The boys started school, officially, this week. And last night at bedtime, The Kid cried to me over how hard life must be for blind kids and their parents.
These things, like all of life, are connected.
Life is so much sometimes, especially the first full week of school, when you find out your new teacher and new class and potential new friends and everything is just so new. You find yourself making dreaded small talk at coffee socials meant to welcome new kindergarten parents, over-caffeinated and over-vigilant as you sneak looks past people’s shoulders to try to catch a glimpse of your children. You keep the smile plastered on your face longer so that those children’s teachers won’t mistake your RBF for actual bitchiness. First impressions matter. You call out to a friend from the car after school pickup to have a quick catchup and apologise later to her over how your children acted like assholes from the backseat.
It’s exhausting.
Especially when you’ve had your best summer yet, spending some time almost every day at the beach. When boogie-board-riding has been conquered and you see the same joy on your sons’ faces that was on yours as a child, finding the ocean as a second home and the waves not as threats but as vehicles. When you spend summer’s last rainy Sunday, on the suggestion of a friend, at the local water park zipping around curves in a downpour, which is somehow right. When that ends with Little Brother terrified and TK ecstatic, which is also somehow right for right now. When afterward, you get them Oreo milkshakes and while you’re trying to find a utensil for TK because he’s never been able to drink through a straw, you turn around with a coffee stirrer only to find that he’s inhaled half his drink. Through a straw.
You see your children at the top of the slides–nervous, excited, unsure–and at the bottom–victorious, angry, cold. And you find a way to fit both of those shapes into your arms, wrapping one in a towel and your legs around the other for another run.
After the small talk, you have deeper talk: a coffee date with a friend, a chat with LB’s last-year teacher about how she spied him in his new classroom with a “this is all so much but I’m trying really hard to be perfect and brave” look on his face, the one that makes you proud and breaks your heart, and how she told his new teacher how he thrives on praise, and so that’s what she gave him, and now he glows. You hear other parents say how good a fit TK’s teacher is for him, and you watch as he and said teacher bond over calculators, and you revel in you–all of you–being known.
You think about another win of the summer, a trapeze yoga class booked on a whim and rued the whole drive there by the assholes in the backseat, only for their minds to be cleared and changed an hour later as they both meditate in their own way on the floor of the studio: LB on his mat with his eyes closed and a blanket over him, TK peering through squinted-not-closed eyes, announcing to the teacher his every thought.
You remind yourself that they don’t have to be anyone but who they are, and as summer lingers but also recedes, and the air grows cooler, you feel something unlock within, something shift into place, and TK says, “You see? It’s all connected”–not knowing how very right he is, how very right it all is.