Making My Kid To Go To School
and repeatedly asking myself what god might be
This morning I made myself oats with sesame seeds and cashews and honey and oat milk and ghee and blackberries and an egg cooked in it, and I ate it in my beautiful office painted apricot chiffon (ceilings too), surrounded by my life-giving house plants and my kids were not sick and therefore at school and my house was quiet and the sun was beaming as I sat cross-legged across the yard from the old beautiful man who does tai chi or some other beautiful moves I can’t name on his tiny deck every single morning no matter the weather and I thought I’m richer than any person deserves to be.
This morning I stumbled through four blocks of my kid getting on and off his bike refusing to go to school. Somehow I got him there, and as usual I cried afterward at the cognitive dissonance of making my kid do something I’m not sure he should be doing.
This morning I read Meditations In An Emergency by Rebecca Solnit and she told me that google and apple acquiesced to T***** on changing the name of the gulf from mexico to america and so many other terrifying things.
This morning I read a book to my kid on the playground before he went in to school and I did exercises with him as led by the PE teacher over the shitty sound system and we laughed and hugged and made plans with one of his new friends for the weekend.
This morning I watched my little one, BB jr, through the window of her preschool as she brought a book to her teacher and sat next to her, her pigtails facing me, and I could feel her smile as her face turned up to her teacher’s face, even though I couldn’t see it.
This morning I flossed my teeth and worried about my perpetually bleeding gums, despite this best-of-my-life dental hygiene phase.
This morning I looked at and still avoided the registration sticker in its envelope I need to put on my car.
This morning I did not clean up the endless blocks in my kids’ room; I took the old leftovers out of the fridge.
This morning I texted with M, and even sharing the fear we have for our kids in two lines helped me.
This morning I remembered I need to plan for Original BB’s birthday and wondered if I should finally succumb to sending an “evite,” after all these years of resistance that no one has noticed or cared about.
This morning I left my jacket open on the ride downhill back to my house from school drop off and the cold air blew into the tiny holes in my sweater and it felt good to let myself get cold for no reason.
This morning I moved some random pieces of wood out of my office and into my bedroom, leftover from when we installed Original BB’s new bunkbed. There are always pieces of the kids’ lives taking up space in my office, somehow.
This morning I worried about my hip pain and did not make a to do list even though the list is so long. I didn’t make a to do list because it’s better if I don’t keep meditating on things in front of me and just do them instead.
This morning I looked at a list of what god is from my notes app, which I wrote during a coda meeting last week. I decided not put any of it here, because none of it felt like the profundity translated. It’s so hard to talk about god, because of everything that gets in the way between us. The thing is god is the only thing I want to talk about, and I keep thinking about how my child is forming before my eyes. I’m watching identity formation take place, and the astrological point of view suggests that we don’t fully land here incarnated with all of our things to work through, evolve with, until our Saturn Return in our late twenties. I don’t know a person who has gone through childhood without pain and suffering. I’m not sure it’s possible or even advisable to try to prevent it, and yet it hurts more to witness someone becoming than it does for me to have become. (I have certainly not fully become because no such thing but I also am already dissolving?)
This morning we’re not getting out of this without some scars. And that leaves me with even more questions, as always, with him. What is mine to fight for in his childhood? In any version of it he is going to get a set of things and not get another set of things. Inheritances, societal and personal. These questions are the work of my parenting. Indecision is a habit I bring to everything I do.
This morning I checked my email, unopened tax forms, the ones I save from my kid’s school expressing solidarity with undocumented families, trans kids—superintendent emails have never felt so good or made me sob harder—diaper subscription receipts, a friend’s yoga newsletter. The thing is I can’t see my influence on him. Like I’m too close, so I won’t see my influence until he’s old enough to tell me what happened in the past.
This morning I remembered that hyper-attuned conception phase I was in, where I’ve never tracked my body’s moves so closely before or since. And that circle about time, how you only really know the story of the cycle at the end of it, when you start bleeding, when you ovulated at the last time, etc, but the end is also the beginning of the next phase. Parenting feels like this but longer. A spiral that I want to unfold and lay out so I can see it in front of me, but instead I’m moving on it, or it’s moving me and therefore many points on it are out of my view.
This morning I know this is as it should be, or at least, as it is, and still I fight it. I grieve my child being in a place and time he doesn’t want to be, and I grieve the bottles and dirty diapers that won’t be picked up in Yosemite anymore because of all the newly laid off employees. This morning I’ll do my little pilates anyway, and I’ll probably light a candle (as meager and pointless as prayers usually feel), lament and celebrate the aging of my face, get excited to eat the pesto I made, walk outside and ache in my hips and my ribs and my breath will breathe anyway, somehow, for now, like you, with you, breathing, being breathed.
Love,
Sarah
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