And I had to let her.
Two weeks later I dressed her in a little pink sundress with a monogram on it and put in what would turn out to be one of the last bows she’d ever wear in her hair. We took a million pictures to document the moment, and then Perry and I drove her to school and began the long walk to her kindergarten classroom, each of us holding one of her little hands. Then suddenly she dropped our hands and said, “Follow me. I know where to go.”
She walked ahead with her head held up and a backpack on her back that was almost bigger than she was. Oh, my heart. It was at that moment I realized I was going to have to let her lead the way to so many milestones.
We followed Caroline to her classroom, said hello to her teacher, and hugged Caroline good-bye. I managed to make it to the car before I began to cry in a way that would make Shirley MacLaine think I needed to quit being such a drama queen and get a grip. Perry and I prayed that God would watch over her and protect her and surround her with friends and his love. That’s when the peace came in, because it was the reminder that God loved her even more than we did. He had big plans for her life, and kindergarten was just the beginning.
And you know what? She was just fine. And I was just fine. It was the beginning of a new adventure for both of us, and if you want to discover the new, you always have to leave the old behind. God can’t take us anywhere if we keep clinging to little bits of the past. Which is a lesson I’ve had to learn at least once or a thousand times over the years.
Kindergarten was great. Caroline and I both loved her teacher, and I was able to spend one day a week volunteering in her classroom or in the cafeteria, which is where I learned that five-year-olds are gross. And I also learned that there was at least one mom who felt the need to pack roll-your-own sushi in her child’s lunch box. Way to make the rest of us feel guilty and mediocre with our offerings of peanut butter and honey on white bread, sister.
I believe it was in January of Caroline’s kindergarten year that we got a note informing parents there would be an informational meeting for those of us interested in having our child tested for the gifted program. Which made me wonder what qualifies a kindergartner as gifted. They know to use a Kleenex instead of their finger? Or they don’t try to eat the gold, spray-painted macaroni during craft time?
But I had to make a decision about whether or not to attend. I was torn because obviously Perry and I thought she was gifted. We knew she was gifted when she could pass gas like a man at only six months old, not to mention the fact she could spot a deer in the brush at 150 yards from the time she was three years old.
However, those qualities may not be exactly what Harvard is looking for, although they might be exactly what she needs to someday get her own hunting show on the Outdoor Channel.
But I wasn’t sure I wanted to have Caroline labeled by the age of five. If she qualified for the gifted program, would it mean she’d feel too much pressure to perform academically? Would it take the joy out of school? I was much more concerned with raising a well-rounded person who enjoyed school than with being able to casually drop phrases in social settings about the struggles of raising a gifted child. “Oh, it was so difficult when we started trigonometry in second grade.”
I thought about e-mailing Caroline’s teacher to see if she thought we should have her tested. I figured she saw her in the classroom on a daily basis and probably had a better idea of what they were looking for to determine if a child was gifted. The problem was that I really liked Caroline’s teacher and didn’t want to send her a potentially awkward e-mail:
Dear Ms. Kindergarten Teacher,
You know that our precious baby girl, Caroline, is the light of our lives. We think she is the smartest, most well-adjusted child on the planet. She is able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, and we have no doubt she has a brilliant future as an Olympic athlete with a sideline career as the host of an incredibly successful reality television show or as a nuclear physicist. In other words, she has the potential to live the American dream.
We’re sure you agree with us that there is no doubt she is gifted, but will you please let us know if you think she’s not?
Sincerely and Totally Unbiased,
Perry and Melanie
See? Awkward.
Ultimately I decided to attend the meeting and see what they had to say because I didn’t want to be the parent who says, “No way is my child gifted! I’m going to skip the meeting, stay home, and watch me some Real Housewives of New York City instead.” I figured I needed to give Caroline a chance and not be defensive if someone dared to write on paper that my child wasn’t intellectually superior to all the other kids in her class. At least I could rest in the knowledge she was smarter than the kid next to her who chewed the gum he found on the bottom of his desk.
When I walked in the door for the meeting, they gave me a handout. It was a checklist of behaviors, and I was supposed to check yes or no for each one. We were told this would be one of the determining factors for whether Caroline qualified for the program.
Apparently most of the parents in the room were gifted because they all realized pretty quickly that they’d better check yes to at least ten of the twelve characteristics or their child was getting sent straight to Doreen’s Vocational School for Kids Who Can’t Read So Good instead of spending a few hours a week discussing Einstein’s theory of relativity with a bunch of other geniuses who didn’t eat paste.
I sat in that meeting and realized I didn’t want to assume Caroline wasn’t gifted based on the fact that she came from a parent who consistently received report cards that read, “Does not live up to academic potential,” which, translated, means, “Would rather flirt with cute boys and talk about who’s having a party on Friday night while coming up with new ways to tease her bangs even higher.”
(That would be me, by the way. Perry didn’t flirt with boys, nor could he tease his bangs very high. Rumor has it that he did have a sweet mullet, though.)
But at the same time, I didn’t really care one way or the other whether she was gifted or not. I just didn’t want her to end up in therapy someday, saying, “It all started the day my mama decided I wasn’t gifted when I was in kindergarten.”
I quickly realized there were parents in the room who were taking the whole thing a lot more seriously than I was. This became clear when I whispered to a mom sitting next to me, “Well, if she’s not gifted, it might just mean she’ll be the prom queen instead.” I promptly received what I feel certain was a dirty look.
Of course, in retrospect, maybe this woman had been the prom queen herself. And so it’s safe to say that whether or not Caroline is gifted, we know for sure that I’m not gifted when it comes to social situations.
Ultimately, Caroline didn’t make it into the gifted program that year, but one of her best friends did. Not that Caroline cared about that at all. It just fed my insecurities that maybe we should have done more flash cards instead of watching so many episodes of The Backyardigans because Tyrone the moose was so much more fun than learning phonics. But there was no way I couldn’t feel a little concerned that Caroline’s best friend would be reading aloud from Homer’s Odyssey on the way to school every morning while Caroline sounded like Lloyd from Dumb and Dumber as she sounded out “t-t-t-h-uh” as she tried to read the word the.
I wish someone had told me then that children all learn at their own pace and that reading is a developmental skill, just like everything else. Maybe someone did tell me that, but I was too neurotic to pay attention. I’m proud to say that today Caroline is now an excellent reader. And as it turned out, the gifted program in kindergarten was a three-month supplementary program where the kids learned about Egypt. Like you have to be gifted to do that? Here’s a pyramid; here’s King Tut; there was a woman named Cleopatra. The end.
Clearly I’m not one of those dragon mothers that you read about these days.
Chapter 19
The Big, Bad World of Elementary School
After
a successful year of kindergarten we had to prepare (okay, mainly I had to prepare) for another big change. In our school district the kindergarten is its own little campus, and then the students move to a bigger school for first grade through fifth grade. Once again I had to let go of something that felt safe and secure. This seemed to be a theme God kept emphasizing in my life. Comfort zone? Okay, let’s keep moving forward.
But the transition to first grade was practically seamless, with the exception of the first week, when I single-handedly created a car-pool traffic jam of epic proportions in my ignorance about which lane was the pick-up lane. Man, police officers can be so touchy.
So I decided I’d just walk in and pick Caroline up every afternoon instead of navigating the tricky waters of the car pool. (See what I did there? Car pool? Waters? Now tell me who’s gifted.)
Caroline’s first grade teacher was young and enthusiastic. She taught the students their words and sounds using songs and rewarded them for good behavior by allowing them to make basketball shots in the classroom in a little plastic hoop on the back of the door. One day Caroline came home so excited she could barely speak as she told us her teacher had let the kids push her down the school ramps in her rolling desk chair. Now that’s an educational experience.
Caroline quickly made new friends, and therefore I made new friends, and it was about as perfect as elementary school can be. Yes, the homework took some getting used to, and we had a few projects that brought out my inner crazy, such as creating a model of Christopher Columbus’s ship, but the Fiesta float experience had given me practice for just such an occasion, and I’m happy to say Caroline and I did the whole thing without incident.
That was also the year Caroline really learned to read, and it brought me so much joy to see her pick up a book. Even though that didn’t happen very often because, as she told me, “Why would I want to sit around and read a book when I could be out doing that stuff instead?” Yes, this is a child who comes from a dad who believes there is no finer reading than the latest Cabela’s catalog. And even that grand tome is read only in the bathroom.
Classy.
Then it was time for second grade. And everything changed. When we got the letter about our teacher the week before school began, I was disappointed to see that Caroline had gotten the teacher everyone warned me about. But I tried to be positive and convince myself that our experience would be different. How could any teacher not like Caroline?
When I walked her to her classroom the first day of second grade, I had a pit in my stomach that wasn’t helped at all by the stiff greeting we received when we met the teacher. I could tell immediately this wasn’t going to be the warm, fuzzy experience we’d had for the past two years. And I could tell the teacher didn’t think I was funny or charming at all.
It was a hard year. The teacher seemed to like Caroline well enough, but her teaching style was strict and no-nonsense, and this wasn’t helped by the fact that she had a class full of behavior problems. I watched as Caroline went from a happy-go-lucky kid who was excited to go to school every morning to a little girl who bit her nails and scratched her head in nervousness and wanted to stay home in the mornings. It broke my heart.
And so I prayed. I prayed for wisdom and guidance and discernment. Should I homeschool? Should we move her to private school? Was I supposed to go get belligerent with the school staff and demand that my child be switched to another classroom? Because those were the things I wanted to do.
But I felt God clearly telling me that I needed only to be still and trust him. So that’s what I did. Perry and I did our best to encourage Caroline and let her know she was in that class for a reason. Her job was to let her light shine brightly and to know that we were always on her side. But it wasn’t easy.
I realize that school isn’t always going to be fun, but second grade seems awfully early to have to learn that life lesson. Yet it was the reality. Which was why I was so surprised when Caroline got in the car one Friday afternoon full of excitement and told me that her teacher said she had a “huge surprise” for the class on Monday. This seemed completely out of character but, sure enough, I got home and discovered the teacher had sent out an e-mail to the parents informing us the kids were getting a “huge surprise” on Monday.
All weekend long Caroline speculated about what the huge surprise could possibly be. An ice cream party? Maybe a dance party, complete with a disco ball? A pet guinea pig for the class?
On Monday morning Caroline jumped out of bed, beside herself at the prospect that the unveiling of the huge surprise was imminent. I dropped her off and told her I couldn’t wait to hear all about it when I picked her up that afternoon.
As soon as she hopped in the car at the end of the day, I asked, “What was it? What was the huge surprise?” She looked at me with an expression of pure and total disgust on her face as she announced in a monotone voice, “Tim Duncan’s shoe.”
“What did you say?” I asked, thinking I had surely heard wrong or missed a piece of the story.
“I said it was Tim Duncan’s shoe,” she repeated with absolutely no enthusiasm.
“His shoe?”
“Yes. Tim Duncan’s shoe.”
For those of you who may not know, Tim Duncan is a basketball player for the San Antonio Spurs. Like most basketball players, he is tall, and I’d estimate that his shoe size is probably around a 14. Caroline’s teacher had written to Tim Duncan and requested that he send her an autographed shoe. Apparently she thought the kids in the class might be motivated to have good behavior if they had the promise of getting to keep Tim Duncan’s shoe on their desk as a reward. So technically, yes, that is a “huge surprise.” But I will tell you that Caroline and I learned an important lesson that day: there is a big difference between a huge surprise and a fun surprise.
The biggest question in my mind was how anyone could think an enormous shoe would inspire a bunch of seven-year-olds who had spent the weekend dreaming of eating ice cream and dancing under a disco ball. Don’t ever promise kids a huge surprise that doesn’t involve the opportunity for total chaos. It doesn’t translate.
Perry and I immediately adopted the phrase “Tim Duncan’s shoe” as code for anything we deemed boring and lame. It has proved to be terribly useful. Invited to a boring charity dinner? Tim Duncan’s shoe. Sitting through a PTO meeting? Tim Duncan’s shoe. Listening to our neighbor rant about politics? Tim Duncan’s shoe.
So I guess the bottom line is that while elementary school hasn’t always proved to be fun and has presented its share of challenges, I can’t say we all aren’t learning a few pieces of valuable information.
School is the beginning of the real world, the end of the protective bubble. It’s a time to learn that not everyone uses their nice words, a time to learn that you’ll run out of jackets if you keep leaving them on the playground, a time to learn that there are sometimes battles you have to fight. There are highs and lows and struggles and triumphs.
And there are days that sometimes feel like Tim Duncan’s shoe.
Chapter 20
It’s a Party & I’ll Cry If I Want To
I never had a piñata at any of my birthday parties. Of course I realize now that is probably grounds for some kind of therapy, but I was a child of the ’70s, and we didn’t know about such things. A birthday party was a small affair with a homemade cake, ice cream, and if you were really lucky, some balloons. There were no piñatas in those days. No treat bags to say thanks for coming. If you had asked for a party favor back then, you might have been met with, “You know what you can take with you, kid? The memory of some good cake.”
Did I mention we also had to walk uphill BOTH WAYS in the snow to attend most of these parties?
Or maybe everyone else was having great parties and I just never knew about it because I wasn’t invited. If that’s the case, please don’t tell me because I visit the edge enough as it is. I certainly don’t need to know there were extravaganzas happening all around me complete with fanc
y bakery cakes.
My birthday is in August. Also known as the Tim Duncan’s shoe of birthday months because it’s summer, it’s hot, and all your friends are probably on vacation. So the majority of my birthdays were spent either at the pool or at Six Flags with whatever friends had the misfortune of being born into a family that didn’t take vacations.
And that was totally fine until September, when the first kid in my class would have a birthday and his mom would walk in with cupcakes and I’d be reminded of the fact that I’d been born in the worst month.
Given this childhood trauma, I was a little disappointed when I realized my due date with Caroline fell smack dab in the middle of August. I had inadvertently passed the bad birthday gene to my offspring, who would suffer her mother’s fate of having party options that consisted of (1) having a pool party, (2) having a pool party, or (3) inviting people over to sit on a block of ice.
What I didn’t realize then was that the time of year would be the least of my worries. I wasn’t prepared for this whole new world of birthday party competition.
The first time I remember having full-on birthday party envy was in seventh grade. Jamie Hornbeck had a dance party in her garage, complete with a DJ. There was a table set up with a bowl of cheese puffs and some Dr Pepper. And a disco ball. Be still, my heart. To this day it might be the best party I’ve ever attended. That garage turned into a place of pure awesomeness under the dim lights and with the sweet sounds of Journey singing “Faithfully” while we all slow-danced awkwardly in our Jordache jeans and jelly shoes.
But times are different now. Birthday parties have become a new competitive sport. I can’t remember exactly when I first became aware of this, but I think it was somewhere around the time Gulley took Jackson to a one-year-old’s birthday party and called me on the way home to inform me it was nicer than her wedding reception. And her wedding reception was very nice.
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