4 pairs of Converse high-tops

We bought four pairs. You came into the world with four pairs of Converse hightop shoes. Daddy bought unisex colors: two sets of aqua (unisex? debatable) and two sets of black, because we didn't know if you were a boy or girl. But we were prepared with hightops, sizes 3, 5, 7, 9.

We didn't know how this would work, you joining us, no other family member for 1000 miles, Mama in grad school, Daddy working 3 jobs. When the nurses handed you to me, I couldn't tell if it was just the anesthesia making me shiver or if the great and profound weight of this new life in my care was making me quake. I was holding 8 lb. 1 oz. of beautiful you but the pull of gravity at that moment was much greater. Like a Mac truck had backed into my hospital bed and dropped a heap-ton of work and sleeplessness into my lap. Somehow--and I can't explain it because I think you have to experience it firsthand--a feeling washed over me that you were the only one thing in my life that I couldn't get out of, and yet we were going to be ok, you and I and Daddy, and that we were going to be so, so happy together.

I mean, for starters, at least we had shoes.

The first time I saw your Daddy walking up the hill of Schultz lawn, he was wearing Converse. They were red Chucks, the only appropriate choice for the man who captured my young heart.

Whenever we would go to visit your grandparents in Ann Arbor, we would visit Sam's to buy ourselves a new pair of Cons.

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It's terribly naive to think that we should make this bulk investment in Converse for a girl who would not walk for another 13 months, but I suppose the shoes symbolize our naivete and our induction of you into our Converse club.

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You put the last pair on today, the bookends on this shoe collection, and you complained that they were pinching your toes. It felt unfair, that you had outgrown these shoes that had once seemed so impossibly big without our even noticing it.

This, too, is a symbol of the invisible ache that your own growth causes the people who love you most in this world, and also of the wonderful shoes you have yet to fill that you do not yet own, in sizes we cannot yet fathom.

Pint-sized gowns

I sat through the planning meeting for thekindergarten graduation convinced I must be dead inside because I wasn't crying yet over gowns and tassels and Pinterest party decs or even over my baby, who hasn't been a baby for a few minutes now.

We hustled to the graduation after I barely showered, nearly died of Lego impalement and carried younger one shoeless into the church where I sat in the empty pew for introverts who score low on the parenting small talk test.

The pint-sized gowns filed in, a million iPhones captured their well-orchestrated pairings and twinkling smiles some with open spots where baby teeth once parked.

I sat wrangling my younger and shushing my mate held attention for sweet songs and slideshows, corrected the grammar in my head of speeches and prayers because sometimes I get in my own way, even sitting down.

My mate snapped the obligatory diploma take and transfer; You made it, kid! Except not for first grade looms. Even from here I see sandtraps on both sides of the fairway.

My mate handed me the phone and then I saw it, the worst injustice, solidified, crystallized, preserved there so plain I started to cry.

Children are born each day into abject poverty, to arms that abuse and smother, to homes where hunger is real little feet run bare, not on purpose.

And here is mine, embraced, just as each child betasseled and begowned tonight at the graduation--where I graduated from overprivileged to overwhelmed by the love these shepherds in skirts show our messy pints, cherishing their persons not always so refined, filing in two-by-two, loving them through difficult consonants, vowels, holding their wobbly hands that write names between two pale blue lines that remind me of the two pale blue lines that once changed my life six years ago on a different kind of test.