because it’s more challenging. If there’s one thing you’ll learn about Jeremy Lansing, it’s that he likes a challenge.
Lansing is an “Early Childhood Intervention and Community Outreach Specialist.” It’s a fancy way of saying he works with both kids and their parents. He spends hours during the day with the kids, most of whom bounce off the walls like they were superheroes, and he never uses the word “no” or the word “don’t.”
Then he goes into the community and meets with parents, many of whom have drug problems or emotional issues, and he never uses the word “no” or the word “don’t.”
“People don’t learn from being told what they can’t do, they learn from being told what they can do,” Lansing said.
Some of the families are required to attend the nursery by the courts after child-abuse cases. Some families seek out the nursery because the weight of parenting is heavier than a dumbbell. Some parents simply want to learn how to be better. At life.
Lansing deals with enough sadness every day to crush a normal person. He deals with kids whose parents were abusive or whose parents stuck needles in their arms while they were pregnant. He deals with kids who won’t talk and kids who talk too much.
“I want those situations that are mind-wrenching sometimes, or heart-tearing,” Lansing said. “That’s where the most change can happen.”
Lansing was a psychology major, but applying that psychology still blows his mind.
“It’s not always easy,” Lansing admits.
Sometimes, Lansing has to face issues that the rest of us will never want to or have to face. He tells the story of a young girl who, when she first got to the nursery, wouldn’t talk and mostly sat in a corner, biting her lip. Worse, she reenacted sexual acts with a doll on the nursery playground, underneath a slide. She often broke down crying for no particular reason.
“Seeing a child do things like that makes you awe-struck,” Lansing said. “It’s not something you associate with a child.”
The girl’s mother was a methamphetamine addict and her father was a pedophile. The girl would spend days in bed with her mother, and she was neglected by both parents.
After the girl moved in with a foster family, the family didn’t know how to deal with her. Their natural reaction was, “Stop!” “No!” “Don’t!”
But over several months at the relief nursery, the girl learned how to interact socially. Slowly, with Lansing’s positive building blocks, she built relationships with her foster parents and with other children in the program. Lansing tried to help the foster parents understand their child, so they ended up working alongside him in her development, like partners in a new restaurant.
Lansing helped a little girl say, “Please pass the ketchup.” It may not seem like a lot. But he taught a girl without feelings how to feel. He does this all the time. If a kid lashes out, he teaches the kid to lash in. If a parent can’t take the stress, Lansing helps them manage it like a bank manages money.
Once upon a time, Lansing was that lash-out kid, without the troubled background. He threw chairs and even hit a teacher in fifth grade. When I knew him freshman year, he was a typical college student, drinking a lot and being social. Now I find out that he’s come full circle, he’s helping kids like him. And that’s the point, he says. If he can do it, why can’t other kids?
Lansing wants to enact change on a grand scale some day. He wishes he could’ve been an athlete, so he could “have a pulpit” to impart his views. Someday, he will have that pulpit. The instant he shows up on my presidential ballot, I’m ticking his name without hesitating.
See, I think Lansing already enacts change on a grand scale. Even if it’s only one or two people at a time, it’s better to change things in a small environment than not change things at all.
Lansing said his goal is to inspire somebody every day, whether it be a child at the relief nursery or a co-worker or a friend, he doesn’t care.
Well, today, Jeremy Lansing inspired me., and I hope he inspired you.
To donate to the Cottage Grove Family Relief Nursery, call (541) 942-4835.