Start of school a suburban passage that always hits home
My wife and I set up the photograph, moved by habit more than inspiration — our three boys, backpacks at the ready, standing on our front steps on the first day of school.
We have 11 versions of these photos, starting with our twin sons' first emotional-and-exciting-for-all-of-us day of kindergarten in 2001 through Wednesday's obligatory photo of the older boys as high school sophomores with their little brother acquiescing for a pose before catching the bus to 7th grade.
The first day of school doesn't hold the cachet it once did for our family. There's some buzz about teachers and classes and what friends might be in their lunch periods, but the move from freshman year to sophomore year or 6th grade to 7th grade doesn't qualify as one of those life-altering transitions for the kids, just more of the same.
It's different for parents. We seem to witness more groundbreaking passages than Gail Sheedy. We see meaning in the routine.
Twenty years ago in our lives before kids, I would be taken by surprise every first day of school when I'd get bogged down in a morning traffic jam two blocks from my house. I'd see parents tottering under the weight of giant video cameras balanced on their shoulders as they captured little Jenny's or Jason's big moment, and I'd chug my remaining coffee and think, “Man, will Starbucks ever get around to opening one of their newfangled stores in the suburbs?”
Now, I intentionally drive by grade schools on the first day of school because it makes me realize how precious those memories are. I see a mom I know with a multiple-lens camera around her neck. That way she can take a close-up of her grade-schooler and then crank out the lens to covertly snap a candid photo of her middle-schooler without embarrassing him while he's waiting for his first trip on the bus.
Facebook is filled with postings of photographs that document the universal suburban experience. They are mostly mug shots similar to the ones my wife and I take. The confident teen, smiling broadly, his hands in his pockets. The dazed grade-schooler, seemingly unaware that she'd have to do the school thing again this year. The fifth-grade girl striking an adult pose, but still very much a kid. The fifth-grade boy in his favorite T-shirt picked out long ago. The second-grader's perfect skirt. The mom and her three daughters who attend classes at four different institutions. The newly adopted Filipino children starting their American schooling with their previously empty-nester parents. The “last first day of school” photo of high school senior triplets, who probably are smiling because they think it's so corny and cute that their mom thinks this is a monumental occasion.
Then there are those postings that seem a lifetime away for my wife and me. A friend's photo of the college dorm where the kid who used to cry in kindergarten and beg his parents to stay now has to nudge his parents toward the exit so they can start their car ride home before they get all teary-eyed. He doesn't grasp the magnitude, but his parents realize this could be the day that signals the difference between “coming home to his parents” and “visiting the parents.” Their roles will be reversed the day he drops them at the senior-living facility with the assurance that his parents will “make new friends” and “have so much fun.”
Trumping all those off-to-college entries are the postings by anxious parents watching their offspring depart for Nicaragua, Argentina and seemingly every distant location this side of Libya.
My wife and I see the first-day-of-school photos of little kids and think fondly of our happy memories of those years when our boys were that age. We see the first-day-of-school photos for kids who are now adults, and we are totally bewildered as to how we could possibly be approaching that precipice when our memories of kindergarten are still so fresh.
It's natural for us parents to look at our kids on the first day of school and romanticize about where we've been and wonder and worry where we are going. But the most important thing might be to just appreciate wherever we are in the present.