Amateur Hour

by Kimberly Harrington

  I’ve sat through talent shows that lasted three and a half hours too long, downed a medicating glass of wine before every school Halloween party, and felt unabashedly hopeful about the world listening to tentative voices pipe up at winter concerts.

  I have felt a part of something, buoyed.

  I have also watched children dragged and shoved into school by parents barely tethered to earth. My husband took our son to his best friend’s house for her sixth birthday party only to find used needles scattered around the yard, drunk adults filling up the apartment. I have seen kids showing up to school with just a soda for breakfast or without a coat in the middle of a Vermont winter.

  I raced to the regular all-school Friday assembly on the afternoon of December 14, 2012, just hours after the Sandy Hook shooting. Our principal led the kids through the most normal-seeming town hall meeting while parents looked at each other with pleading, shattered eyes. We longed for it to be over so we could rush to our sons and daughters, to hug them too hard, stick our noses in their hair, and wonder at their physicality, their presence. Every glance around the room as we waited for that moment—every pair of eyes meeting—serving as silent confirmation that, yes, it had happened, it was real. These were kids our kids’ ages. Their school, their teachers, their paras, not unlike our school, our teachers, our paras.

  I have felt broken.

  I used to think of elementary school as a place for my children to learn, to become more of who they are. What I hadn’t anticipated is that I have become more of who I am too.

  My daughter’s passionate and almost obsessive love for her friends — regardless of how they treated her or whether they returned those feelings — has mirrored my own struggles with friendship. What parenting books don’t prepare you for are the conversations you will have with your soft-cheeked daughter, the one who is cheerful and loving and just a straight-up kick in the pants, as you teach her how to harden her heart.

  Within these walls I have made and lost my own friends—both in spectacular fashion. I have stood alongside them as we cackled at inside jokes or locked eyes across the gym as we cried with joy over a performance. And then, after everything fell apart, I struggled to understand where I fit in. Instead of constantly claiming what my kids got from me, the past eight years have been a slow revealing of things I didn’t know were inside of me, apart from them.

  In just two weeks our family will be done with elementary school. Not for the school year, but forever. This fact only hitting me straight between the eyes days ago. Maybe because my daughter’s prep for middle school has mirrored her prep for kindergarten — she was born ready and we are left trying to keep up.

  I’ve sat stunned in random five-minute grabs of silence realizing that, much like trying to get a good night’s sleep or suffering through potty training, I just thought we’d always be parents of young kids. They would be this age, this size, this digging-in-the-dirt, picking-flowers, needing-me, needing-us way forever. They would just always be in elementary school.

  Yet forevers come to a close all the time. They certainly come to a close every June.

  Last fall when I picked up my son from his first middle school dance, I again fell down a rabbit hole of nostalgia, much like I had on that first elementary school tour. But it was different. Because within those walls and that post-dance stink, girls on their phones and boys flipping water bottles, it felt like the beginning of moving away. Those walls were different, full of trophies and dance banners, news of elections and photos of volunteering. Those were the walls of becoming who he is, away from us.

  I realize I am hopelessly bound by the mythology of this country, that I am supposed to make it all on my own, pulling myself up by my bootstraps every step of the way. Maybe that’s why elementary school feels sacred; it’s the one place where I— as a child, as a parent — have been allowed to feel vulnerable, cared for, safe. Every violation of that relentlessly hopeful assumption, from bullying to lunch shaming, fills me with inexplicable sadness and rage.

  I am offended at the breach.

  These walls, these art-dotted walls, represent a promise—a promise that others will see you, they will see if you are hungry, if you are struggling, if you are broken. They will see the best of you, the potential in you, because it is far too early to give up. They will tell you this is a place where it’s okay to cry or shout out with surprise, to throw snowballs at recess and pick tiny tomatoes from the garden just at the edges of the playground. This is a place where you are wanted and where you belong. And this is a place where parents can roam the halls before these years have even begun, and again as they come to a close, their eyes swelling with tears over the fast-forward slow motion of time.

  Pro/Con: Caving to PTO Bake Sale Pressure

  PRO: Finally doing something for my kids’ school.

  CON: Don’t want to do anything for my kids’ school.

  PRO: Was already going to hell anyway.

  CON: Don’t love the heat.

  PRO: Will see a lot of familiar faces.

  CON: Will remind me of the oven I’m currently avoiding.

  PRO: Could always just go buy something at the market and rough it up a little.

  CON: They said it had to be homemade. And they’re expert level at sniffing out homemade-baked-goods fraud.

  PRO: I’m expert level at choosing the easiest thing to bake.

  CON: I’m non–expert level at following basic package instructions a monkey could master.

  PRO: Was always curious what monkeys were better at than me. Now I know.

  CON: No monkeys available in neighborhood to outsource this to.

  PRO: Thinking about monkeys.

  CON: . . .

  PRO: Skim the crappiest brownies for myself.

  CON: They’re really crappy.

  PRO: They’re still brownies.

  CON: Self-loathing.

  PRO: Hero to my kids when they smell fresh-baked brownies as they walk in the door after school.

  CON: I already brought the brownies to school.

  PRO: Except the ones I didn’t.

  CON: And those brownies are long gone, too, suckas.

  PRO: “But they benefit your school.”

  CON: (whispers to self) “And my desire to eat brownies in secret.”

  PRO: Important life lesson about how harsh the world can be.

  CON: Especially the part of the world that’s our kitchen.

  PRO: I’m not here to make friends.

  CON: So far succeeding.

  PRO: Could respond to future PTO requests with “NEW E-MAIL, WHO DIS?”

  CON: They’ll know it’s me.

  PRO: Willing to jump on that grenade.

  CON: Talk of grenades frowned upon at school.

  PRO: It’s a figure of speech.

  CON: No shit, Sherlock.

  PRO: Fighting with myself in list form is still better than making something for the bake sale.

  CON: You don’t get secret brownies from fighting with yourself in list form.

  PRO: But you don’t have to bake anything either.

  CON: Homeschool.

  The Punching Season

  Some people are smart about where they choose to live. Some people live in places where they can walk outside in February and still feel their extremities. Some people live in places where three layers of pants aren’t required to take the dog out for a walk and their kids don’t have to dress like members of Pussy Riot just to catch the school bus. Some people are smart like that. I am not some people.

  If you don’t live where it snows for keeps or where the cheerfully named “wintry mix” can ruin everyone’s life or where subzero days stack up like hash marks on a prison wall, you might not have experienced the very dark night of the soul that is late February and early March in Vermont. The excitement your family felt about a white Christmas, snowmen, and sleigh rides feels like a story you were told a hundred years ago. You truly believe you’ll never see a flower that
grows in the ground again and you wonder, for the twelfth winter in a row, why you choose to live in such a godforsaken place. From your nest of misery you scroll through photos from the previous summer to convince yourself it was warm once so maybe it will be again. The merciful winter amnesia that will wipe these dark days from your memory the minute a single blade of grass pops up is still a fistful of weeks away. You measure everything in fists now. Because this right here? It’s the Punching Season.

  And then: the colds hit. And not just the colds, but the stomach bugs that usher in storm fronts of throwing up, diarrhea, and a desire to single-handedly destroy the earth. You start to wonder if maybe you angered an ancient god at some point but it slipped your mind. Let’s face it: you are more forgetful these days. And there has to be some sort of explanation for this infinite hell. The flu and nonspecific horrible coughs descend upon you, your family, and engulf surrounding communities, causing you all to google things like Child + hacking cough + when to go to the ER + real estate + Dominican Republic.

  And so it went a couple of weeks ago. When one sick kid turned into two sick kids and one very sick adult. When one sick day for me turned into seven. And when every routine we had was detonated so hard I can’t believe Antonio Banderas wasn’t seen striding out of them. We just tried to get through each day as best we could without crying.

  Most of those days I couldn’t have gotten off the couch if someone had been running in front of me with a flourless chocolate cake (why skimp, do you want me to move or what?) while someone else chased me with fire. So on the mornings the kids were feeling well enough to go to school, my husband told them in no uncertain terms they were on their own. He was leaving for work and they needed to get themselves fed, ready, and out the door on time.

  As I drifted in and out of let’s-call-it-sleep, I noticed the glaring absence of my commands, incessant reminders, and questions about whether they remembered how a clock worked. In their place were the sounds of my kids actually speaking to each other—chatting even—and the clattering of them clearing their spots, the crinkling of papers being stuffed into backpacks, and the rustle of snow pants and puffy coats being pulled on. As I tried to unstick my eyes long enough to check the time, my son materialized above me, leaned over, and smiled, then kissed me lightly on the forehead. The most touching and surprising of role reversals. And they were both out the door. Early.

  Being jerked out of my routine and having a completely new one thrust upon us made me see how competent, how grown-up, my kids had become. Although I knew that at eight and ten they certainly didn’t need my help getting dressed or eating or being walked to the end of the driveway, it was the first time I realized that although I was sinking, the ship wasn’t going to go down with me. Not this time. It was a relief. And it was a little lonely, too. I had been training my replacements all along.

  We need to be needed. Parenting demonstrates that in stark relief. You need us; you need us; you need us. We hate it; we love it. We are exhausted by it; we crave it. And although it took having kids for me to see it, it’s of course true for everyone, throughout our lives, whether we have children or not. We each want a place in another’s life. We want to know we fulfill some sort of purpose no one else possibly could. We want to be important, even if just in the moment, to this one person, in this one specific way.

  The running joke about my grandmother was if you left her alone for more than twenty seconds, you’d find her ironing your dresses, your tea towels, your nicest shirts. I look back now and see that simple task—among the dozens she regularly performed—made her feel necessary. She moved the lives of those she loved forward. What may have started out as a duty, over a lifetime became a pleasure. Perhaps the greatest accomplishment any of us will have is moving the lives of those we love forward.

  The following day my daughter stayed home and I felt steady enough to bolt myself to a chair and attempt to work. She took a long hot bath, ate a piece of cinnamon toast, traced L-O-V-E-! into the palm of my hand with her soft fingertip, and broke open a quilling kit she received for Christmas two years before. Our house was peaceful, quiet. The day unfolded as if we were at a spiritual retreat rather than in a self-imposed germ-soaked quarantine.

  The next day she excitedly returned to school and my son, who had kissed me goodbye so gently and cheerfully the morning before, had come home early that same afternoon with a fever and chills. I spent the day curled up on the couch, finally able to focus on printed words long enough to read. He joined me and we lay facing each other, two coughing bookends sharing one big blue and white zigzaggy blanket. The icy sun streamed in, and we blocked our books from it with cement-gray pillows set against the window. We were a fort of sickness, reading and leaning, our legs almost the same length. I could’ve stayed exactly like that, sickness and all, until the first tentative days of spring. I could’ve stayed exactly like that forever.

  I don’t remember having a lot of sick days when I was growing up, certainly not as many as kids have now. I guess kids just get more of everything these days, including attention and viruses. But the sick days I did have stood out like holidays. No school. Lots of lounging. Unlimited TV. I particularly remember the afternoon my dad came home early from work carrying a fresh stack of magazines. TigerBeat and Seventeen were right on the top, that’s what I remember most. I like to picture him in his business suit going into the store and browsing the particular section where these magazines were found. I try to imagine the looks. I try to imagine the reactions when he went to check out. Then again, it was the 1970s. Did people even have reactions back then?

  I had a hard time swallowing pills, and to this day I can still call up what ground-up aspirin stirred into chocolate ice cream tastes like. The things we do for each other, the small gestures that tumble out of us so much more readily when we’re simply given the opening. On a daily basis I will refuse to do things my kids can do for themselves and even some they can’t, but there is no independence in virus-infested foxholes. I have slept on the couch as my daughter curled into a sleeping bag, our trusty blue barf bucket at the ready. I have cleaned bushels of sheets and scooped up and wiped down floors covered with such a range of disgusting fluids and, well, solids—miraculously not gagging myself—that I wonder what sort of anti-nausea superpowers I was gifted with at their births. I also wonder if it is trademarked or patented yet, and if not, how do I go about doing that? I have held hair back while breathing through my mouth and attempting to block the sound of vomiting from reaching my ears through sheer mental will. I have made mountains of cinnamon toast and rubbed miles of backs. I have admired the beautifully stained lips that come from cherry Popsicles and think makeup artists with kids must get some of their ideas from days like these. And I have upheld revered traditions: No school. Lots of lounging. Unlimited TV.

  I hope when my kids are grown they’ll remember even a little bit about that week. I’m sure their sick days and weeks will blur together, there have been so many. I have forgotten entire family vacations from my childhood, so maybe it’s unrealistic to think they’ll remember even a fraction of these days that were already hazy to begin with. But maybe they’ll remember being able to stay home with me. Or the time I didn’t move from our couch for an entire week. Or the baths they took, the Popsicles they ate for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Maybe they’ll remember the small actions—the cool cloth, the sip of water, the midday nap—that made a difference in how they felt.

  I know I’ll remember how we found an unlikely oasis during the hardest time of the year; when we felt our worst, they showed me their best, and for those quiet and adrift moments, we were a fortress of independence and interdependence.

  I will remember we still had one another.

  Please Don’t Get Murdered at School Today

  Do you have everything? Homework? Lunch? Field-trip money?

  I love you.

  I remember one of the Sandy Hook parents said they took comfort in the fact that they had seen their child o
ff to school that morning—you know, that morning—and said, “I love you.” So before their first grader was gunned down in her classroom, she knew she was loved. I bet they all did though.

  But just in case, I love you.

  We’ve talked about all kinds of scary things, like I’ve told you never to get into a car with anyone you don’t know and don’t ever believe an adult needs your help finding a puppy or a kitten. Also: no one will ever give you a free iPad or Legos from their car, that’s just not how the world works.

  But for some reason, amid the talk of stranger danger and pedophiles, cancer and dying, and me sheepishly asking your friends’ parents if they have a gun in the house, we haven’t really talked about one of the scariest things of all. Those lockdown drills you’re always having at school? No one’s being straight with you about those. They’re to prepare you in case someone decides to come into your school and murder you, your friends, your principal, the secretaries, and teachers before killing himself (it’s pretty much always a him). Sorry about that.

  I love you.

  I know that may sound scary, but what you need to remember is this country was founded on freedom. And that includes the freedom of all people (sane, crazy, whatever) to have unchallenged access to guns that are capable of executing at least twenty first graders or twelve moviegoers or nine of the faithful at a church service or even a baby asleep in her car seat.