Another year

Here's a little confession: I am a very tired teacher who is looking forward rather desperately to summer, but this time of year is also tough for me -- tough because part of me isn't ready to let go. It is the very definition of bittersweet.

My daughter has just a few days left of fourth grade. She's so excited to be a fifth grader, to be at the top of the school. She loves her oddball class and she's excited (!) about middle school. She's ten, still a little girl in so many ways, but also not. Not so little. She's nearly a preteen, and when I say that out loud, Matt shushes me furiously because he is just not ready to talk about it. Last night at her brother's kindergarten concert she hugged her old teacher, who caught my eye and we had this moment because Suzannah is so tall. Where is the tiny pony-tailed girl I left on that brightly-colored carpet just moments ago? And for that matter, where is her delicious round-cheeked little brother with his big cloth-diapered bum and joyful squeals? I'll tell you. That solid little boy stretched out into a knobby-kneed bundle of kindergarten wiggle who stood on the risers in the school gym for the first time last night, singing his heart out in his first school concert.

"Wow," his sister said. "This is the first time I'm the one sitting in the audience and he's standing up there." Indeed. I remember wearing Isaac on my chest in the Ergo when his sister was in kindergarten. I remember praying he'd stay quiet while she sang in her kindergarten concert. I remember holding him in the back, swaying with him. Shhhh. Look at Zannah! And now he has taken his place on the risers, and he is the one scanning the audience, and he is the child breaking into a grin when he sees his parents grinning from the second row.

That moment is so sweet, every time: when our children see us seeing them. The relief and pride that spreads across their faces swells inside my own heart until I really do feel like I'll burst. Last night I watched my radiant son singing and bobbing to the music, watched him do all the hand motions and actions, and I know I was grinning like a crazy person but I just can't believe we're here. Sometimes I experience these flashes in which it feels like everything, everything, is contained in a single moment: my son's first cry, the way I touched my nose to his in wonder and delight, the way I couldn't stop smelling him. The way he used to shriek with glee for no reason other than he seemed to love being a baby. The way he screamed and shook when the pediatrician had to insert a catheter when he had his first UTI, the way I pressed my forehead against his and tried to calm him. The way he used to fling himself into the dog bed and grab at our pug's face. The way he played in the sand at Ocean Shores and screamed in terror at the sight of a giant dead crab. Watching him sleep in a hospital emergency room, watching him tear through the water at the splash park, watching him construct elaborate towers and bridges out of Tinker Toys. Kissing his cheeks, washing his hair. Watching him color and write and concentrate and be still. Seeing him run and laugh and tumble. Tantrums, whining, giggling, kissing, snoring.

Somehow, I feel it all coursing through me even as we are present in this specific moment in time: Matt and I are beaming at our son, who is standing on the risers at his first kindergarten concert and beaming back at us, and his sister (who saw the concert at the school assembly already) whispers, "The next song is my favorite. You'll see. It's really funny." And I realize it's impossible to hold this moment, to stop time, and I don't really want to do that anyway, but somehow the knowledge that this marks the end of our kindergarten experience (as if it's all of ours, and not only our son's) just about levels me. How are we here, with our almost-first-grader and our almost-fifth-grader, parents of children in the thick of their elementary years, checking their folders and reading at night and attending conferences and signing permission trips and chaperoning field trips? How great, how fast is the leap from washing loads of diapers and cheering on our children's chubby-legged first uncertain steps across the living room?

(I suppose this is one reason I write. It's the only way I can hold these moments, to prove they existed from some future point in which I sit, shaking my head with total bewilderment.)

Wrapping up another school year of my own is a similar mix of exhilaration, exhaustion, and a strange melancholy. I have had three absolutely fantastic classes this year and one class that just made me crazy. All of them have frustrated and drained me at some point. All of them have had students who broke my heart. All of them have had students who filled my heart with love and pride the way my own children do. (And how often it seems the same kids who broke my heart filled it up again.) I have been challenged, delighted, totally baffled. I have threatened and cajoled and begged. I have perfected THE LOOK. I have taught like an insane person. I mean, honestly, I'm not even trying to not sound insane these days. Yesterday I said to a kid I love/a kid who has the potential to devastate me, "How many times have I physically assaulted you over the last two years?"

"Uh, none?"

"You're welcome. And am I currently punching you? In the face?"

"No..."

"Then I am going to go ahead and pat myself on the back. I'm going to make myself an award. Teacher of the Year. Because you take me to the edge of my very sanity, Buddy."

...I probably shouldn't talk like that, but it's June. I made some other idle threat this afternoon to a kid in a different class and a girl shrieked, "Ms. Winslow!"

I hadn't realized she was listening. I paused. "Yes?"

She stared at me for a beat. Then she said, "Oh my GOD, I am so going to miss this class."

And I am too. I am so eager for the summer, and so ready. But when I have spent the last ten months with these kids, when they are part of my day, part of my life, part of my psyche, when I have loved them and worried about them and celebrated them and tried to get us all ready for whatever comes next, the letting go isn't as easy as one might think. Oh, dear seventh period girl, I'm going to miss this class, too.

Be safe, Babies. I'll see you in the fall.