6.75 years

Dear Baby Girl, Last week you were bucked off a horse, and seven days since does not allow me any further eloquence...

I can tell you this, though: there is/was a space between the time I realized what was happening and the time I was picking you up from the ground as you were gasping for air when I was changed.

In between the time I was trying to figure out if the horse was going to trample you and the time I was trying to figure out if you would be paralyzed--I leaped over a few lifetimes.

My love deepened in a way that is different from the eyelash winking increments that it grows for you each day. It plummeted to the depths of someone being thrown from a building. Of a six year-old being thrown off the horse.

In that space, in those seconds that felt like the worst nightmare looping in slow motion, my heart reaffirmed something. I'm not sure if the heart spoke any words but if it did, they would have sounded something like, "Mine. Beloved. Will fight."

Within moments of my picking you up, you proclaimed, "That is the last time I ride a wild horse! I am only riding Western from now on!" That was sort of snobby of you, but we all decided to forgive you, since you had been thrown off a large animal and all which probably addled your brain a bit.

In the days since, I have been trying to memorize your face, your sweet face just as it is. I now know more acutely how quickly you could be snatched from the safety of this moment, a false safety if ever there were one.

And the truth is that you are being snatched each and every moment from me. The moments are taken, seized without warrant. I should be used to it by now. In parenting we are forever straddling our own little heaven and hell at the same time; the heaven of the moments we want to preserve, the hell of having to will these moments away to cruel time; the hell of wanting the hard times to pass more quickly, the heaven of looking back on things when they felt so much simpler than the complicated present.

I will return to the horse and to you on the ground and I will pick you up thousands of times in my mind and my heart will reaffirm millions of beats more resoundingly that you are, indeed, my beloved and I will never stop fighting--time, distance, darkness, pain--to make sure you know that wild horses couldn't keep me away.

Love,

Mama

Real talk about school drop-off/pick-up

You may be among the blessed whose school districts use a big yellow bus system whereby you are spared the pleasures of pick-up/drop-off. Or maybe you homeschool and lead us all to wonder why we are not doing the same. The school system where our children are enrolled does not have a busing system. The schools are located in rural-burbia where children do not typically walk or bike but rather climb into oversized sport utility vehicles with 2-3 cute dogs wagging their tongues out the window and are transported everywhere. I seriously wonder sometimes if this is what my forbearers dreamed about when coming to America. Lo, let us mount a sea voyage to the new world, they said, a twinkle in their eye, where we will enjoy a famine-less potato crop and our children will never need to exercise because we will drive them everywhere! 

But that is neither here nor there.

My point is that there is a long long queue of minivans and big SUVs parked outside our kids' school every morning and every afternoon and it is a scary scene if you don't know what to expect. Here's the reveal:

The first rule of drop-off/pick-up is to you never mess with the flow of traffic. Trust, you do want to be that person who is trying to do creative maneuvers into the school driveway. You remember that part from "Mr. Mom." Enter from the South, exit to the North.  You want to be in the correct lane and not have to depart from it or you will suffer sinister glares from fellow parents and you will sleep with one eye open lest they send gremlins up your shower drain at night for trying to pull a three-lane sweep just to get to the clutch parking spot. Also, don't be that guy who is sitting in the pick-up lane totally unawares of others trying to advance because he is sweeping like woah in Candy Crush. Fear the gremlins, bro.

The second thing you need to know about drop-off/pick-up is that you need to keep your eyes on the prize. If you have to go into the school building (true fear) as we do because of legal stipulations for signing kids in/out, you are going to have to watch out for the landmines. You are basically going to have to storm the beaches of Normandy to retrieve your kid. Everywhere, there will be social explosions. The mom whose name you can never remember. The dad who always wants to have a Big Long Conversation about the new math. The school  librarian who got a super cute new haircut and you just need to let her know. You have got to avoid all this, fair voyager, or else you will never make it to the end of this Super Mario level and rescue the princess. I mean, haha, pick-up/drop-off is not a video game! That would be insanity if I thought of it as a game. I meant, you need to put on the tunnel vision blinders so you can get to your child(ren) and take him/her/them home or chauffeur them to any number of organized activities and suffer more helicopter parenting. I mean, enjoy watching your kid kick the ball into the goal.

Then there is the matter of all the tiny student people who are slugging backpacks that are so large they have a Pizza Hut inside of them. Do not trip on them in the hallway. Try to dodge them at all costs. They will flatten you.

Let us also discuss the dress code of drop-off/pick-up. We live in the South where wearing sweatpants in public is the equivalent of announcing, I  have just gotten out of jail and this is all I was given to wear. Regardless of your incarceration status, if you are a female in the South, you must look fresh, have your "hair fixed" and have a handbag that matches your ensemble if you are venturing out. I am a daughter of the MidWest, so this all is against my constitution. Ergo, I am not always befitting of Haute Drop-off. If I am not teaching on a particular day, I am reliably going hard with my yoga attire, as if I have just gone to yoga or am headed there now. En route to bringing my children home, I will wave at the yoga studio like we are old friends, when the daughter of the MidWest in me knows the truth. And so, probably, do you.

I know there will come a day all too soon that this pick-up/drop-off madness will cease and I will hear the door slam to my child running out to hop into a friend's car and I will wonder if my child will die in a car accident or be prosecuted for wearing sweatpants in public. A part of me will long for the days when I was the chief executive of transportation operations. After that panicky prayer is uttered, I will probably go find my kid's lunch on the counter and turn around and bring it to her in school where I will wait in the endless queue of parents dropping off their kid at school.

Should-ing all over myself

As I am holding Baby Boy up to the trash can so that he can urinate squarely inside its rim, I decide to forgive myself. We are probably giving that unarmed security guard services guy quite a show as he watches us on the video camera. Aside from the tourists who surreptitiously touch everything and climb up the rocks at Ruby Falls, despite the guide's caution against this , my son being lifted to whiz in a can could be the most exciting thing to happen all day for the video monitor. I really should know better, though, to have peed the boy before we embarked on the cavernous subterranean journey, because we've already done this. We visited Ruby Falls earlier in the summer, the kids and I. So I should know that there aren't any bathrooms within the whole cavern basement and the place is one big giant dripping spout so even if you don't think you have to pee, you're bound to think you do. I should know this!

Just like I should: - never overdraw on my bank account anymore. - not still break out like a teenager when I am stressed. - observe a reasonable bedtime. - be more diligent in getting my kids to read and do chores and speak 3 languages. - be fit enough to audition for American Ninja Warrior. - make a mealplan for my family the next 3 years like I know you and Pinterest do.

But I need to stop should-ing all over myself. Who, in the history of shoulds has ever benefited directly from someone declaiming, "I should do that thing that I've been meaning to do!"

Try these: - I should vote! - I should container garden! - I should go back to school! - I should not be such a witch all the time!

Which of the above changes a molecule in the world if none are ever executed, if no actions are taken to turn the shoulds into dids?

So I'm tossing should from my lexicon this school year. I will bandy about "want" and "pray about" and "tried" and that powerhouse of a three-letter past tense verb, "did."

***

p.s. Here I am with my new friends at Nerd Camp. It was the greatest time among new but true friends.