My girl

Me, during bedtime reading: Suzannah, you’re GREAT at reading. Why don’t you read to ME tonight?
Suzannah: Fine. I’ll read ONE page. Maybe two. But only two.
Me: But my throat is really tired! I’ve had to talk so much in the last two days!
Suzannah: Well, I’ve been working TOO.

The thing I forget every year is how exhausted my voice is after those first few days. How my throat aches. Look, I talk a lot, and I talk fast. I know this. But somehow, the first few days of classes are different than my normal wind-bagginess. Meeting groups of teenagers for the first time, getting to know them, introducing myself to them, talking to lots of people at once, all day long -- it requires an entirely different sort of energy.

I finally met my classes yesterday. We start late, after Labor Day. It seems that all of my teacher friends in different districts or different states have been back at this for awhile, and in the last week I’ve gotten antsy, mostly because I’ve been at school every single day for the past two weeks anyway. But in the end, I appreciated that my first day back was freshman orientation -- a planning day for me this year, since I don’t teach freshmen or have a freshmen advisory -- and my first day with my own students fell on a Thursday. For two days I’ve been on in a way I haven’t had to be in quite a long time, and if my first on day had fallen on a Monday, I think I’d be comatose at the end of the week. As it stands, I had grand plans for my first day back; I was going to spend my evening doing things like cooking a healthy dinner and going for a run before stories and bedtime. I thought I’d feel energized. What actually happened was that I made it home with the kids, decided we were having boring old spaghetti with jarred sauce instead of a recipe that made good use of our CSA veggies, changed into comfy clothes in which I had no intention of sweating, and poured myself a glass of wine while I settled the kids on the couch to watch something on Netflix. At first I was like, wow, I’m Mom of the Year, but then I decided that if any day calls for extending a little grace to myself it’s the first real day of teaching, and yesterday that grace looked a lot like a box of spaghetti and a bottle of wine.

Sometimes it’s hard to be your own friend. I’m working on that.

Suzannah started second grade this year. It’s nearly impossible for me not to write that in ALL CAPS. Second grade! Second grade is wonderful. I remember the summer before she started kindergarten; I pretty much felt like I was on the verge of tossing my cookies every day just worrying about it. Would she be okay? Would she miss me? Would she make friends? Would her teacher love her like I did? I am forever -- forever -- indebted to her wonderful kindergarten teacher, who did indeed love her, and who also had the gift of calming an anxious mama like me. I knew immediately that she would be fine, and I will always love her teacher for that. Last year I didn’t worry at all. We had a glorious summer in which I did not obsess over my daughter’s teacher or whether or not she would be okay; I knew she would. And I loved her first grade teacher just like I loved her kindergarten teacher. Truly, it is because of those two that my daughter loves school and has blossomed from a very cautious, shy girl into a confident young lady. (Okay, she still seems to feel terribly self-conscious about reading aloud; even in front of Matt and me she’s pretty quiet about it, her voice dropping not quite into a near-whisper but close. This is so interesting to me. Even though I teach English, I really firmly believe in not pushing “literacy” on young children, and so while we’ve read to and with our children since birth, we don’t drill them at all in reading and writing themselves. And it just happened. When my daughter picks up, say, a Star Wars book and reads it to me, I’m always a little surprised that she just flies through it and corrects me if I mispronounce something. Currently, she’s reading this awful R.L. Stine book she picked out for herself at the University Bookstore in Tacoma. But she still seems shy about people hearing her read.)

I asked her, the night before her first day, if she was nervous. She seemed perplexed by the question. “No, of course not!” she said.

“Are you excited?”

“I’m so excited!” she said, and grinned her gap-toothed grin. And she was. The next morning it was all Matt and I could do to convince her to walk over to the school so we could take pictures -- she would have preferred that we just drop her off in the car line so she could jump out and get on with things. We met her teacher last week, and Suzannah liked her immediately. That, in addition to the fact that most of her first grade class is in her second grade class (they are a sweet little group) and she knew that going in, made for a pretty easy transition. And when I picked her up at the end of her first day of second grade, her grin was just as big as it had been when I left her that morning. She flew into my arms and we walked, hand-in-hand, across the school lawn. She turned back.

“Wait!” she said. “I forgot to say good-bye to my friends! And I have to go say good-bye to my teacher! Can I go back?”

At home today I looked through the papers in her green folder, the note her teacher gave her about her three terrific first days of school, the pictures she drew and the “About Me” paper on which she wrote that her favorite subject is math (it’s true -- she really likes it and is really good at it, and I take absolutely zero credit for this) and she has a little brother and her favorite thing about summer was camping, and my heart filled right up with gratitude for this terribly ordinary thing, this transition we’re learning so well. Second grade. It’s not even a rite of passage, really, like a confirmation or a graduation. But somehow my daughter has become so much more -- and so beautifully -- herself, and it is such a privilege, and such a joy, to witness.

And when she ends her day by running back across the lawn to give her teacher a good-bye hug, I know in my deepest mama heart that we’re gonna be okay.