May 25, 2006 – Originally published by CNC, Inc.

Your First-Grader Is Here To Teach You Something

For my youngest son, first grade is ending soon, and I’ve always found this time to be bittersweet – second-graders seem to have, in one short summer, gotten impossibly taller, more knowledgeable, and much more independent than they were when they were in first grade and their day seemed almost too long for them - they will often crumple into you on the playground at the end of the day, just glad to feel your waist, or smell your coat, or bury their tired head into the crook of your arm. And you are almost glad for the distress, as distress has a way of bringing all humans closer, and there is no one sweeter to hold, even if just for a moment on a busy playfround, than a first-grader.

When first grade began for my youngest, there were so many decisions: what to wear the first day of school? Who would he sit with? Would his teacher like him? And most of all – which backpack? We went with a SpongeBob backpack, in no hurry to give up a beloved character. As my son walked into school that first day, I caught my breath and stared at the space where only a second ago he had been. We had done it! We had let go. And, we had both made it through. He had wonderful reports at the end of the day – his new friends were nice, his teacher, Mrs. Tucker, was “wicked awesome,” and his backpack had worked out just fine – in fact, he reported, the SpongeBob on the back made it easy to find! He looked at me then, his eyelashes still baby-long, his bones seeming to change daily in his arms and legs and shoulders; lengthening, becoming sturdier and more of what he would need this year. What, he wanted to know, did I do all day? “You know, I don’t even know,” I laughed, at a loss. “I mostly just waited for you, I guess.” His eyes widened. “You did?” he laughed. “Wow - thanks, Mom!”

This son has been a way for me, in a sense, to move backwards – his next oldest brother being ten years older than he, I thought I had left all of this behind, and it is with gratefulness and a renewed appreciation of the little things in life that I move in his first-grade world. I like talking about bugs, and numbers, and the mystery of dreams, and I don’t worry so much when we are late, or disheveled, and I don’t worry that I am not perfect. I understand that I am, in a sense, the keeper not of him, but of his path – knowing it, removing obstacles from his way, or, sometimes more importantly, leaving those obstacles, like boulders in the road, for him to clear up or figure out for himself. I also know that we need each other, and that we are here together for a reason.

I remember one night when he was about four years old – it was one of those perfect summer nights when the crickets were singing in the dark, and he and I were laying in his creaky bunkbed, our heads close to the screened window, and a breeze was blowing the summer leaves above our heads. He was lost in a world of his own, humming, becoming drowsy in the lamplight, tracing a pattern only he could see on the wall with his fingers. And for some reason an awareness came upon me, that this was it. This was the secret of life, after all – the cotton sheet under us, the bugs outside our window, the tear falling from my eye. It was not going to get any more real than this. And for a moment, before it was gone, I realized that it was not strings of moments (what we call life, or time) that matter, it is the moments themselves - that are recorded somewhere – that matter. God is measuring everything differently. A man of 98 years watching the stars and a baby having only lived a day have both lived fully in this accounting.

And then, it was gone, and even now in this relating I am grasping at a moment that has already passed, having brought what it was supposed to.

Your child is here to teach you something. Keep listening and looking for what it will be.