Mother Tongue
Lauren Whitehurst
Back-to-school time for me is fused to a transitional month and a half that leaves me spinning. I am technically in the world each of these days and ostensibly moving us forward. But it's not until mid-September that I can confirm my actual presence in any place, register what all I signed up for over the past weeks (yikes!), and then, desperately, try for some sort of perspective.---
July's crop of back-to-school catalogues presages it all, of course, but for me, the initial time-skipping happens in the Birthday Vortex. This phenomenon extends from the end of July through early September and encompasses all four birthdays of my sister's and my children. It's like a celebration-endurance race.
Even if one dispenses with big parties, birthdays occupy a lot of time in planning, scheduling, ordering, wrapping, baking, transporting, celebrating, and thank-you-ing. You eat a lot of cake, ice cream and icing—way, way more icing than if you're just attending other kids' birthday parties.
Birthday-Vortex time-sucks are large and small in our family: Gift-related discussions among the extended family, elaborate cake decorating, candle-lighting—and then more candle lighting because the wrong child blew out the candles and made the birthday child cry.
It can be hard to really register the milestone of an individual child. I mean, they've each been getting older all year, and then this one day in the Vortex just nudges them to the other side. No big deal. Occasionally, it feels like a big deal. But there's so much going on, there's little time to sit with it. Either that, or there's a degree of emotional multi-tasking that spreads the shock of fast-passing time over four children instead of focusing it on one. This might be a good thing.
Sylvia's birthday is the most squashed—nine days after one birthday and three before the next. Yet with her third birthday this year I felt most sharply the point of passing time. Amid the Birthday Vortex sea of jollity, I was moored on a little mid-week island of mourning, where neon signs proclaimed babyhood gone and cuddling diminished.
Confirming this jump farther from my arms is the disturbing fact that Sylvia sometimes peppers her tantrums with the language of an angsty pre-teen. "I hate you!" she screams in a bathroom-floor moment somewhere between pull-ups and tooth-brushing that feels weirdly like a forecasted bathroom-door moment somewhere between first tampons and pimple popping.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. She doesn't know what "I hate you" means, only that it elicits a terrific reaction. At 3 and 6, and now in preschool and kindergarten, Sylvia and Theo are being exposed to and pushing harder against boundaries they don't necessarily understand.
Also, they have less rest time than they used to, and more stimuli. My reactions to them consequently require more thought, especially with Theo—which is not to say that I am giving them the thought they require much of the time. We're all in a new place.
The transition to kindergarten and a big school is major, but it didn't feel as gut-wrenching as I expected it to, or as parent-friends of mine experienced it. I couldn't figure out why this was, until I realized that my reaction to Sylvia's birthday had to do as much with Theo as with Sylvia.
Two weeks before school started, I was drumming up heaps of birthday enthusiasm and school spirit while feeling rather sad. Big steps were afoot and my kids weren't going to need me in the same way as they did before, which left me, where, exactly?
I was hardly worried about being at a loss of things to do. I was grieving the passage of time, which is, by nature, open-fingered and empty handed. The sand slips through. By the time kindergarten actually started, then, that first day wasn't a huge deal. I'd already started wrestling with it, and Theo seemed unfazed.
My timing was a bit premature, but I'm not alone in choking over this sucker-punch parenting moment: Schools have "Boo-hoo Breakfasts" for kindergarten parents for a reason. Also, I've since discovered where, exactly, that school-launched, mama-need shift leaves me: Signing up for active PTA service.
I'm not alone here, either: The number of kindergarten parents at the first PTA meeting indicated a strong trend in this direction. Schools probably count on entering families translating this life-stage step into volunteerism.
At this point, I'm not sure where everything is going to fit in our weeks. Nevertheless, I've channeled into school support my anxieties about the state of Santa Fe public education and our not getting an interzone transfer to our preferred elementary school. I have developed a militantly positive attitude: We will be fine! This will be a great year! It's critical that we support our neighborhood schools! There is so much potential! Let's get involved! Hip, hooray for us!
This is a new parental realm, proactive, defensive and sincere. Every day, I walk the fine lines between compassion and self-righteousness, confidence and despair, goat-head-riddled dirt playgrounds and broken sidewalks, being a comforting ear for my kids and anxiously yanking out any information they'll cough up.
Sylvia is vocal and proud about her big-girl preschool. Theo, however, has little to report—and/or he doesn't grasp the importance (to me) of reporting. So far, the only thing he has said about school this year is, "Mom! Real knights and princesses visited us today!" His captivation with knights is long-standing, so I wasn't surprised by his excitement over this unanticipated event, which sounded kind of random, but, hey, it got him talking!
Of course, he was referring to the royal entourage of Spanish conquistador Don Diego de Vargas, roles that are reenacted every year in La Fiesta de Santa Fe. Fiesta week is full of extravagant events and daily parades. It punctuates the end of summer and it compounds the whole transitional vortices thing—because now they're plural.
We celebrated Fiesta, and then we celebrated Theo's sixth birthday. And then…and then… Everything is busy and turning and new this time of year: routines, birthdays, schools, tourist seasons. All this activity in and around the Birthday Vortex feels a little breathless. It's distracting.
It also can open up the progressing autumn to me being more mindful about Theo and Sylvia getting older. Kids do a lot of growing in tiny moments that carry a lot of weight. Calm after hoopla can put these in greater relief, sharpen edges and direct my focus.
Now, it is time to leave the Birthday Vortex, happily. It's time to enter this next season and begin walking with my children through another year of their lives, grateful for their company and the chaos of celebration—and for times when it calms down.
Does it ever calm down, by the way? Because there's a school fundraiser in two weeks…
