The last day in August. Labor Day weekend. Thirteen years ago at this time, I’d already spent three days in front of my very own class, for the very first time. I spent the weekend curled up with my new puppy in my new apartment, trying to process this crazy, brand-new life I was living. I distinctly remember the relief I felt at having those three days to do exactly that and nothing else.
We start after Labor Day now, although our teacher in-service days began last week. I’ve been back at school for two weeks now. Not every day, but quite a few days. I’ve cleaned my classroom and made photocopies and lesson plans and have more still to do, although sometimes when I feel anxious because I’m not sure what I’ll be doing with one of my new preps two weeks from now I need to remind myself that during my first year, despite trying to get ahead each weekend, I still found myself planning Thursday’s lessons on Wednesday night. Now, planning units is much easier, and much more fun, and I know it will all just happen. I love reading and rereading things I’m going to teach. I love the creative process of planning how I’m going to do that -- for the first time in some cases, or how I’m going to rework something I’ve done before. It’s exciting. (I believe, again and again, that poetry will save us in the end, and that literature matters. I believe in connections. I believe in what we’re doing. I believe in these kids.)
This year, I’m still thinking of all of these things. Thirteen years in, I still get butterflies. But I still feel that this is where I’m supposed to be, doing exactly what I’m supposed to be doing, and so I’ve shaken off the Sunday afternoonishness of mid-August and am planning to hunker down tomorrow and do some real work. I’m going to sail into next week excited to meet these kids I’ll be spending the year with.
Some things change, though. This year, I’m not wandering restlessly around my apartment or reveling in sleeping in one more time. Today, I spent my day smoothing my son’s hair off his sweaty forehead while he napped. I sent my daughter into the backyard to kick around her soccer ball. I made them lunch; my daughter ate hers quickly, while my son had to be coaxed. I tried to keep them separated as much as possible, because the last thing my daughter needs is to start the third grade with her brother’s cold. I napped restlessly myself, listening for my son. He woke me in the middle of the night last night, asking for water. He was cold, and then he was hot. I helped him out of the long-sleeved pajama top he’d insisted on sleeping in, tucked him in loosely. I took his temperature. Touched his cheek.
It is terrible timing, to have a sick child the weekend before school starts. The simple fact is that I must show up next week. Maybe by then I’ll have caught whatever my son is fighting; Lord knows I’ve caught plenty of bugs from my children over the past eight years. I can separate my children from each other, but I cannot separate myself, nor do I want to. They are entitled to my hands brushing their hair out of their sweaty faces, to my kisses after they drift off in a restless sleep. It’s part of the territory, even when it’s inconvenient.
“I’m stressing,” I said to Matt tonight, after both of our children were tucked into bed. “I seriously can’t miss anything this week. If he’s not better by Tuesday...I mean, I really think he will be, I think his fever will probably break tonight, but if it doesn’t, can you--“
He was already nodding. Yes, he can stay home if he needs to. I tried to breathe. We are so lucky. We can make it work. I can go to school. Even if I wind up feeling terrible, which I always assume will happen because I am a worst-case scenario kind of girl, I can go. I will survive, and we will survive. Of course will; I know this. And so I can reduce this moment to its simplest: my little son is sick, the only thing that matters. Not terribly sick, of course--he has a fever, and a bit of a cough. He is tired, wrung-out, cranky. This is not 2011, when he had a kidney infection, when he wouldn’t eat, when I stayed up with him at three in the morning, showering blearily in the middle of the night after he threw up all over me, when I e-mailed my principal to tell her I wouldn’t be able to make a mandatory staff meeting after coming home from the hospital, waiting for the results of a blood test. This is a cold, or allergies maybe. This is a common fever, this is restless sleep. This is childhood, and this is motherhood. And still. Still. My heart is anxious and my hands are restless. I know to let the fever run its course. I know the rest of us might get sick, or we might not. (Usually, we don’t. But there has been enough germ-sharing in our family that I always figure it’s safer to assume that will be the case, and then I can be pleasantly surprised.)
There are so many aspects of parenthood that aren’t fun -- who enjoys vaulting out of a warm bed in the middle of the night because a young child is crying, or throwing up, or needs to go to the bathroom, or needs a drink of water? I remember reading (years ago, when I was pregnant with Isaac, I think), some article on whether having children makes you “happier.” Honestly, I don’t think it does, at least on a day-to-day basis, because there is just so much bickering and whining and snot and poop and sticky fingers and drudgery. It’s not that I don’t think of myself as happy; it’s that I don’t think happiness is the point. I think of happiness as something superficial, I guess, and fleeting. What parenthood has done, though, is increase my deep, deep joy. How can I explain this? How can I explain that while of course I would prefer to sleep peacefully all night long, there is something I love about being the one to guide my son’s arms through his pajama top when he’s fussing at three o’clock in the morning? That it is a privilege to hold his head when he is feverish or ill? That simply being present for these people I love so much is a gift beyond anything I could ever find the words for which to ask?
Tomorrow morning, the last morning before it all starts again in earnest, I will rise early and take my son’s temperature before I eat my own breakfast and pray for it to be lower. I will drink coffee, whatever the thermometer tells me. I will have some time to myself in the afternoon to wrap my head around the week; Matt will take the kids while I write lesson plans, and read, and think. For the past couple of years, Labor Day has meant that he takes the kids to the zoo while I sit at a nearby sandwich shop and drink lattes or lemonade and work, but tomorrow maybe he’ll stay home with the kids and I’ll just go to Starbucks. Which is fine. Suzannah and I will pack her backpack and get ready for her Open House on Tuesday. Matt and I will cook dinner with the last of our fresh veggies for the week -- we’ll make a salad, find some way to use the last of our kohlrabi and beets before next week’s veggie box comes. Even if Matt has to stay home on Tuesday, we will be okay. This is the season of life we are in.
I’m excited for the school year, and soon I’ll be carried along on the momentum of it all. But in the meantime, this weekend has served not so much as a vacation, as a break, but as a reminder that life also happens within these small moments, glimpsed in between my grand ideas and my to-do lists: in tucking my son into bed and peeking anxiously through the door while he naps. In watching my daughter kick a soccer ball across the backyard. In hearing her giggle over some book she’s reading, tucked away in her room while her brother and I nap fitfully. It doesn’t make the bigger picture less important, but the smaller moments are the moments in which I live, and breathe, and love.
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