The requisite back to school picture

I already saw one this week that made me cry, and I've never met the towheaded boy who was headed off to kindergarten, right after he shrugged his little sister off his shoulder and stuffed the sign his mom made him hold for the camera. By virtue of raising our children in the South, we launch the wave of back-to-school pictures that graffiti Facebook walls. In a month, we will glance at our  New England counterparts like they've just been the frivolous grasshopper playing his fiddle, while we carpenter ants down here in Tennessee soldier on, getting ready for school.

Oh, those requisite First Day Pictures for the Social Media's Pleasure.

Here is what I want to see: the pictures of the parents taking the pictures. Posturing their children to appear a certain temperament, or frowning at the uniform that was so well-fitting at the end of last school year, or at the outfits chosen for first day impressions.

Appendix A:

I will spare you the picture of me. I haven't slept all week--and I am a person who values sleep! I've been so anxious about this school year beginning and all of the ramifications therein that I haven't slept. Last night? Not a wink. I finally decided at 4:30a.m. to put on my clothes and hit the gym.

I have a kindergartener this year. My kid. Not the one I babysit. Mine. My child. That one I gave birth to last week and brought home from the hospital in her snuggly onesie yesterday.

Baby Girl starts kindergarten this week. Ok, so I should spare myself some of the theatrics. My kid is in the same classroom she's been in for two straight years already, with the same delightfully gifted teacher who invented early education as far as I am concerned. I have no worries about this situation and neither does Baby Girl. But oh that adrenaline of the first day! The anticipation! The jitters! The smell of gluesticks that smacks you immediately when the doors of knowledge fling open!

My heart was quieted tonight as I found one of my favorite passages in a favorite book of mine that every parent should read. My boyfriend sent it to me during his last semester of college. My boyfriend with whom I share that baby who's going to kindergarten.

Now for a word from our sponsor, 1-800-SENTIMENTAL-MUCH?

The author writes to his son's teachers present and future:

If you only knew how nervous we all are, I thought. How hopeful we are that you will be kind, that this isn't something you've grown tired of doing, that our children will soar with you and not in spite of you, that they will still believe it all when you're done with them--that you will let that be true in their world for this one last year. You could never know how much we hope that you will please, please--to the very depth of all the word means--please, be kind.

- Marc Parent, Believing it All

*** Forthcoming: August 2013 First day portrait.

Here's one to tide you over until then.

Updated:

Box 1305

Alma Mater sent me the door to my mailbox of all four years Even the semester I took off to be an intern in DC Box 1305 was still mine. Not occupied by anyone else. And when I received the souvenir door to my once-mailbox in my now-mailbox which is an oddish nesting of postal portals when you think about it, I opened the box containing the door to the box that I used to open every day, ages 17 through 21. I gamely held the dial, pointing it to combination numbers and it all came rushing back.

I was reduced to that tender age where I felt everything acutely. Where I would stand there in the midst of good-smelling fraternity boys in front of the wall of little doors like Alice in a neo-Wonderland I stared at my fate through a clouded window marked 1305. Would today be a day of discovery J. Crew cargo shorts gone pastels this season? Would today be a letter from my granny signed, Keep the faith, Love, Gramma or would today be a telegram from my old man in the form of TIME Magazine which he sustained a subscription for me for all four years as if to remind me, weekly, to take a look at the world's problems for a moment, from the heights of your ivory tower. Or would today be the proverbial golden ticket in the Wonka bar-- a small slip indicating you had won the college lotto: Today a package awaited you.

Box 1305: the gatekeeper of So much more than mail. Homesick for a home that was no longer mine Missing my friends and an identity now amorphous, irrelevant. Point, wind right, wind left, wind right, click, open: Mix tapes and messages in bottles. I was 17, 18 and ready to go for broke. Love letters and love-of-life letters The kind of love I'll not find again The kind of letters I'll read thousands of times when I do find them When I find them in dusty shoeboxes, in my mother's basement and awaken to the fact of how loved I was.

Was time different then? Or was I just different then?

All that time, my husband was only a few mailboxes away But he might as well have been in a different zip code Later his letters would find 1305 Potted clay and grass His animated penmanship a beacon. He graduated I stayed behind Typing papers and writing letters on the road to earning the letters B. A.

Today we share the same mailbox. And our shared mailbox doors can live closer Can live out of the order of numbered portals in Cochran Hall Sometime a million years ago Or was it just 10 or so that our doors and our days were sorted by mail.

Homework Grades

The rigamarole began for me this week. I put on the non-T-shirt and the non-shorts and went to work. I felt so much better about my syllabi this year. You best believe we professor types fret over the syllabizzle. I mostly stare at the wide gaping space between FALL BREAK and THANKSGIVING and wonder HOW WILL WE FILL THE TIME? and then I get over myself and figure, aw, let's read a book or something. Sound good? I know you want to take this class now, pahah! School. It's always hard to get back into the rhythm of being away from my kids for long stretches at a time. I feel like I need to be scrambling to finish things so I can rush back to be with them, but then I remember that my daughter is at school and my son is napping per usual and I go back to staring at my syllabi HOW AGAIN WILL WE FILL THE TIME???

A privilege of being a parent who works outside the home is having the "novelty hours" where you are the hot commodity. You are not the one whose presence your kids take for granted. No, in fact, you are the Biebs! Live! In Concert! Right in your own living room. Then they get over you and have a meltdown about having to eat the crust of their grilled cheese. Whatever. It is still good to be the rock star for 35 seconds a day.

I really enjoyed picking Baby Girl up from school today. She showed me the fish tank and the case with the tarantula (I know, I still enjoyed pick-up today!) and held my hand as we walked out to the car. As I was buckling her into her car seat, she said something curious. She said, "Mom, I don't have to be sad that Hadley is in another grade now. Because when people get into the homework grades, they're still the same person."

I mean, first of all, "homework grades"? Is that not slightly adorable? And the fact that she feared people becoming different people THE KIND OF PEOPLE WHO DO HOMEWORK reveals a little bit of that innocent heart that I know we all once had.

I am not so far corrupted that I don't understand what it is to fear the "upper grades." I can still identify with the fear of not being equipped for writing cursive and wondering how those Big Kids taught themselves to read silently INSIDE THEIR HEADS without having to point at words and sound them out. I remember so clearly wondering whether when my baby sister got older, if she would know all of us. I didn't understand gradual progression. I could only focus on the great leaps that I believed necessary for reaching certain precipices in life. Oh those fearful homework grades.

I didn't quite have the perfect assurance for Baby Girl but she seemed to have come to the conclusion on her own that people who moved up to homework grades were still approachable and not totally elite and 8' tall.

From the looks of things, e.g. from the picture texts her wonderful teacher sends me, she is going to be okay.

Appendix A