A Letter to the Parents Who Dread the First Day of School Photos

Hello, Dear One,

’Tis the season, again. I know how you are bracing yourself for the photos that dance across your feed of Everyone Else’s Children Who Look Happy. They appear thrilled to be headed back to school. You notice their ruddy, sun-kissed faces, their smartly pressed uniforms. Maybe it’s the backpacks full of brand new supplies and so.much.potential that grip you for a moment before you remember this is not your story.

Maybe once upon a time you were in the camp of those who were ecstatic to snap and post photos of your children on the first day of school. The two pocket folders were ready for A papers, the calendar was ripe for new adventures. You felt proud and excited and maybe a touch trepidatious. Would their teacher be kind and inspiring? Who would be their friends in homeroom? What would happen at recess and would your little person be brave and inclusive? Would this be the best year of school ever?

Perhaps you no longer allow yourself to feel this hope, because of how your story unfolded in school years past. You try to put stock in the promise of a clean slate, but all you hear are the calls from the principal or the school counselor or the learning specialist or the math teacher AGAIN, again with the missed assignments or the behavior or the sickness or the mood swings. Your heart is still aching from the bullying or the distracting or the excluding that went down last year. You don’t have to work hard to imagine the dynamics that will replicate themselves— just shuffle the cast and the scenery a bit and you already know the script for Act I.

Or maybe you do have all the hope in the world for this school year, given the only direction to go from rock bottom is up. You’ve already been to the darkest place, to the Upside Down, and you already got that ticket punched. You know what it’s like to watch your kid go undiagnosed or unmedicated or unacknowledged or unprotected. You are far too acquainted with a lack of to not be able to believe in the abundance.

Still, your optimism is guarded. You want to believe, but you are cautious. Your heart has been broken before. You are tired. You’ve had to advocate so fiercely in the past. You think, surely that needle’s got to move. Is this the year when the progress report shows actual progress? You see everyone else’s kids smiling as they board the big yellow school bus and you wonder if yours will ever have a seat on there, or if they will always ride the struggle bus.

Dear one, I want you to know that you are not alone. I have ridden the struggle bus as a parent and as an educator for years. I often feel that I am sitting alone on the bus, looking out a murky window to yards where everyone else is having the time of their lives. It is only when I have raised my hand, though, to let others know that there’s a seat next to me, right here on this busted bench with gum stuck to the bottom of the seat, that I’ve felt such freedom. The journey of shepherding kids through school is so damn hard, especially if your kid’s factory settings are not the default. But it can also be pretty gnarly and hilarious and complicated and enriching. Why would we want to pretend otherwise?

Back to school photos tell the story of A Beginning, but even beginnings, as you know, can be fraught. Everyone else seems to approach the year with ease. To you, the beginning of the school year can feel heavy and anxious-making and downright baffling. How did we get here again?

Except, we are not Here Again, after all. We’re another year wiser, and another year stronger. Our backpacks are a bit more battered, but they are full of lessons and strategies for navigating the difficulties and the red tape. We may again find a seat reserved for us and our kid(s) on the struggle bus, but we’re seasoned students of this struggle. The story of the year ahead may be familiar in theme, but if you thought it would be a solo journey—plot twist—your First Day of School Photo isn’t a selfie. It’s an ussie.

Solidarity,
A Struggle Bus Rider

These Come Back to Me

I imagine my children think of me as this present iteration only, the woman who checks to see if the toothbrushes in the holder are wet, who is ever skeptical that the offspring are lying about having brushed their teeth. My children are like most in that they cannot fathom their parents as their slippery age, or in their wobbly legs. Even though there is evidence that I was not born into the 40 year-old body of a woman obsessed with flossing (and the other hygiene habits of her offspring). Even though I tell them about times I was young and very wide-eyed and sort of dumb, they think probably as I once did, that our parents may have once been younger, but they were essentially the same people, just in shorter containers or less bald.

What does it benefit a child to know that their parent was once as incompletely formed as they are now? I suppose it matters because when we make mistakes, we need grace from each other and for ourselves. We need to remind one another how far we’ve come, and that no one has simply arrived like an Amazon package, shrink-wrapped and cushioned in a bubble envelope, ready to be plugged in and operated.

Lately I am starting to move from a place of parenting for the present season —checking in on homework and monitoring manners —and parenting more for The Launch. I want to parent with goals in mind, both in order to coexist with these humans for the next few years, and to prepare people who will someday not live with me (where they inhale an entire box of ice cream sandwiches in four minutes flat). Sometimes I dream of this sweet hereafter in which my children text me not from the other room (with an incomprehensible meme) but from art school or med school or maybe the school of hard knocks in which they reveal to me an eternal truth that I imparted to them in some clumsy moment I no longer remember, but that rings true to what they glimpse from their hilltop or valley. I will be humbled and grateful and I will celebrate with a gluten-free ice cream sandwich.

My dad and stepmom visited last weekend after 14 months of us all not being able to see one another. We were talking about plans for camp for the kids, and my dad said how glad he was that we had not left him for two months at a time when we were younger. How strange the ache of children leaving you is, such that during the years in which they are attached to you like barnacles, you can also feel so very much alone. And then, in my own experience, the years my own parents probably thought I would be with them for a few years, I made every effort to divide that pie into unequal slices with jobs and friends and all the extra curriculars I could cram into a young life.

Parents say that we thought there would be more time—and, though delusional, we really think this. We think there will be more time to get things right, to rehearse the consequences talk and see if it lands us in a soft, amicable place. We think there will be more time to say the things we want to say and to take the kids to the places we dreamed of taking them. All this presumes our children will wax strong and remain healthy.

What I long to hear is from parents who were not able to parent their children for as long as they expected. If they were deluded once to think there would be more time—surely they were forced to awaken to the cruel truth that time is a thief. I want to know what the bereaved parents, the estranged, the separated, the parents of the lost and trafficked and comatose children believe now. What can they tell me about the gift of knowing only what we know and nothing more? What can they tell me about the teeth we think need brushing?

Love is Actually

I had to make a quick pickup at the mall this evening, which is a lie, because even in pandemic times, a quick pickup at the mall in peak holiday shopping season on a Friday night is One. Big. Oxymoron. The holiday rush was so different, still loud and rushy, but it was masked up and spaced apart.

When I saw the Mall Santa wearing his shielded mask, sitting six feet behind the bench where children could supposedly meet him, something caught in my throat and I found myself oddly choking back tears. Shuffling by, I tried to unpack why I was so moved by the Socially Distanced Santa. I think it was partly due to how dystopian all this seemed, and how frankly unfair it is to the kiddies. We could have given them a virus-free holiday season as they are able to in, say, Australia which has effectively beat the ‘VID. I’m mourning the holiday that could have been.

But the Socially Distanced Santa also reminded me of the scene from “Love, Actually” when all the anonymous people are hugging in Heathrow Airport. We hear Hugh Grant intone that “Love is…actually…all around.” In spite of the film’s problematic relationship with curvy women, I’m a fan of the ways that it normalizes turtlenecks for all mankind, as well as its dismantling of the hierarchy of people needing love. Yes, the Prime Minister gets lonely. Yes, the widow and Claudia Schiffer and the married couple and the folks living in developmental care facilities are all dying to be well-loved. If we train our eyes to see, so says Hugh Grant, we’ll see the love all around.

I’d like to add a Covid in America Asterisk to that adage, if I may. In this quaky season before anyone on the stateside is vaccinated, I think it’s important not just to look for love, but to look for opportunities to love. Those are actually all around. They are found in the spare change jars we’ve been meaning to empty and turn into gift cards for the mail carriers and crossing guards. They are in the shoebox of stationery we’ve been meaning to bust open to write a letter to our granny in the home. They are in all the places we can exercise extra patience. True, no one can see our smile because it’s hidden by a mask, but that, too, is an opportunity to show love.

As for self-love, I will attest that I’ve been staring at this same mug for 40 years and, well, I don’t fully know how to love that lady. But she is looking for ways to love being herself. I can’t imagine learning to love being alive in one’s own body and not wanting it for one’s neighbor. Maybe it’s a radical notion, but wouldn’t we want for others the same measure of love we have experienced? Self-love, when it translates to love of being oneself, wants for others to be a part of that whole joyful equation. Self-love negates itself when it does not show that same love for others. In other words, stay home, drink egg nog, look for ways to love from a safe distance so that Mall Santa can live his best life next year and get back to handing out candy canes and judging kiddies’ wishes for ponies.