Grief and Hope and Joy

I moved my firstborn into her college dorm this week.

I keep trying to write the sentence that comes after that. I keep trying to choose the sentence that comes after that. The right one. I keep typing and deleting.

There are so many sentences and I haven't found the one that fits, but if I wait to find the one that fits, I won't ever write this.

I keep thinking about taking her to her first day of kindergarten, which I wrote about at length in this space so many years ago. So many years in the blink of an eye. (It's wild, really -- I've been writing here for sixteen years, and I keep thinking I should start a Substack because that's where so many folks I'm reading are writing these days, and this space has been pretty quiet for me in the last couple of years but that's not because I don't have things to say, and it's not because I'm not writing; it's just that writing about parenting older children -- older teens and baby adults -- is very different territory. All that to say, I guess, is that I'm still writing, that I'll always be writing, and right now I guess this is still my little corner of the Internet to share a fraction of that.)

I felt all the feelings when we took our baby to kindergarten, and I wrote about that day like I'd invented parenthood -- forgive me, but it's so easy to put on our MomPants when our babies are small in an age where we share everything with an immediate audience in some way. The solidarity ("Hang in there, Mama!" and all those likes and heart-reacts) can get us through some tough moments, long days of drudgery, crushing self-doubt, and often help us laugh about it later. But as my kids grew older, I found myself drawing different boundaries around what I would share, imagining them reading it later, and I realized the importance of being transparent about my writing with them. It can be more complicated to write my story when it tangles with someone else's, whose stories are not for public consumption.

Lonelier, too. So, so much lonelier.

Kindergarten drop-off was hard -- is hard, I imagine, for so many parents -- because at its core is the realization that our babies will continue to grow up and grow away from us. That feels particularly cruel when our babies are five years old.

I wrote this back in 2011:

She hung up her new pink backpack. She already had a cubby, one she'd chosen the day before when she met her teacher. She gave us each a big hug, and then she walked over to the large rainbow carpet and joined all the other kids. Her cheeks were pink and I could tell she was nervous, but she was holding it together so well...she turned and waved at us, gave a little smile. We waved back, smiled as hard as we could, and left. And we sort of staggered across the playground, holding hands and leaning heavily into each other. I must have looked awfully shaky, because we attracted lots of sympathetic smiles from other parents milling around. I really thought I might throw up. And then, it was so ridiculous, Matt and I kissed each other good-bye and went off to our respective jobs. I was all, what? I have to go to school and teach classes? How?

I would like to tell you that dropping my child off at college was like that. It was, in some ways. But taking a child who hasn't been traumatized to kindergarten is a different kind of hard (for a mama who is equally and also senselessly privileged) than taking a child to college who has experienced trauma her mama couldn't protect her from. The spaces and silences in a journal can speak as loudly as words.

My child has her own story to tell, and it's a powerful one. I have my own story to tell, too, but I'm still trying to figure out where it fits, and how to tell it.

Here's what I can say: I am so proud of her. My heart is constantly seized by terror and love, but mostly love. Grief and hope and joy can coexist in a strange and beautiful space. I am lucky beyond measure. It's unthinkable, when they're five, to imagine them growing up and growing away from us. But it's also the point, isn't it? To raise them to be able to do exactly this: to find their way. 

Here's what I didn't understand about raising teenagers and young adults, when she was five:

That they need us more, not less.

That we have to figure out an entirely different way to parent them.

That when our babies are born we think we understand how much a heart can hold, and we haven't the faintest idea. We learn that quickly, but I'm still amazed and shattered by it as my baby becomes an adult.

That this is what it's for. We don't have babies to have babies forever, or preschoolers, or second graders. I may melt with nostalgia when Facebook and photo memories remind me of the delights, absurdities, and challenges of my children's childhoods, but what's really incredible to me is how these babies of mine have become humans I just really love getting to know. Learning who they actually are in the world, who they are becoming, and continuing to navigate a relationship with them both -- that is the greatest gift of my life.

But it's also just so hard. I'm still so scared. The last few years are still so raw, and there is no clear road map for navigating our way forward. I'm beyond grateful for the connections I have with friends who have traveled this road already, for the connections I've made in writing groups where we can share from our most vulnerable places, and for the privilege of access to support and resources.

Weeping as your baby goes to kindergarten is a thing. And for most of us, it's okay to share that as publicly as we want. And make no mistake: I believe in honoring and remembering those moments.

Weeping as you walk across a college campus, away from your baby, walking toward your car as she walks towards the dining hall -- it hits differently, and for me, at this moment, harder.

I know I'm not really alone, that I am experiencing a privileged grief shared by many, many other parents -- to be able to send my girl to a school that suits her, where, God willing, she will thrive. She will find her people and continue to discover and become the fabulous human she is. But I also have to grapple with this: I can't really protect her anymore, not like I used to. I can always provide a soft place to land, I can spread my whole soul out on the ground, but this really is her path.

Thirteen years ago, as my baby started kindergarten, I wrote this: All I really need is for her to be okay, and I'm okay.

There are layers in that sentence now. My okayness should never be her burden to carry, and she is not responsible for it, ever. I read those lines and thought, yes! That, exactly! But as I think about it, my okayness isn't the point. So I revert to the prayer I've prayed every first day of school for her whole life: Lord, let them love her like I do.

Just let her know she is loved beyond measure.

 

Float On (or, the strange juxtaposition of grief, gratitude, and joy)

I sit on the couch in the early morning dark, Christmas tree lights twinkling in the living room. A neighbor wearing a reflective vest walks his dog up the street. The quiet lasts just long enough for me to read for five minutes, and then I hear my son’s bedroom door open. He pads into the living room, wrapped in his fleece Batman blanket. When he sees that I’m up, he takes a flying leap and lands on the cushion next to me.

“Morning, Baby,” I say.

“Whatcha doin’?”

“Reading the news. Looking at the neighbors’ Christmas lights.” Across the street, our neighbors, who are always up early, have turned on their Christmas tree lights as well. 

"Less than twenty-four hours until I’m eleven!” he whispers.

“How are you so old?” I ask him. I lean over to wrap him in a hug; he is tall and bony, but his cheek is still so soft when I kiss it. He wriggles out of my grasp and shoves his bare toes in my face.

“Smell,” he says, wiggling them.

“Ew. Get away,” I say, and he hops off the couch, cackling, then heads to the kitchen to toast himself a bagel.

His sister emerges a few minutes later, ear phones in, cords trailing to the phone tucked in the pocket of her robe.

“Morning,” I call to her. She pours herself a bowl of cereal and settles in at the dining room table across from her brother and eats, looking at her screen. I walk by her on my way to the shower and touch her shoulder. She takes out an earbud. 

“Sorry, what? I’m listening to a podcast.”

“Well, untangle yourself for two seconds,” I say, but I smile and kiss the top of her head.

*

Eight years ago, my son’s birthday fell on a Friday. He was three. I’d planned to pick up his sister from school, gather him from daycare, and drive north to meet my husband in West Seattle after work. We’d enjoy a cozy family dinner at our favorite family-friendly pub, and the next evening we were going to take the kids to Chuck E. Cheese and Build-a-Bear. But at lunchtime, a coworker started screaming from the copy room.

“He killed them! He killed all the kids!”

An entire first-grade class, murdered.

I couldn’t reach my own first-grader fast enough, all the way across town. The horror on the other side of the country gripped my throat until I saw my daughter safely at the door of her own classroom, standing in her purple coat next to her teacher. None of the parents lingered on the playground with their children that day.

I drove north on I-5 that evening, Sarah McLachlan’s mournful Wintersong in the CD player, my children buckled snugly into the backseat. And I wept.

*

One year ago, I wrote: My son will never again have a birthday where I do not remember this horror. My children's lives are forever linked with one of the darkest days, the day I realized that if our country could fail to respond to the slaughter of children then what hope is there? I still don't know if what I have can be called hope, because I'm mighty full of anger and, too often, despair. What I have is a crazy, incomprehensible mix of gratitude and grief.

Tomorrow morning, just after five o'clock, my boy will turn eleven, which is five more years than the children at Sandy Hook Elementary would ever see. 

My daughter started high school this year. I think of the twenty children who will never play the trumpet or clarinet on a school cafeteria stage, never get their first periods, will never get their braces off—they never had the chance to lose their baby teeth. They will never take algebra and cry over it. They will never get a driver’s license, or back into the mailbox with their parents' car.

Their mothers will never have the inexpressible, tender joy of having bony adolescent feet waved in their faces, those lanky limbs sticking out of fleece pajamas. They will never knock on their teenager’s bedroom door and say, “Come out of your cave. It’s lunchtime.” They will never open the door to an overpowering wave of too much Bath and Body Works Winter Candy Apple lotion, or the fug of unwashed socks when the room’s occupant has failed to empty his laundry basket into the washing machine. They will never threaten to remove those bedroom doors when their teenagers slam them.

*

Every year, I feel it: the gratitude and the grief. But more than that, I feel the crazy joy that my son has brought to our lives every single day of his existence. 

I write some version of his birth story every year, and often in this space. Tonight, near the end of 2020, which is universally acknowledged as a dumpster fire of a year, I think about joy. I think about how eleven years ago, Matt drove me to the birth center on Lake Tapps in the middle of the night while I howled through contractions and sang along with Modest Mouse at the top of my lungs, one of the songs he included on the mix CD he made for the moment. No soothing Enya for the hard work of birthing a baby, but something to keep me moving:

Alright don't worry even if things end up a bit too heavy
We'll all float on alright
Already we'll all float on

And less than four hours later, he was born into Matt's hands and delivered to my chest while I laughed. I laughed. And every day since then, every single day -- even on the darkest ones -- my son has made me laugh. 

(Mustache Day at school.)

Tomorrow morning, I'll wake up before he does, and I'll curl up on the living room couch in the glow of our Christmas lights. I'll remember the frosty darkness before the dawn of his birth. I'll fiercely miss sharing this season in person with his grandparents and auntie and uncle and cousin and feel grateful that we can gather over Zoom later in the evening to celebrate anyway. And I will give thanks for this sweet, ordinary life in an anything but ordinary year, because one of the unexpected blessings of 2020 -- while I'd never have wished it this way -- is this time with my family, and there's more than a little sweetness in that.

To Imagine the Future: A New Morning

My baby girl, my firstborn, my smart and impatient and funny and compassionate and silly and sweet daughter, turns fourteen years old tomorrow morning. Today, right on schedule, I find myself just staring at her, remembering the day before her birth. Have I told this story here before? Probably yes, probably a hundred times, probably everyone is tired of it; my daughter rolls her eyes because I tell her some version of it every year. I intend to do this for as long as I can speak.

Suzannah was born on the Sunday morning of Memorial Weekend, four weeks before her late June due date. I remained staunchly in denial that I was in labor, although in hindsight (and after birthing another baby since then), I now understand I'd been in labor for quite some time. I taught my classes on that Friday before Memorial weekend, sitting awkwardly on top of a student desk because I couldn't fit anywhere else, because it hurt to stand and it hurt to sink into the chair behind my desk. So I perched on top of one of those desks and coached my students through the opening act of Othello. I wasn't sure I would make it all the way until the end of the school year, but I was determined to get through the damn play before I gave birth, and I figured that if I needed a sub, they could show the movie.

One of my sophomore boys called over his shoulder on his way out of my classroom, "Bet your water breaks this weekend."

"Shut up," I said to his retreating back.

That afternoon I loaded my pug into the car and drove her to the vet. She'd been digging at her ears again and I was absolutely sure she had an ear infection. I wanted to sob at the thought of getting in the car, of having to bend over and lift all of her fifteen pounds onto the exam table. She did have an ear infection, and twenty-four hours later I would be very sorry I hadn't just left her there for the weekend. But Matt brought home pizza for dinner that night, and we settled in to watch a movie, and I actually slept pretty well -- better than I had in recent weeks.

This is an excerpt from my journal entry on Saturday afternoon, less than twenty-four hours before she was born:

Today we're shopping for last-minute things we need. We are packing the hospital bag (which I meant to do over a week ago -- though we did get the carseat installed). And then we're going on a double-date at a pub, where the boys will drink pretentious microbrews and Ky and I will drink root beer.

In between shopping and dinner, I need two things. One: Bubble Tea. Two: To lie down on the couch for awhile.

I don't remember the bubble tea. I do remember walking very, very slowly around Target and pretending to look at things on the bottom shelf because it felt sort of good to squat.

Please just imagine the sight of a very pregnant woman squatting and breathing in the middle of Target and be appropriately horrified. My mother certainly was when I recounted our shopping trip later.

Kyanne and I didn't get our double-date with our husbands. I called her and asked if we could maybe go somewhere closer to my house, because the thought of sitting in the car any longer made me want to die.

"Or we could just...not go," Kyanne said.

I spent the afternoon and evening trying to doze on the couch. I demanded McDonald's chicken nuggets for dinner, which Matt bought and which I promptly threw up. By midnight, I couldn't walk to the bathroom without dropping to my knees and howling, at which point I agreed that maybe I was in labor. I called Kyanne to come and pick up our pug, and twenty minutes later she was standing above me in the hallway with her arms crossed.

"I am definitely never having kids," she said.

"It's not that bad," I panted. "Go look at the baby's room! We just finished it last weekend!" (Note: the joke was on us, since Zannah slept in our room for over a year. But I also have no regrets about that.)

“You’re crazy,” she muttered, as Matt helped me into the car.

“I can’t sit in front,” I said. “I have to stretch out.”

We sped south on I-5, the freeway nearly empty at two o’clock in the morning. I howled and panted in the backseat, refusing to put on my seatbelt.

The light inside the emergency room seemed too bright. I was being asked to do impossible things. To write my name. To wait. To sit.

This wasn’t supposed to be happening yet -- not for a month. But eight hours after we arrived at the emergency room and two-and-a-half after I started to push, our daughter was delivered to my chest. She was four weeks early, but healthy and pink.

“I know you,” I said. We laughed and cried. Our little family of three.

Someone brought in a tray of food: grilled cheese and a small bunch of purple grapes. The sandwich was lukewarm and too soft, but in that moment it was the finest grilled cheese I’d ever tasted. My swaddled baby was nestled into my arms while a nurse wheeled us to our new room on the fourteenth floor.

As soon as I could stand, I hobbled to the small oval-shaped window. The sky was heavy, overcast for late May. I gazed down at the city streets of Tacoma, under the gray sky: a new morning.

***

If birthing my daughter taught me anything, it's that sometimes we need to roll with things we didn't plan for. That's difficult for those of us who like to plan. Perhaps ironically, my daughter is one of those people; on the first weekend after schools closed, she wrote out a very detailed daily schedule. On the first day of "Spring Break" (in quotes for perhaps obvious reasons), when we learned that schools would be closed for the rest of the year, she balled it up and threw it in the trash and we both cried. But during the first week of official remote learning, she was back at it, and she brandished her new daily schedule at breakfast. And every single day she shows up to her class meetings, completes every activity her teachers post, practices her trumpet, and makes sure she spends time outside if it isn't raining.

The end of her eighth grade year wasn't supposed to look like this. She was supposed to have more concerts. She rehearsed with musicians from all over the district for the all-city Honor Band only two days before schools closed. She was supposed to go to Silverwood with the band. She was supposed to be able to celebrate the end of middle school before transitioning to a new high school. The fact that she'll be attending a different high school than her friends adds a layer of sadness we couldn't have anticipated a few months ago, when she thought she would still be able to say good-bye. And while I know how her new school welcomes freshmen, and I know the opportunities that await her (because I happen to teach there), I don't know what that will look like in September. She's lost the end of eighth grade, and the beginning of her high school career will look far different than either of us imagined. My heart hurts for her. But I also trust that neither one of us can grasp the bigger picture yet, not while we're stuck in the small one. What graces, what gifts will come from this? How will we remember these days? How will she tell her own story ten years from now?

Both of us mourn what we've lost. She misses her friends. I miss my students, my seniors. But I wonder if what we're mourning will translate into something worth celebrating. In our weekly Zooms, my students talk about taking care of each other and holding themselves accountable. They appreciate the chance to sleep and understand the importance of sticking to a schedule. We've talked about strategies for managing stress and anxiety and staying organized when there's no teacher there to yell at you. These are lessons it may serve them well to learn as they gain their independence in a world that changed, fast. They're sad, but resilient. And they can articulate this.

I've been trying to be positive about this while also holding space for whatever feelings Suzannah has. She is, after all, my daughter, so there are frequently some big feelings in this house. But while my heart hurts for my girl, while I hate that all of her grandparents and her aunt and uncle and cousin can't join us for grilling and ice cream cake tomorrow, while I hate that her birthday trip to Great Wolf Lodge has been canceled, I'm also taking my cues right from her. She has decided that tomorrow she should have the day "off" from school, considering she hasn't missed a beat, and I agree. We picked out an ice cream cake together, and the kids and I will frost brownies sent by her grandmother. Matt and I came up with a gift to surprise her that, hopefully, will lessen the sting of not sharing her day with more people -- at least not in person. We'll eat outside in the sunshine. I ordered special Quarantine Birthday decorations, which Zannah seems to enjoy. We'll appreciate the technology that allows us to see her grandparents until we can hug them in person. She's pretty good at enjoying the moment she's living in, and I think (I hope, I pray) she understands how much she is loved. The daughter of my heart.

***

Even as I miss our daily routines, I appreciate the routines I'm privileged (and I do understand it is a privilege) to create now: Waking early to walk through my neighborhood, watching the spring unfold and flower. Sipping coffee slowly. Playing Uno with my children, which started when Isaac and I were the only ones awake at dawn, but sometimes in the afternoons (because he never tires of it) Suzannah asks to join, even if it's not written into her schedule. Walking to the school playground, where I walk or jog and Isaac rides his bike. Letting Suzannah stay up a little late and then sleep a little late. Frequently I am ready for bed before she is, because I still like to rise long before everyone else in my house, and when I go to bed she slips in beside me for awhile to snuggle. Still, at fourteen! I loved snuggling my babies, so very much, but there is something profoundly special about my teenager nestling against me while we giggle and talk and sigh. May I never take this for granted. These are moments I will cherish and probably definitely miss when we resume whatever "normal" life will look like again and our rhythms change again. My deep hope is that we are creating connections now that will carry us through whatever comes next.

Motherhood is like this. Nothing could have prepared me for the enormity of the life change when my daughter was born and delivered straight to my arms. I could only imagine, and my imagination wasn't big enough. I think about that now. How can I expand my imagination to hold all that awaits?

These Ordinary Gifts

Ten years ago tonight, Matt and I curled around our newborn son in the middle of our own bed. I traced my fingers over his pink warm skin. Kept kissing him, breathing in his newborn scent. He smelled like heaven. To take him home from my midwife's house only a few hours after his birth, to spend our first day together in the comfortable quiet of our own home, was a great gift.

Every year I tell my children their birth stories -- whatever version, whatever piece seems appropriate for them at the time. Isaac's story always includes this beginning: You were born in the dark of a frosty December morning. Sometimes I tell him that I sang in the car all the way to the birth center at two o'clock in the morning because it helped with the contractions. I don't tell him that I dilated from four centimeters to pushing him out in thirty minutes while I soaked in my midwife's huge tub, how I howled him right out of my body in two pushes, believing I would break in half. Last year I told him I made his dad drive through McDonald's for a breakfast burrito on the way home.

This morning I called him over to the couch to look a photograph, one of the first my doula took of us together after he was safely earthside, just moments after his birth. His skin is so pink. His little feet are pressed against me, his head cradled in my hands, his arms flung out wide, unaccustomed to the sudden space around him. I kept touching my nose to his. A moment of falling in love.

Isaac glanced at the picture and shrieked, "Ew! Yucky!" And then he bounced away to the breakfast table, where he inhaled miniature pancakes from Trader Joe's and irritated his sister until she screamed, "Isaac! Go away!" But she also gave him a birthday hug, without any prompting from me.

I walked up behind him at the table and wrapped my arms around him, pressed my cheek against his. It's still so soft. For a moment, he let me.

"Happy Birthday, Buddy," I said. And because he is still little enough to be sweet to his mama, he hugged me back, kissed me on the cheek. His lips were sticky, and his breath smelled like pancakes and oatmeal and the last piece of a Top Pot donut his dad brought home yesterday. And I still think it's heaven.

*

The kids had their Tae Kwon Do belt test this morning: two-and-a-half hours of hard work. Two years ago I didn't know I wanted to be a Tae Kwon Do mom, just like I didn't know I wanted to be a soccer mom, and as it turns out, both of these things bring me immeasurable joy. (Really, I didn't have kids to sit at home while they watch TV.) Anyway, it seems to me that there are worse ways to spend a few hours on one's birthday than testing for junior black belt.

Sometimes, during ordinary Tae Kwon Do class, I drop them off and run errands. Or I stay, but sometimes I watch and sometimes I read, or I grade papers. Testing is different. I can't take my eyes off of them. It just all comes together, all their hard work, and I see the very best of them: their concentration, their drive, all the results of practicing and, this month, as many extra classes as we could cram in to make up for classes they missed when Suzannah twisted her ankle or I was away for training and we couldn't juggle everything.

This is a thing they decided they wanted to try, two years ago, and once they started I have never once doubted they would become black belts. It's not that, though -- while I'm proud of them, what I love is just being present for these moments of watching them do their thing. They are so present in their bodies, so fully immersed in what they're doing. Sometimes they'll glance over and make eye contact, and I'll smile, and I'll see them try not to smile back because they are trying to focus, but mostly, they're just wholly and unselfconsciously themselves. They are not thinking about themselves, they are being themselves, and when I am allowed into these moments as a witness, I am utterly overcome with love for these two people who completely remade my heart when they entered the world.

*

My son is ten. An entire decade of my life filled with this crazy joy. Today, when I look at him, all of it, all of it, washes over me. The wrapping paper strewn on the floor next to the Christmas tree. The way he scooped up his baby cousin this evening to carry him away from the hot oven before dinner and made him giggle instead of cry. The way he runs away from me when I drop him off at school early for Safety Patrol, not even glancing back as he races to join his friends and don his orange vest (but he will still give my hand three quick squeezes before he leaps out of the back seat). The way his hair sticks up in the mornings when he shuffles out of his bedroom before dawn, and if he's not quite awake, the way he'll let me hug him just a beat longer than usual before he pours himself a bowl of cereal. The way he pours himself a giant bowl of cereal as soon as he gets home from school because suddenly he is always, always hungry. The way he decides to put himself to bed just past eight o'clock every night and screams dramatically, "Tucketh me ins!" And superimposed over all of the moments in our life now are all of the moments we have ever shared. The way he wraps his arms around at least one but probably more like four stuffed animals every night. The way his wispy hair fell over his forehead before his first haircut. The way his round tummy bulged over his FuzziBunz diapers, the way he used to wrap his arms around my neck and let me rock him in the dark before bed. The way he used to let out these piercing screams as an infant, not because he was unhappy or uncomfortable but because he was letting us know that hey! He was there! He was a baby and it was awesome to be a baby! The way he was so brave the night we drove to Mary Bridge Children's Hospital when his doctor told us he had gone into kidney failure, the way I sat in a wheelchair with my four-year-old son in my lap as a nurse wheeled us to his kidney ultrasound at three-thirty in the morning, just so he could sit in my lap instead of sitting alone, the way he grabbed both of my arms and wrapped them around his body. The way he still remembers playing Zombie Cats during that hospital stay even if he doesn't remember bursting into tears at the sight of yet another plate of plain noodles and grapes because his diet was so restricted. The way he used to play at the splash park when we first discovered it, how instead of running through the water he would trot doggedly around the perimeter, again and again, lap after lap, his swim diaper drooping and his little sandals slapping the wet concrete. The first day I took him to kindergarten camp but knew he would be just fine because he would have Suzannah's beloved kindergarten teacher. His little red-and-white striped polo shirt. The way his belly used to round over his swim trunks. The way he stretched as he grew one summer; suddenly, he had no chub to hold up those shorts and he was always showing just a hint of butt crack instead. His first class at The Little Gym. The way he played in the wet sand at Ocean Shores and screamed at the sight of a huge dead crap, leaping to safety in his daddy's arms. The way he threw up four times on a flight to Omaha but wept when we wouldn't get him a cheeseburger as soon as we stepped off the plane. The way he used to hurl himself on the floor in a tearful toddler rage. The way he used to hurl himself cheerfully into the dog bed, whether she was in it or not. The way he used to bring me his nursing pillow, the way he'd say "Boppy!" with a big smile, and I would pull him up on my lap to nurse. The way his nursing manners deteriorated as a toddler, the way he'd poke his fingers into my nose or stick his toes in my face, so when he was finally ready to be done I was too, but also, the way I look at my children now and thank God I never rushed to push my babies out of my bed or away from my breast. The way he used to crawl like a jolly little komodo dragon, barrel chested and bent on destruction, flinging books off the bottom shelf or upending the dog's water dish or tossing his toy cars in the toilet. The way he still brings me his fleece Batman blanket on Sunday afternoons when I lie down on the couch for a nap, the way he tucks it around me and gives me a kiss.

*

Sometimes the moments wash over me, all at once. I watch my son kihap as he breaks a board with his heel. He bows as Master hands him the halves, and he runs across the mat, bows again, hands me his broken boards. My eyes fill with tears, not so much because I am overcome with the sight of my son breaking boards again (which is one of my favorite parts of testing) but because today, in this moment, this lanky, sweaty boy is also my pink warm newborn, my big-bellied toddler, my sweet kindergartner. He is my son sleeping in the backseat, building Lego creations in the family room, curled up in the recliner with a book, zooming around the driveway on his scooter.

Let me never take such ordinary gifts for granted.

*

Seven years ago, the day my son turned three, twenty first-graders were murdered in their classroom. My daughter was a first-grader then. My son will never again have a birthday where I do not remember this horror. My children's lives are forever linked with one of the darkest days, the day I realized that if our country could fail to respond to the slaughter of children then what hope is there? I still don't know if what I have can be called hope, because I'm mighty full of anger and, too often, despair. What I have is a crazy, incomprehensible mix of gratitude and grief. I think of twenty children who should be eighth graders now, who should be planning their high school schedules. Instead, they never even lost their baby teeth, never learned how to play the trumpet or the clarinet, never looked into the audience at a middle school band concert to see their parents filming their beautiful squawking debut, never got their first periods, never got braces. It seems spectacularly unfair that some of us get to raise our children through these ordinary moments and some of us don't. I struggle with this often, but especially on this day.

Seven years ago I had a three-year-old and I had a six-year-old. Seven years later I am lucky enough to have them both, still. To celebrate their ordinary moments and extraordinary lives. They grow so quickly. It's bittersweet. Achingly so. And mostly sweet. Because they grow, and they will not let me drop anchor at despair.

Every year, and especially every December, the darkest month of the year, I look at my son, at both of my children, and remember the light.

So this is my prayer, every December: Let me never take such ordinary gifts for granted. Let me find a way to use my gratitude, and my grief. Let me not drop anchor at despair.

On Turning 40

I understand why people hate February, deep into the slog of winter. I especially understand the weariness my friends and family in Montana and across the Midwest are feeling after so many (So. Many.) snow days. Admittedly, we were going a little crazy after five, plus a few late starts and early releases. I had to remind myself more than once that this wasn't a thing happening to my precious little self.

Anyway, I don't happen to hate February. First of all, it's my birthday month, and my birthday is at the end of February so I have all month to look forward to it -- and I was lucky enough to be born into a family who has always made me feel loved and celebrated on my birthday. And because I live in the Pacific Northwest, February is the month where spring starts to break through the surface of the mud. I'm also one of those people who enjoys Valentine's Day for purely silly reasons. I like chocolate. I love being a mom of children on Valentine's Day. I love buying cheap, fun Valentine's Day socks. I do not see it as a day for romance or expectation, necessarily, and neither Matt nor I spend much time worrying about what to give each other. Usually we pick up chocolate and share, and I think Matt has brought me flowers every year of our marriage. We exchange cards. Our first year of marriage, we went out to dinner -- along with every other couple declaring their public love for each other, which meant we waited way too long for a table at a mediocre restaurant. The following year, we stayed home and I wore fuzzy gray sweats and we cooked some pasta thing together in the kitchen of our still newish house, and it was so much better. Since then, I've never wanted anything else.

It doesn't hurt that our first Valentine's Day together was spectacular in its own way, though. Matt and I were a long-distance couple that first year; I was a senior in college and he was living in the Twin Cities, working in downtown Minneapolis. The band tour that year took us to places like Nashville and Memphis but we also played a concert in a suburb north of the Cities, and Matt drove an hour to meet the bus that night. He was waiting in front of the school (a high school, maybe? Or was it a church? I don't remember) when the bus pulled up, and our tour manager grudgingly let me vault off the bus and into his arms, and with everyone watching he handed me my Valentine's Day gift: a little bag full of things he knew I liked. A nice pen. A half-pound of good coffee beans. Bubble bath. A book of poetry. Writing all of that out, I would marry that man all over again in a heartbeat -- that and his pecan pie at Thanksgiving. (I also remember our friend Katie, who was his friend first, calling over my shoulder, "Wow. I used to get drunk with that dork.") (Also, Matt just now yelled at me, "You can't use that quote on your blog! My parents read your blog!" Sorry, honey. I love you. It's too cute and it still makes me smile.)

That was eighteen years ago.

I'm still happy to stay home and cook and curl up in sweats with him. And he still knows the little things I love.

I turned forty this week, and last night, curled up with my husband, I said, "I've officially known you for half my life." From now on, every year we're together I'll be able to say, "I've known you for longer than I haven't." And that is one of the great blessings of this life I was lucky enough to land in.

I turned forty this week, and I am nothing but grateful. Growing older, as I posted on Facebook this week, is privilege not all of us get. And I don't feel old, because what does that even mean? I feel like me, which is to say, to echo Madeleine L'Engle, that I am every age I have ever been. I remember reading this when I was fourteen, late at night in my bedroom long after the rest of my house was asleep -- from The Crosswicks Journals, I think? I did a quick Google search:

“I am still every age that I have been. Because I was once a child, I am always a child. Because I was once a searching adolescent, given to moods and ecstasies, these are still part of me, and always will be... This does not mean that I ought to be trapped or enclosed in any of these ages...the delayed adolescent, the childish adult, but that they are in me to be drawn on; to forget is a form of suicide... Far too many people misunderstand what *putting away childish things* means, and think that forgetting what it is like to think and feel and touch and smell and taste and see and hear like a three-year-old or a thirteen-year-old or a twenty-three-year-old means being grownup. When I'm with these people I, like the kids, feel that if this is what it means to be a grown-up, then I don't ever want to be one. Instead of which, if I can retain a child's awareness and joy, and *be* fifty-one, then I will really learn what it means to be grownup.”

I don't mourn the passing of my childhood, or my twenties, or my thirties. I've learned a lot -- who I am and what I want. And I woke up on my birthday in the very life I realized I'd always wanted for myself. I have so much more work to do, so much more, and there are still things I want. Deeply. There are things I want that I won't ever have, and that's okay; part of the blessing of living forty years is the realization that we won't ever have everything we want, and that it is possible, still, to be happy. Part of the blessing of living forty years is that the pursuit of individual happiness isn't, perhaps, even the point. I am working towards the things I still want, but I'm not sure that my individual happiness is the point there, either. This is the work of a human life.

*

Last weekend I went out to celebrate with Jessica; of all the friends with whom I still keep in touch, I've probably known her the longest. (I still remember the time someone threw up on the back of her dress at our church Christmas program. I'm pretty sure her parents took her home to change and she was back for cookies afterwards.) We've known each other since we were seven. My family moved from Great Falls to Bozeman when I was in the eighth grade, but we still attended each other's confirmations. We went to the same college, had separate friend groups there, but went on the same trip to Europe. We roomed together for the entire month as we traveled through Ireland, England, Wales and France, and she was the one to witness my falling for a boy on that trip, the same one I married a couple of years later. She read at my wedding. I stood on the side of a mountain in Glacier National Park for hers. I had the tremendous privilege of holding her newborn son in the middle of the night while she napped. She had the fucking awful luck of being on the surviving end of "till death do us part" when her husband died of brain cancer last spring.

Let none of us complain about growing older.

She was determined to celebrate. Last week she reminded her friends of the importance of celebrating birthdays, "not with more fanfare, but just with more emphasis, more care. We each have one day a year to celebrate our existence." And it reminded me of the time I said to Matt, years ago, that maybe he should throw me a big party. For my thirtieth. Or my thirty-fifth. Or something.

"Do you...actually want that?" he asked.

He knew I didn't. Instead, five years ago, I started taking my birthday off without apology. I gave myself the gift of a day to do exactly what I would ever do with the gift of a day, an afternoon, free of obligation or responsibility. I took myself out for a really good birthday latte. I sat at a wide wooden table in a coffee shop and wrote. I read a book, and not one I was teaching or going to teach. I took myself out for lunch, where I read some more and sipped a glass of wine. I walked around the streets of a neighborhood I love with a gorgeous view of Puget Sound. I went for a run in the almost-spring air. I soaked in a bubble bath before picking up my kids and heading to Seattle to meet Matt, who entertained them while I shopped for new books, and then we all went to dinner together. It was my perfect day. It still is.

In warmer years, I might see the first buds of cherry blossoms as early as February 26th. Not this year. That's okay. They'll be bursting into bloom soon enough.

*

I was raised to celebrate birthdays. It wasn't that we always needed huge parties, but attention was paid. I remember birthday parties at my grandmother's house -- coffee and cookies for her, or her friends, and probably cake. It's where I learned to sneak sips of watery black coffee. For the first fifteen years of my life I shared a birthday with my great-grandmother. I remember her 100th birthday at her church, shared with my 15th. It's the last picture of us together.

I remember waking up on my 10th birthday to find a pink clock and a note from my mother -- she had received it as a birthday gift when she was a girl, and she was passing it on to me. I woke up early, as I always did. My room was still dark, and everything was in the wrong place. The door was to my left. The window was on the wall opposite my bed, instead of directly above my head. I sat up and remembered that yesterday my mother helped me rearrange my bedroom, something I was allowed to do a few times a year. My room was just large enough to accommodate a few different set-ups, and simply moving my bed to a different wall made me feel like I had an entirely new room. I am orderly by nature, but the momentary disorientation always made me smile. I had chosen this.

A line of light shone beneath my door. My mother was already up, moving around in the kitchen. And then I saw it -- the clock.

I recognized it right away -- the pink plastic rectangular clock with the dancing ballerina. For years it perched atop the headboard in my mother’s old bedroom at the farm, the room I slept in when we visited my grandmother. My parents slept in the bed, and I slept in my Strawberry Shortcake sleeping bag on the floor along the wall. Sometimes I took the clock down and wound it, fascinated by the delicate sound of the wheels inside, the mechanisms turning. When I released the little key, the ballerina turned to the sound of “Oh, what a beautiful morning.” The clock was decades old, but it kept perfect time.

And on the morning of my tenth birthday, I found it on my nightstand. My mother left a note: Dear Shari, this clock was given to me by my grandmother on my eighth birthday, and now I am giving it to you. Happy Birthday to my beautiful girl.

My mother would have turned eight in 1960. Even at ten I possessed an uncanny memory for dates and a deep yearning to know my family’s stories. I remembered that my great-grandfather died the day after my mother’s eighth birthday. His wife -- her grandmother, my great-grandmother -- would have given this clock to her only the day before. I was born on my great-grandmother’s eighty-fifth birthday. She turned ninety-five on my tenth birthday, and two days later I joined her for our family birthday dinner. I’m not sure if this was the reason I felt the clock was weighted with more than my mother’s love for me, but I picked it up with nothing short of reverence.

*

I am every age I've ever been.

The following winter, I could have had a new clock radio. My church youth group was selling meat and cheese trays that year—maybe mixed nuts, too. Christmas-themed snacks. And I was tempted, because my best friend had a clock radio that played top-40 songs when it went off in the mornings. What I really wanted from that fundraiser, though, was the phone—it was just a simple white plastic touch-tone, but it would go in my bedroom. I wouldn’t get my own line—ever, my parents emphasized—but if I sold enough beef sticks and cheese balls, I would be allowed to keep it in my room. There would be limits, but I would be allowed to call Julia and speak in relative privacy, rather than in the middle of the kitchen. And anyway, I loved my little pink ballerina clock. It only played one song, but I loved the physical motion of winding it each day, loved the sound of those intricate little gears and the way I could set the time so the ballerina would begin to dance each morning. I loved the click, the momentary grinding before the plinking music began.

When my grandmother moved into the nursing home a year later, we still slept at the farm and my parents still slept in my mother’s old bedroom. I was the one who slept in my grandmother’s bed, alone on the main floor. I packed the little pink clock into my suitcase each time we visited.

My grandmother died -- too young -- from Scleroderma on a Tuesday morning in November. My mother was younger than I am now. My parents needed to make arrangements so I spent the night at Julia’s house, unrolling my sleeping bag against the wall of her basement bedroom. We went to school together the next morning as if everything was normal, and then my dad drove my brother and me north to the farm where we would stay for the rest of the week.

My friend’s bedroom was almost as familiar as my own, but that night I was as disoriented as I was when I rearranged my own furniture. None of it was my own choosing. She set the alarm on her clock radio a little early so we both had time to shower before school, but before I went to sleep I pulled out the pink ballerina clock and wound that, too.

I am every age I've ever been.

Let none of us complain about growing older.

*

I turned forty this week. My parents flew in for just a few hours, trying to return to their snowy home after a few days in Phoenix. Suzannah had a band concert, and my mother had a gift for me -- a mug I gave her when I was Suzannah's age, when she turned forty. Twenty-seven years ago. 40 is not the end of the world! But you can see it from there.

I laughed hard, and after sipping my morning coffee from that mug all week, I realize I love it at least as much as I love that pink ballerina clock. This is what it means to celebrate a birthday with care. This is a gift my mother gave me, and it transcends any thing on this earth.

I turned forty this week. I woke up in a life I love. I am lucky to love so many people.

It was a perfect day. I sipped coffee from my new twenty-seven-year-old mug. I jogged around my neighborhood in the bitingly cold and beautiful sunshine, the snow barely melted, Puget Sound a brilliant blue just down the hill from my house. I walked down to the edge of the water to catch my breath. I stood in a hot shower. I took myself to lunch. I read a book I'm loving, ate something that made me feel amazing, sipped a cold glass of white wine at noon. I lingered over a latte at a coffee shop I don't get to often. I came home and curled up on the couch for a nap, the sun streaming through the glass doors in the dining room. In the early evening, we all went to the Elliott Bay Book Company, and I picked up just a few things I may have missed at Powell's, and we went out for a cozy dinner. It is everything I could have wanted from this day, from any day. To feel the sun on my skin, to taste good coffee, to hug my children, to curl up in bed with the one who's known me, really known me, for my entire adult life.

I found this in a journal I kept a decade ago, from an entry I wrote late in February. It seems fitting to rediscover now:

The air is sweet with the first breath of spring. I never feel the need to crawl up, crawl out from winter's quiet depths until I smell it, that singing fresh scent under the mud, under the earth and the grass. It's almost painful, that first gasp of sharp sweet air, like a birth, like a death.

We find ourselves so fumblingly human together. My head meets your shoulder, your hand finds mine. We seek out that touch, your lips against my hair, my breath against your neck, my hip bumping yours, our hands across a table, our knees underneath. And all of these accidental collisions of skin, proof of life, proof that we are still alive, proof that we still are breathing and moving. My sigh against your chest, my tear against your hand, my hope against your life. Our eyes meet. We are not meant to go it alone.

We drove to Discovery Park this afternoon. We left it in late October, our feet treading upon the sweet damp mulch of fallen leaves. All that sweet rot. We returned today in the sunshine, cool air knifing my lungs. Wake up. I know this scent. It is buried deeper in the landscapes of my youth, under snowfall and dirt, deep, dark in the earth. It emerges earlier here, washing down the streets in the rain, rising to the surface of the earth in the sunlight, in the breeze.

We hiked to the bluffs overlooking Puget Sound. You are the rock against my wave; we are the rocks against each other's waves; we are the waves together, crashing against grief, against joy, the terrible swelling, the ebb and flow, the rise, the breaking.

I thought about grief, about joy, about all the ways we find and lose each other on ordinary days, on the breath of the first day of spring. About how it comes from the same place, about how the source of joy can be so dark and deep, how grief can be surprisingly light.

Spectacular beauty, spectacular joy

The other day I was clearing the table for dinner, moving the odds and ends that accumulate throughout the afternoon: a chunky eraser, a pencil, a slinky, a small tub of Play-Doh, and my son's weekly reading log. I paused over that, just letting my eyes linger on his careful, blocky sentences. He enjoys reading well enough, but he sighs over writing about it. Still, he is ever the teacher's son. He sharpens his pencil over the kitchen trash can, and now, a few weeks into the school year, he settles in to read and write immediately after we get home in the afternoons so the rest of the day is his. He turns to the sandbox while the afternoons are still dry and warm, to the backyard, or to his toys. Daily he spreads his toys across the floor, building his own creations: towers, robots. And I stand at the kitchen table, gazing at his writing: the shape of his letters. The heavy black oval of a period at the end of a sentence. He kneels on the chair while his writes, his feet crossed underneath his bum. He's already shed his grungy little socks; they are balled up on the floor in the family room.

I think about the way I'll slip this reading log into his school box later, the special case I keep for his papers. I'm unsentimental about so many material things. I feel no nostalgia for old Happy Meal toys, for slick paperback picture books collected from so many book orders, for spit-up stained onesies. I have no desire to fill up the corners of my closets with things I'll never look at or use, just to take up space, just to have them. I save stories. But I also do save some things. Not everything. Not every piece of paper my children scribble on. Not every math worksheet. But they each have a box or two, one that does fit unobtrusively into a closet, filled with exactly these treasures: these carefully printed sentences, with their mix of capital and lower-case letters. The heavily scribbled dots above the i's, at the end of the sentences. The sheer beauty of the work, the earnest care. Someday I imagine myself as a mother of two grown children: sliding one of these papers out of the box, and letting myself return to this moment. These golden September afternoons. The whining, the sighing, the resigned sharpening of the pencil, the triumph of completion. The shhhh of the sliding door as it opens for my son's escape to the backyard. The crumpled little socks. The blocky dinosaur eraser, blackened with pencil lead around the edges. All of it.

*

Last night we attended our daughter's Open House. It was a week of Open Houses; three of us are in three different schools. High school, middle school, elementary school. This requires a certain amount of juggling, adjusting to our new normal, but the Winslow girls are efficient, and our mornings have taken on a different sort of smoothness. I wake up earlier without snoozing my alarm, even when I crave more sleep, simply because right now I need the space to be a little quiet with my coffee in the midst of all the movement: Suzannah hurrying her dad to the car, Matt adjusting to leaving the house earlier so he can drop her off on the way to the bus stop. I take Isaac to school a little later, and there's something painfully sweet about this too: this school is his now. I reach into the backseat and squeeze his hand before he jumps out of the car, running towards the open doors, his backpack bouncing over his little butt, his jeans barely staying above the waistband of his superhero underpants. He barely looks back. And we're okay. This is my seventh year dropping off a child at these doors, and I trust the adults on the other side to love him well for a few hours. His cheerful running and his careless goodbye tell me that I'm right.

The night before my little girl started middle school, I didn't sleep. At all. I went to bed early and tossed and turned. Matt came to bed, and I tried to relax into the normalcy of hearing him breathe next to me, but I stared at the ceiling, stared at the wall, tried very deliberately not to stare at the clock, and then gave up. I grabbed a book and retreated to the couch so my restlessness wouldn't bother Matt, and I read for I don't know how long. I dozed a bit before sunrise and rose feeling wrecked and queasy. Let her be okay. I prayed this with every breath. Let them be kind.

My own first day of school was a blur, not unlike my first day of school after I dropped my girl off at kindergarten. But she greeted me with an easy smile that afternoon, her face flushed in the heat.

"Great!" she said, when I asked, So how was your first day of middle school? I slept much better that night.

She comes home smiling every day. She loves her teachers. She and her friends chatter their way home. She and her gym locker partners couldn't figure out how to work their combination lock, so their exasperated PE teacher told them to watch a YouTube video for homework; the next day, my daughter was an expert who announced that she "saved the day." In the meantime, she reported, the eighth graders who helped her were "super nice" about it, and I sent up another prayer of thanks.

The sight of my daughter walking across the playground to meet her brother at his classroom door, swinging her trumpet case, fills my heart to bursting. So did the sight of her at Open House last night. After hot dogs and chips in the cafeteria, we followed her through her schedule.

"This way, I know a shortcut," she called over her shoulder as we hurried to keep up with her. Band to math. Math to science. Science to P.E. She glanced back, just briefly, her ponytail swinging. I wanted to talk to all of her teachers, wanted more than the few minutes we were allotted. I wanted to tell them my daughter loves them, loves learning, and feels safe and happy there, and that is everything to me. That's all I want. I need those teachers to know how much that matters. Having a child in school has shaped everything I am as a teacher of other people's children.

*

It's soccer season again, and I've fallen back in love with it all. Practice falls in the hour before dinner. Last month I jogged around the track while the girls practiced on the field, and my son ran off with the other younger brothers to brandish sticks and fling pine cones at each other. Lately, though, I settle into my camp chair under the trees at the edge of the field, and I try to read, my eyes bouncing between the girls on the field and my son playing nearby in the dirt.

The sun is lower in the sky each day. The afternoons have been mostly warm, sunny, and dry. The sun hits the leaves above me, and the late afternoon is framed in golden light. And every day, exactly fifteen minutes before the end of practice, a large flock of Canada Geese assemble in the middle of the field encircled by the dusty track, just beyond the soccer players. They waddle into position and wait until each goose is present and accounted for. At first I don't notice, but then suddenly there are these fat, feathered bodies, shifting and shuffling.

And then, each day, at exactly the same time, they take to the air. They lift off the field in a grand fluttering of wings, and they fly over my head, honking low and loud. I lift my eyes and watch their bellies sail over the tips of the trees, watch them fall into their perfect V.

It is spectacularly beautiful.

*

Last year, I was so ready to be done with September: I was too busy, and too sick. I coughed and sniffled my way through the month, trying to juggle too many meetings -- if I look in my planner from last year, one week shows seven meetings in five days, which is just stupid for a part-time employee. I was still on church council. I was unmoored and stressed and exhausted.

This year is different. September has seemed long this year, too, but at the same time, it's been awfully sweet. I'm still breathing. My girl comes home smiling. My son bursts through his classroom door with a grin at the end of the day. My students are wonderful and ridiculous and I love them. The dynamics in my department feel so healthy right now, and even when I'm stressed, I know I'm in good company with a good team, and I am grateful. I love the work. I love the people. That's a lot.

I was more than ready to be back at school by the middle of August this year; I was just done with this summer, which had become stressful in its constant demands, pulling me away from home when I really just wanted to be still and present and rooted. It's a privileged problem to have, and I don't regret the travel, not exactly, it's just that I really wanted to let more of the days be slow. The days are anything but slow now, but they are ours, they are here. We are learning how to settle into our groove, and I'm so deeply happy in all of it. My classroom space. My cozy little house. Our routines: these mornings in which I make time to curl up in the living room with my coffee. These afternoons, in which I wrap my arms around my sweaty, smiling children. Soccer practice, the geese, the setting sun. Everything is settling into place, into a rhythm, and it's the rhythm of our lives, every fall. Today I'm a little wistful about September's end, but on Sunday, the first day of October, as the temperature drops just a bit, I plan to pick up pho on the way home from church and curl up on the couch with a quilt in the afternoon. I'll drift to sleep in the living room as the shadows lengthen across our driveway, and later I'll sit at the dining room table and grade commentaries.

The big picture is often unbearable and I don't know how to move through the world these days. Doesn't mean I'll stop trying. Doesn't mean I'll stop speaking. But when I stop and breathe inside the right now of my life, how can I feel anything but gratitude?

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.

Dear World: This is my girl

It's late, and I just tucked my exhausted children into bed, but I wanted to document this moment, however inadequate my late-night musings may be.

We celebrated my girl's tenth birthday today. Ten! She is ten! How is it possible? How has a decade, which seems like such a weighty, significant length of time, actually passed since her birth on that gray Sunday morning? Then again: she is so deeply anchored in this world, and in our hearts, that trying to remember our lives before her seems like a strange trick of memory.

Dear World: I want you to know some things about my girl. I want you to know how much I love this child. I want the world to love her like I do. Loving someone as much as I love my babies just makes me feel kind of desperate and crazy most of the time. Sometimes I feel like the best I can do is hope and pray that this crazy love will make up for all the ways in which I cannot possibly live up to the task of raising them well enough.

My daughter loves to laugh. She is also obnoxiously funny in that fourth grade way that irritates me now but that I will absolutely miss one day. (Things that are "funny" in our house include terrible puns, terrible knock-knock jokes, and anything including bodily functions. Oh, you thought that was limited to boys? It doesn't help that she has a little brother whose favorite word lately is "booger," but I am here to tell you it's not limited to boys.)

She is friendly. Nothing delights her more than seeing someone she knows. If she recognizes someone from school at the grocery store she insists on running over to say hello. Sometimes on our way home she'll cry, "Mom, I see my friend!" and it will be literally some kid her in class she saw not ten minutes earlier, but she is still so happy to call a cheerful good-bye after that person.

She is kind. One of the best compliments I received was from a staff member at her school who watched her standing up to an older kid who was picking on a younger kid.

She is incredibly stoic at the dentist. I don't know why I find this relevant; maybe as her mama I'm just so proud every time they say, "She's seriously one of our best patients." They probably say that to everyone who doesn't cry, I don't know, but last year Suzannah had to have a filling and it wasn't fun, and the dentist said that while she held it together really well in the chair I might just be prepared for her to be a little shaken or emotional afterwards. And I was like, hey, I majored in being shaken and emotional! I've got this. But Zannah walked to the car, spit casually onto the asphalt before climbing in, and asked if she could really have ice cream for dinner and also could we please hurry home so she could do her homework.

At the same time, she is sensitive to people's feelings. She is sensitive to perceived injustice. She in sensitive to what she perceives as imperfections: she will lose her mind if she thinks she will be late for school, or if she forgets a math assignment in her desk, both of which have happened exactly once this year. The tardiness was out of her control (ahem, Matt) but the math assignment was a simple mistake. Both, I thought, provided opportunities to learn how to deal with life and the pressure to be perfect, and I resisted the powerful urge to try to fix it for her. It was hard on both of us. But it's not the last hard moment we will have: I know this, too.

She loves school, loves learning. She reads greedily. She thinks math is fun and she's proud of being good at it. She tells us that her class is full of weirdos, and she says it proudly. She's not "cool" and she she seems to be unabashedly okay with this, and this is something about her that I love so much; I will do anything to protect that in her. She doesn't engage in drama at school; if it exists, she doesn't appear to notice. Her best friends are the boys in our neighborhood, but lately her "best friend" is a girl at school who she has been "hanging out with a lot lately, like the last two weeks!" (She's actually a lovely girl who's been in her class for years, but lately they've bonded over, I don't even know, math and Harry Potter.) She deeply loves everyone who has ever been her teacher. I can't blame her. I love everyone who has ever been her teacher.

She is bookish and bossy, which she maybe gets from her parents (although I am admittedly the bossier person in our marriage, though Matt is probably equally as opinionated). She also loves sports, and I have no earthly idea where she gets that. Matt and I love to be active, and Matt is all about tossing a frisbee or playing tennis or engaging the kids in hard outdoor play, but neither one of us give the remotest of shits about, say, football, and our child can watch an entire game and be actively engaged the entire time and I have a pretty good feeling she understands it far better than we do. She plays soccer every day at recess and can't wait to tell me about the day's game when I pick her up at the end of the day.

She wants to play the drums. Gulp.

She loves people. If you become one of "her" people, know that it matters. Know that when you see her, and smile, and give her a high five or a hug, it matters. If you know her name, it matters.

So today this girl of mine turned ten.

We celebrated with a trip on the light rail, first to Trophy Cupcakes and then to her very first Mariners game, and she got to spend most of the day with not only her parents and brother but her beloved Uncle Aaron and Aunt Morgan and Grandpa Chuck and Grandma Diane. She seemed to love every moment. Full disclosure: we left the game a little early, as it was a night game and we wanted to avoid the crush of people leaving the stadium. She was disappointed at first, but Isaac was totally done by the time we made it to the light rail; he fell asleep on the way to the transit center. Both kids zonked out as soon as we buckled them into the car and snored the entire way home, and both kids changed robotically into pajamas and collapsed in bed within minutes of pulling into our driveway.

"Was it a good day?" I asked my daughter, curling around her in her bed after I tucked her in.

"Uh huh," she said. She pulled her blanked over her head, like she always does. Then she smiled.

"You can give me some extra kisses, if you like," she said.

Kindergarten Camp

We flew in from Minneapolis late Sunday night, bleary-eyed and covered in bug bites, still sticky from the Midwestern humidity and gloriously exhausted. We caught a shuttle to our car. Stopped for a gallon of milk on our way home. Tucked our children into bed.

Ten hours later I led my son into the gym at his new elementary school for his first day of kindergarten camp -- five mornings of getting the littles acclimated to school before the bigs show up. They have recess and music and PE and snacks. They cut and color and sing and write and share and learn where everything is. I am not remotely worried about Isaac’s kindergarten readiness, but in some ways, he is my more cautious child, the one who clings for one more hug, the one who feels a little more nervous in new situations. Suzannah was also quite shy as a five-year-old, but she preferred to just handle it herself, thank you very much. Isaac, I knew, would benefit from a gentle introduction to school where he has the chance to find his bearings a bit.

We were greeted immediately by teachers who are, now, so familiar to me. (Suzannah’s kindergarten teacher remembers me picking her up in the afternoons, wearing Isaac in the Ergo.) Isaac was given a marker and he printed his own name on his nametag. He misjudged the space a bit and had to squeeze in the second a and the c, but one of the teachers smiled and said, “That’s just perfect.”

I led him over to where the kids were lining up with their teachers. He knew I would leave for a few hours. He has an older sister at this school, so he has spent plenty of time in this space -- for concerts, for Winter Wonderland and family math nights and cultural nights.

“This is where you’ll have lunch,” Suzannah explained, putting her arm around his shoulders in a rather proprietary manner. “You also do other stuff in here, like morning assembly.”

“Oh,” said Isaac, solemn and wide-eyed. And then Suzannah ran off to give her kindergarten teacher a hug and say hello to another older sibling, a boy she knew waaaay back in first and second grade.

“How’s your summer going?” I heard her say conversationally. His mother caught my eye and winked.

I held Isaac’s tan little hand in mine. It’s so soft, still. I noted that I needed to trim his fingernails, which held little traces of sand from the lake.

“Okay, Buddy,” I said. “You’re going to stay here and have lots of fun, and I’ll be back at noon to pick you up. Okay?”

“Okay,” he said quietly. But he held my hand tightly. My heart was pounding, which surprised me a bit. The entire summer before Suzannah started kindergarten I felt perpetually on the verge of barfing, but I’ve been pretty relaxed about Isaac. We know and love this school, he’s already spent plenty of time there, I trust the teachers, and I know my son will be fine. I know this. And yet. And yet. My little boy. His little hand in mine.

I squeezed three times. It’s a code I share with my children -- when we’re walking somewhere, say, or when we’re in a crowd of people, they know that three little squeezes is how I say I love you.

Sometimes when I do this to Isaac he cackles and runs away. Sometimes he grabs my hand and crushes it as hard as he can and says, “I love you the most” in a voice that resembles Darth Vader's, and he might follow that with something like, “and I’m going to eat your eyeball.”

I. Squeeze. Love. Squeeze. You. Squeeze.

In that moment he squeezed three times back, steady and firm. I knelt down to hug him, wondering if he’d shrug me off or push me away -- sometimes that’s necessary when he’s navigating a new situation and doesn’t want to be coddled. But he wrapped his arms tightly around my neck. I kissed his cheek, still so deliciously baby soft. He turned towards me with his lips puckered and I kissed him once on those, too.

I don’t mind admitting that right about then I could have just devoured him whole. I love that little boy so much.

And then I stood up, and smiled, and said, “Have so much fun! I love you!” And I walked towards the door. I paused to call Suzannah away from all her socializing (if I’d let her go for much longer she’d have probably gone ahead and started a reading group with some of the kindergarteners or organized them into a game of some sort) and turned back to look at my son. He smiled bravely and waved.

How can my heart break and feel so full at the same time? How can I keep breathing in and out? How can I keep from floating away?

His smile when I picked him up three hours later was exactly what my mama heart needed, grounding me solidly in that moment: in the gratitude that we’re all right here, where we are, and everything is going to be okay.

Birthday Weekend

“Let gratitude be the pillow upon which you kneel to say your nightly prayer." -- Maya Angelou

And just like that, I have an eight-year-old.

She isn’t too old yet to tire of her birth story. I share different details with her every year. Last year she was fascinated by photographs documenting her week tucked into the bili blankets in our kitchen as she recovered from jaundice. This year, I told her about the little ordinary details of the day itself, the hard kernels of memory that anchor her birth firmly in our family story. I told her that as soon as she was born someone brought me a grilled cheese, and it was the best grilled cheese I believed I’d ever tasted. As soon as I wolfed that down I turned to Matt and demanded a hamburger. He went off in search of one while they wheeled me into my postpartum room, my brand-new daughter in my arms.

We laughed about the nap Matt took on the little fold-out chair in our room that afternoon, how he slept so hard he didn’t even stir when a group of friends came to visit. (“Wasn’t that nice for you,” I grumbled playfully. Eight years out, I think I can finally laugh at the horror of sleep deprivation I faced in those first few days. The first night, I didn’t sleep because I was in labor. The second night, I didn’t sleep because I had a newborn who needed to be fed and who I couldn’t figure out how to feed very efficiently. The third night, we were home in our house with a newborn who would not sleep and I had no earthly idea what to do about that, so mostly I rocked her and cried.) I told her that eight years ago today her daddy changed his first diaper and he figured it out just fine. I’m not sure I even helped.

And I forget what prompted me to say this, some little show of attitude or resistance, but tonight I definitely said, “Oh yes you will, because I am your mother and I pushed you out of my body and it was a lot of work and it hurt and I think you can do this one tiny thing for me.” She laughed, rolled her eyes, and complied.

I crawled into bed with her for goodnight snuggles just a bit ago, something that still happens every night. More often than not I will say, “Okay, but nice snuggling tonight, not too silly, okay?” and then we wind up shaking with barely suppressed giggles. Tonight, we were both tired. I curled around her -- so different than curling around a newborn, to be sure -- and she pressed her backside into my stomach, tangled her feet with mine, and fell asleep. When this happens it’s hard for me to tear myself away, because I know these moments are limited, although secretly I hope that she won’t give up on the snuggling any time soon. I stayed there, breathing in the scent of her hair, the faint whiff of cake still lingering on her breath despite bedtime teeth brushing, and the slightly grubby undertone of elementary school kidness.

It is nothing like sleeping with an infant. But in some ways it is just as sweet.

We spent Memorial weekend in Vancouver, BC with my parents, Matt’s parents, and my brother and sister-in-law. Suzannah’s birthday gives us the chance to be together all at once and it was a nice reason to decide to take a mini vacation, so the ten of us squeezed into two Honda CR-V’s and headed north on Saturday morning. We stayed long enough to take in the aquarium and Stanley Park, eat a couple of good meals, check into a hotel, sleep more or less peacefully, and go swimming in the morning. I wound up sharing a bed with Suzannah, which didn’t surprise me much. We originally tucked the kids in together after all sorts of promises and admonitions to behave! and they were so worn out from walking that I really thought they’d just go right to sleep. But then Matt went out for a walk, and I tried to read for a bit before turning off the lamp next to my bed. Right away I heard the whispered “Tee hee hee!” and “Isaac, stop it,” and after about five futile conversations involving my patiently explaining to them how frustrated I was, I said, “Okay, that’s it. One of you is going to have to come and sleep in bed with me.” Suzannah popped right up and said, “Can one of us?” And that is how I wound up with Suzannah in bed with me, and when Matt returned I explained that I was very sorry but he would be sharing a bed with Isaac. Within about forty seconds of the switch they were both completely unconscious and sprawled diagonally across both beds. Matt and I curled ourselves between their limbs -- no amount of shifting and shoving could get them to keep to their own side of the bed -- and slept, too.

***
There is a particular tree in Stanley Park with a curved trunk that appears in a handful of our family photographs dating back to 1979, the year I was born. In those first pictures, I’m sitting on that curved trunk, nestled between my parents.

The summer I was nine, my parents took us on a two-week long road trip through the Pacific Northwest—Spokane to Portland, Portland to Seattle, Seattle to Victoria and Vancouver, BC. In Vancouver we watched the killer whale show at the aquarium. My brother and I planted ourselves squarely in the “splash zone,” shrieking when the orcas rose from their pool and belly-flopped again, sending a wall of water cascading over the lower bleachers. We were drenched and delighted. Afterwards, my parents took us on a little walk along the waterfront until we found it.

“This,” my father said, “is our tree.”

And so it was. I recognized it immediately. I even noticed the same name carved into the trunk—JAY, in block letters. Who knew how long ago someone had left his mark there? My brother and I arranged ourselves side-by-side on that strange curved branch, worn smooth over time. A Mountie rode past on his handsome black horse and offered to take our family photograph; then, he posed with my brother and me. When I look at the photographs now, I can see the faint crimp marks in my hair, flattened by that salty wave back at the aquarium—I can still feel the itch of salt drying on my skin.

We found it again this weekend, all ten of us, after a bit of blundering up and down the walking path. My parents and I attempted to recreate the picture from 1979 (I didn’t need so much help sitting upright this time), and then Aaron and I squeezed in together to duplicate 1988 -- a bit more challenging than it was when we were nine and seven, and our behavior hasn’t particular improved over the years. (“Smile! Shari! Put your tongue back in your mouth! Come on, a nice picture!”) And then I settled my own two children into the sturdy arm of this tree, taking my place in the background, my hand on the smooth wood. Isaac flailed and stuck out his tongue; Suzannah struck all sorts of bizarre poses. I’m sorry, Mom and Dad. They come by it honestly. Maybe they’ll try to look normal in pictures someday, but I wouldn’t count on it.

On a cellular level, I am every age I’ve ever been. I feel this often, especially when I look at my children. It’s a little disorienting to remember standing at this very spot when I was their age, to remember the way the moment felt. The itchy drying salt. The smooth wood. The oceany waterfront smell. Adding another photograph to our timeline of trees feels like a sturdy thread connecting my present to my past.

And what a blessing it all is, indeed.

Even if things get heavy we’ll all float on

"It’s really striking me tonight how normal it feels to have two children, like our family has always had room for Isaac. Like we’ve hardly had to adjust to him...He’s so big and fat and wonderful and growing so fast. He has the widest eyes and the most expressive eyebrows I’ve ever seen. He always seems like such a happy little guy; I hope that means he’s always going to be mostly okay.” -- my journal, July 1, 2010

It is the eve of my son’s 4th birthday. As I do every year, I remember: the way I chatted with my sister-in-law shortly before midnight (the time I’m writing this, right now), feeling like I would definitely still be pregnant for awhile. The way I felt almost exasperated less than two hours later when my water broke dramatically all over the bathroom floor because I’d just gone to bed and was tired and was not particularly in the mood to be in real labor. The drive to the birth center after Morgan came over to stay with Suzannah, me singing “Float On” at the top of my lungs in between contractions:

Alright don't worry even if things end up a bit too heavy
We'll all float on alright
Already we'll all float on

Laughing less than four hours later as he was born into his daddy’s hands and lifted to my chest.

Holding him in my arms, kissing his nose, and falling in love.

Tonight he shrieked with laughter as he scooted his new Iron Man toy across the kitchen floor. He helped his Grandma Winslow make a pumpkin pie, and when Matt and I tiptoed into his room after our date tonight, intending to kiss our sleeping son, he opened his eyes and whispered, “Is the pie out yet?” He inherited his daddy’s big feet with the giant big toe, and he’s tall. But his baby fat -- the delicious chubby rolls I nibbled every day of his babyhood -- has given way to little boy leanness, skinny legs and knobby knees. But his belly -- that yummy round tummy! -- still pokes out underneath his pajama tops.

Sometimes when I see Matt’s socks crumpled on the floor in random places, I think, My house will be full of stinky boy socks forever. And then I can’t help but giggle at that absurdity. Someday, God willing, I will live with a teenaged boy who will likely be taller than I am. I won’t want to kiss his toes the way I still want to kiss them now, when he waves them in my face and hollers, “Smell my stinky foot!” I have these little flashes of hugging his stretched-out, grown-up lankiness and it is almost too much to bear, but it is also the thing I want most from this life -- maybe the only thing I really want. For my children to last longer than I do.

Last year, on the day my son turned three, twenty-six people -- most of them children exactly my daughter’s age -- were shot to death in their elementary school. I couldn’t eat lunch with my friends that day; I could only hurl my food into the trash and cry uselessly into my hands, trying to compose myself before turning on Ten Things I Hate About You for my seniors that afternoon and resisting, somehow, the urge to drive across town and take my children home and stay there. Forever. That evening, the kids and I drove to West Seattle to meet Matt after work. We ate a comfortable dinner together, the kids cheerfully oblivious, excited for weekend birthday festivities. I swung between desperate grief and desperate gratitude, and in a way, I feel I’m still swinging.

This afternoon I drove across town to meet my daughter at her classroom door, listening to news of another shooting at another school. This time it seems the only fatality is that of the gunman but I’m still shaken, and angry, and full of inflammatory thoughts that do not belong in a post about my son.

Last week I told one of my most trusted friends that part of me is terrified all the time because I see all the ways I could lose my children on an ordinary day. It’s not rational, and I know this. I found this tonight -- I wrote it when I was pregnant with Isaac, the day after I learned a former student had been killed in a car accident:

I've heard people say it's easier not to have children for this reason, and of course they're right. On so many levels. Birthing and loving and raising children is such a huge fucking leap of faith -- it's nothing I could ever have prepared for. Nothing I could ever have prepared my heart for. It's so hard. We screw up a lot. We can't ever go back to the "before" that existed before children, a time that seems so hazy and nostalgic to me sometimes (remember when we could just go out whenever we wanted, to a movie or to have a drink? Remember when we could stay up late to watch a movie at midnight and sleep in the next day? Remember when we could take off on a spontaneous weekend trip without worrying about where the baby will sleep?). But I wouldn't give them back for anything, and the risk of my heart breaking (my heart breaks every day) is a risk I'm willing to take, because this love is the thing in my life that makes me think I'm a little closer to understanding the meaning of it.

I don't always (ever?) know how to find meaning in loss, but I guess that's another leap of faith I have to take.

Motherhood is such an insane mix of grief and joy. Both, at once. I’m a little afraid all the time; mostly, I think, I have learned to gently remind myself that fears are not facts, but it’s there, under the surface of our lives. It’s not that I think about it all the time. But I’m also never not aware of what I stand to lose. I don’t know why some people have to, and I know there’s no reason it couldn’t be any of us.

This may seem morbid for a birthday entry, and it’s true that I don’t think I’ve ever written about Suzannah’s birthday this way, but she’s a springtime baby and so far her birthday has never been sullied with the darkness my son’s has now. And yet: I refuse to let that have the last word. My heart shattered last year, but at the same time I felt so full, full-to-bursting, of gratitude. Of that desperate grief, that desperate joy that fills any mother’s heart, I believe, on a cellular level.

Pray, said my friend. And I do, or I try, and I love my family joyfully and imperfectly, and I wonder why I get to have them, but tonight, tonight, I do.

Happy Birthday, Isaac.

Alright already we'll all float on
OK don't worry we'll all float on
Even if things get heavy we'll all float on
Alright already we'll all float on
Don't you worry we'll all float on

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.