Sometimes I get bent out of shape about living in the same town I grew up in. How can I possibly still be here, I think to myself? I would have thought I’d be living in a different country at this stage.
And then, there are times when the magic of my history here gives me a cosmic wink.
Like this year, my youngest son's teacher is the sister of a dear high school friend. My middle son has the teacher I personally helped hire — the one who stepped into my classroom when I left teaching. And my daughter's high school counselor is the daughter of my childhood Girl Scout leader, a woman who was a close friend of my mother's.
They’re like my secret insiders, guiding the fate of my children.
There are invisible threads everywhere. And this week, as both of my boys graduate, I can feel them more than ever.
One of my boys leaves fifth grade. Another leaves eighth. Elementary school ends for one. Middle school ends for the other.
Two boys, two different thresholds. Two versions of childhood quietly packing up their backpacks and walking out the door.
I have packed the lunches, and signed the forms, and gone on the field trips, and bought the shoes, and reminded them, for the millionth time to put on deodorant.
But we did not get them here alone.
Our children are carried by so many hands. Teachers who learn their faces and come to love their quirks. Counselors who notice quiet friend struggles and offer solace. Coaches who teach them how to lose with dignity. Friends’ parents who feed them without making it weird.
My youngest started kindergarten during COVID. I remember him sitting in his room with a laptop, trying to listen to his wonderful teacher perform near backflips to keep her squirmy five and six year olds engaged.
My son, after two minutes: “I’m done.”
He’d shut his computer. Enough “learning” for one day.
Now I watch him do 100 sit-ups every single night without fail, astonished at how long his limbs are and how committed he is to those six pack abs. What a gift that the child who started school through a screen was helped across this threshold by someone connected to my own girlhood.
And I remember my eldest son, who used to dress up every poetry day with a beret, a mustache, a scarf, and glasses to stick the landing on the Beatnik vibe.
I now watch him painstakingly perfecting his hair in the mirror before school in the way the boys today do. Equal parts boy and young man, morphing into something almost unrecognizable before my eyes. And the teacher who stepped into my old classroom became one of his favorite teachers, helping him step out of middle school and into his next chapter.
Beginnings and endings have a way of showing us what we missed while we were busy living the ordinary days.
This week I see it more than ever.
I see my boys growing and childhood shifting again. I feel the ache of what is ending, and the promise of what is beginning.
And I see, maybe more clearly than I have in a long time, that even here, in the place I once thought I was supposed to outgrow, something holy has been happening all along.
To read more of my work or check out my offerings, please see my website. xxo
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