And somehow, just like that, it's already April. The end of it, even. This is the point in the year when all of us feel the approach of summer, but it's just beyond our grasp, just enough to be sort of soul-killing. My family and friends in Montana and Minnesota were still shoveling snow last weekend. Last Saturday I watched my girl play in her first soccer game of the spring season in the pouring rain on the muddiest field in King County, but honestly, it wasn't terribly cold and she played so well on that slippery, clumpy field, and at some point when you're drenched and covered in mud you might as well just relax and decide to have a ton of fun, and it seemed that the girls did just that. Yesterday they played on their home field, on smooth and beautiful turf, and I just...still love it all, so much. We haul our camping chairs out of the back of the car and carry them to the field, but mostly I can't even sit down, because I get too excited. Yesterday, my parents were here to watch -- they were in town to meet my tiny new nephew James, and they managed to set aside time for Isaac's track meet and Zannah's game -- and my mom made the same comment she made last March, at Suzannah's first spring soccer game: "It's fun to watch you, too." Because I never saw myself as a soccer mom, ever. But damn if I don't love watching my girl play.
Spring soccer is just beginning (the games, that is; practice started in early March, not long after our own snow day); the girls will play until June. Their last game is just a couple of days after I teach my last class of 2018 seniors. I'm trying not to think about that. I kind of feel like all I've done for the past two months is yell at them and clutch my hair and beg and cajole and threaten and beg some more. Every single class feels like I'm blurting some PG-13 version of "Goddammit, I love you, please get your shit together, I don't even sleep anymore because of you, I am fucking worried about some of you and I am proud of all of you and absolutely beyond blessed to have you in my life and you are all ruining my life and you make me furious and crazy and I am going to miss you more than you even know."
This is love, though. It's just love. Messy and hard and beautiful.
I've been a teacher for my entire adult life, and I was really barely an adult when I started. Now, seventeen years in, these kids really feel like my kids. I've loved so many students over the years, and I've had the deep privilege to stay connected to some of them, but this class is something new for me. I've taught all of them for at least two years, since I looped with them for junior and senior year -- a first. I taught a lot of them as sophomores, too, and a good handful of them as freshmen. All this to say: it's not that I love them more than I've loved students I've taught before, because I have had the deep privilege of loving a lot of kids, but I've never before felt so deeply attached and emotionally invested in an entire class. And it's probably not very healthy or balanced. I really have lost a lot of sleep over them this semester -- or maybe I've lost sleep wondering if I've been enough or done enough for them. I worry about that a lot, actually -- about how I could have taught them better, been better. (Teaching really does parallel parenting. So much, so much.) Mostly, though, I'm just going to miss them. This is the natural order of things; they need to move on, and more kids will come, and I will love them, too. But I think what I'm feeling is -- dare I say it -- grief.
And there's the bittersweetness of my own beautiful life, my own children. I love this stage of parenting so very much; I hardly even know what to say about it. I've loved all of it so far, truly. I loved my babies, and I loved my toddlers, my preschoolers. But to be the mother of school-aged children who make me laugh every day, who can get themselves up and dressed, who sprawl on their stomachs to read books but still curl up against me at night to read together, who run in track and hi-yah! in Tae Kwon Do and play hard on the soccer field -- I love everything about this. My kids make me crazy every day; they can't stay out of each other's faces, they hi-yah at each other all afternoon. Mom, Isaac's copying me. Mommy, Zannah kicked me. There's that. But mostly, I wish I could stop time, right here, at this year: this time with my children, when they are growing so much but still yell, "Tuck me in!" when they're finished brushing their teeth, and they tolerate me crawling into bed with them for snuggles for a few minutes. I can take a nap on Sunday afternoon and I don't have to worry about it lining up perfectly with a baby's nap, or a toddler's (although really Isaac was my only toddler who ever napped). I can send them outside to play while I work, and I don't have to think about it much; the reassuring sound of the basketball bouncing in the driveway or their shouts to the backyard neighbors are enough. They need me still. When they spill something, when they're scared, when they need help: they call for me. We talk about things. I pick them up from school and they are still both bursting to tell me about their day. But they can make their own beds and help me with laundry. They settle in to do their homework after school and they don't even need me to nag at them. (Teacher's kids? Luck?) I love living with these people, and wondering who they will be, how their joys and talents and passions will manifest themselves as they grow. They have always been themselves, but as they grow they continue to reveal more and more of who they are, and that is joy I could not have fully understood when Matt and I said to each other, yes, we want to be parents, let's have babies. What an unspeakably beautiful gift.
In the meantime: this April, as the cherry blossoms fall to soft pink carpets over the sidewalks, I am so acutely aware of time passing. This year, the cherry blossoms feel as achingly, beautifully sad as autumn leaves. I am in no hurry for summer; I just want to keep and hold each moment. I am not counting down the days until the end of this school year. I don't want to measure my days that way. I love summer, but this year, somehow, its approach breaks my heart a bit.
But probably that's always true. I love the turning of the seasons, but they come at a necessary cost. A loss.
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