Another of my boys starts school next week, taking that first step on a 13-year journey, and there are three of them now, away from my influence seven hours of every weekday, and I can feel the fear of it catching in the back of my throat.
It happens every year, just like this, and every year I have to fight off that failure-feeling that sneaks in—because I cannot be a homeschool mom.
I could protect them from so much. I could drill those values so deep in their hearts they’d never get them back out. I could speak life into their lives all the time, instead of relying on a behavior chart to teach them who they should be.
I could control their friends and their food and their learning and their choices and their decisions and their opportunities and their playground interactions and their exercise routines and their literature reading and their library visits and the soap they wash their hands with and the way people around them talk.
My heart has begun its jagged beating, once more.
I wish. I wish. I wish.
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My first day of kindergarten I walked into a classroom not much bigger than a dorm room, lit by lamps and a back wall of windows. Mrs. Spinks hung all those alphabet balloons, an apple with an A, a penguin with a P, a zebra with a Z, in every corner of the room, and she pointed, three times a day, to the checkered carpet sitting in the center of the room, where we’d learn our letters and their sounds, even those of us who already knew how to read because our mama was a librarian and our 10-months-older brother had come home every day from his kindergarten year and taught us everything he knew.
My brother had refused to sit in that neat circle on a checkered carpet the year before, but I did everything I was told, eager to please in any way I could.
Just after lunch, the room transformed into a blue-carpeted mat, because we all stretched out our nap pads, and Mrs. Spinks would turn on that big noisy fan and all my classmates would sleep around me while I stared, wide awake, at those bubble letters, creating elaborate stories in my mind that linked them all, the zebras and the penguins and the apples and everything in between.
In that room we colored and slept and sat at desks facing a chalkboard with no computer anywhere in sight, and we were such a small town everybody’s parents knew everybody else’s parents, and we, the students, had already known each other for years.
It was safe. Comfortable. Warm.
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Four years ago, when the oldest started school, the whole family walked him into a room with desks facing each other in pods and math sums arranged on posters and stacks and stacks of handwriting pages he and his classmates would work through by the end of the year, because all those 5-year-olds, or most of them, already knew their letters and just needed some extra practice writing.
My boy didn’t seem to notice that day the proximity of those desks, how they never gave a student one minute to be alone, but he would, in unexplainable ways, notice them later, when he’d yell at his brothers to leave him alone and when he’d cry about things he never cried about and when he’d fall asleep on our bed, even though he hadn’t napped since he turned 4.
I wondered, a hundred times, a thousand, if we had made the right choice.
But I worked a job, and that made homeschool a can’t-do option, and all those kids still at home, four of them, made it an even greater impossibility.
In those first days, I did what most first-time-public-school mothers do—I wrote a note to his teacher to explain my boy’s little quirks, the way he preferred to take off his shoes after playing outside because he wanted his toes to breathe, how he enjoyed teaching himself and read animal encyclopedias and Harry Potter and environmental guides, how he loves hard and strong and wild like a tornado that’s often overwhelming for those who are the recipient of that love.
I wanted her to know him the way I did, and I wanted her to accept all those quirks, all those strong-willed bones that hold a hard line in his body, and love him anyway.
And then we walked our beloved one to school and left him there, sitting in a seat that bore his name. I hoped all the way home that he would feel as safe as I did when I was just a 5-year-old girl in a world I had never known.
But you can’t make a teacher love a child, and sometimes the only safe place you can give him is his home-place.
I would learn that later, and it would drive another spear in my heart.
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The kindergarteners in my small-town school shared a playground with everyone in school, just like we shared a cafeteria with one lunch period and one tiny hallway of classrooms.
Our playground didn’t look at all like the playgrounds of today. A merry-go-round and a metal slide and three seesaws edged it, and, in its middle, a bank of swings and above-ground culverts and cut-in-half tractor tires painted sky blue and electric orange and pale yellow, set upright for the climbing onto and under. A cement slab waited across the street for P.E. class, but we weren’t allowed to cross the street during recess.
That first day I stayed far away from the seesaws and the merry-go-round and the tires. I stuck to the swings, because it was what I knew, and I could kick my feet high and feel like I was flying for that half-hour of free time twice a day.
It was safe.
But as the weeks wore on, I watched friends climb through the above-ground culverts, where spiders hung from cement tops and snakes might be hiding in the grass patches between them—and if they could do it, I could, too.
A friend and I hid in one of those culverts during one recess, and there was a boy, years older, who stood just to the side of it. I knew who he was—a big boy who rode the bus home with my brother and me—by his scratchy voice.
Hey, Fatton, he yelled so everyone on the playground could hear. I peered out of the culvert, because the name sounded awfully close to my last name: Patton. He was pointing at my brother, just across the way, climbing onto a seesaw with a friend small and thin. You’re too fat for that, Fatton.
He wasn’t fat, my brother, just solid, built like a football player, but the name would stick all through elementary school, and that boy would be the torturer, and he would drag along with him other boys, boys who went to church with us and boys whose moms knew our mom and boys who came from good homes with a mom and dad who loved them and tried to raise them right. They would all tease and poke and tear apart.
It was that day I learned that school could be a not-so-safe place, one that could take a last name, Patton, and turn it into Fatton because someone thought it was funny and didn’t think through how it might brand a heart forever.
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It’s not so different, this world where my sons will walk to school and sit in a classroom and play on a playground. And yet it’s so very different. Bullies existed back when I was a girl, of course they did, but we knew each other’s parents and we knew each other and we didn’t hide behind technology and computer screens and entertainment that existed outside of real relationships with real people.
We knew how to look our tormentors in the eye. We knew how to see that their mom was dying of some disease doctors didn’t know how to cure and how his dad worked too much and never spent time with him and how they were afraid of our brains and our dreams because they somehow believed ours stole something from their own.
My boys, though, are coming of age in a world that values performance over empathy, that holds up competitions as the only way to achieve, that mandates boys walk angry and wounded and shut down, because to show emotion is to be a lesser man, and they don’t know how to express their deepest hurts outside of the violence they see everywhere—in games, in movies, in their homes.
They will live in a school world where men can walk in and shoot 5- and 6-year-olds, where boys carry knives in the front pocket of their backpacks, where bullies on playgrounds can rip holes in a heart faster than a mama can mend.
How does a mama keep her sweet boys safe in a dangerous place like this? How does a mama make sure her boys keep holding tight to who they are in a culture that holds up who they aren’t as the “way to be a man”? How does a mama breathe on a day like today?
These are questions I cannot answer.
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All the kids braved the monkey bars back when I was a girl, even though they were so high off the ground even an adult had to swing across instead of walking themselves across.
There was a day when I watched a boy, my brother’s best friend, get halfway across and then drop, his body twisting all the way to the ground, his hand trapped beneath him so it cracked in three jagged pieces. I watched him turn pale as the teacher on duty led him away, and I watched him return five days later with his hand and wrist wrapped in a white cast, ready to sign.
I watched a friend brave the big metal slide that burned our behinds raw when the sun was out, and she slid all the way down, her legs squealing for her, and then her bare-skinned thighs stuck to the bottom so she had to throw herself off, and the throwing knocked out two front teeth before they’d even had a chance to loosen. I watched her cry herself bloody as she ran off to find help.
And then there was another day, when we all sat in a cafeteria where the smell of chicken noodle soup shifted and turned and stretched, and I sat down with my friends and dipped my two cheese rolls in broth and ate them first, and then I heard the yelling, and there was my brother, turning blue, and Mr. Tegler, the district speech therapist, behind him, lifting and squeezing until that bone flew out of his throat and my brother sucked air like it was all he’d ever wanted to do. I watched his face whiten in the relief of breathing again when he thought he never would.
My brother could have died. He could have died. He could have died. That’s what I remember thinking all those days later, a childish sort of thank-you prayer. A help-me prayer too.
Because in a place this unsafe, anything could happen to anyone.
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My sons could die. My sons could die. My sons could die. Every step closer to the school, I feel those weights closing in.
How do I protect their dreams from death? How do I protect their hearts from death? How do I protect their lives from death?
I could drive myself crazy with all these questions I cannot answer. I can twist and turn under that not-really-a-decision public school decision, all those fears it drags along beside it, and I can let its guilt nip my heels all the way through the halls to those classrooms, and I can feel its burden hanging my neck and dragging my feet and choke-holding my heart.
Or.
Or I can let them go, let them take this first step out of my arms, because there will be so many more that must be made after this. I can loosen my hold to their own capable selves, to a God who knows them better than I know them myself.
We are parents, and we will always hold them tight, in arms or in ragged raw, letting-go hearts, but there is Another who holds them, too, and as hard as this letting go is, we must remember they will be caught. They will be held. They will be loved.
I can keep them hidden and safe, or I can let them go to shine like noon in a world of midnight.
I can keep them within the bounds of my home and my carefully controlled community and my list of approved friends, or I can let them go to stand on legs of their own and live out values and missions and love in their own individual way.
I can teach them to crawl in my safe-zone perimeter, or I can let them go fly.
I want to be brave enough to let them fly.
So next week I will take the first step. I will swallow hard, and I will kiss them goodbye, and I will whisper those words into their ears, Remember who you are. Strong. Kind. Courageous. And mostly Son, and then I will walk the sidewalk back home, with three more who wait for this flying.
