Dispatch #17: Fifth Grade and Kindergarten

School's out for summer

Today is the last day of school for Ginger and Bean. It was quite a year! In the fall, Bean’s class went into quarantine twice in about three weeks. Since then, both classes have had scattered individual cases but no issues with community spread. Bean’s teacher is immunocompromised so they banded together and all agreed to wear their masks indoors, despite the lifting of the mandate. In Ginger’s class, about half of them, including Ginger, still wear their masks indoors. LAUSD has paid for weekly COVID testing, on campus, which I’m certain has caught cases and limited the spread. The weekly testing won’t continue in the fall, which I’m not thrilled about—but, also, I get it, it’s expensive, and my naive hope is that some of that money can be reallocated to intervention, after school programs, and so on. But I’m sure that’s not how it’ll work.

Ginger is graduating kindergarten. She’s the tallest kid in her class, one of two blondes, the other a boy. She has lost two teeth since mid-May. She is really funny and strong willed, with a tongue sharp as a knife. (I’m the worst mother in the world, did you know?)

In the last two years—since COVID descended, really—she has developed some anxiety issues: scratching her arms, worrying about random stuff. At bedtime she often starts touching all the furniture in an OCD ritual. Sometimes her brain makes her tell me stuff like, “I have a crush…just kidding!” (The brain always wants her to talk about crushes, which I find fascinating and sweet.) Her pediatrician gave me the number for Kaiser’s behavioral department. Do I call it? Or do I just let her talk to me and move through it? I don’t want to pathologize being six years old, which so often is the age of tics and nerves and emotional storms. Maybe I’ll call. Anyway, we talk about anxiety openly, we tell her it’s okay, that the brain is a funny spooky mystery, as is the body. It’ll pass, we say, and it does.

Ginger now reads chapter books and writes little stories. In one, a girl wakes to find she has magical powers, and her room has filled with flowers; she goes to school and she turns it to stone. She draws at least twenty drawings a day, and makes all sorts of multi-media pieces with tape, cardboard, string. She wants to be an artist. She is one already.

Ginger can reasonably add and count, but I have a feeling she doesn’t quite grasp what numbers are (me either, kid, me either!). She’s a classic introvert, and prefers to play by herself when she’s home, whispering to herself; yesterday she played something with the Chutes and Ladders game pieces for like two hours. At school, however, she is devoted to her group of friends, which I can tell takes a lot of energy, despite her love for these girls. Their names are Calista, Jemma, Rosemary, Kira, and Amaya. There is some ongoing drama with Gigi and the “Queen of the Year” contest, which Jemma won fair and square, but of which Gigi contested the results.

Every day, my kids get into the car and fight to tell me stuff about their day. It’s frankly annoying, even stressful, when they’re shouting over one another, but I’m happy and grateful they want to report anything to me. I know it won’t always be this way.

Bean turns eleven in a few weeks. He blossomed in fifth grade—finally, finally he was able to be back with his friends! He seems so much taller, more mature. Puberty is coming. The weeping is already here. BIG FEELINGS, HELLO. He likes reading but hates doing any of the “literature response” stuff in school. It sorta breaks my heart that he won’t be an English major, but I’ll live. He did write an entirely too-long essay on chemical reactions with a passion I could never summon for such a topic. He was a student art docent at MOCA, the first kid in class to volunteer because he loves that museum.

What else? He draws these incredibly detailed comics and illustrations of mountain men, trolls, birds in cloaks. He draws interiors of National Parks visiting centers and old-timey homes with stone chimneys. He loves Minecraft, Dungeons and Dragons, The Simpsons, Star Wars, comic books, history, bugs, and his friends. He is still an unapologetic litigator. He will wear you down. He wears me down every day.

He has Patellofemoral Pain syndrome, which essentially means his legs are weak, he can’t really walk long distances or run, and he goes once a month to physical therapy. He looks eighty years old walking up and down stairs, which suits his monologuing-about-world-war-two personality. It worries me: that he can’t move comfortably, that he can’t play sports if he wanted, that his body hurts and he’s only ten. My hope is that, as he ages, he will want to work on strengthening his legs. Right now, only his parents want that for him, and he complains a lot.

He reads, at night, but it’s definitely not his thing. He does listen to audio books while bouncing on his giant ball. Let me always remember him bounding across the room, bucking like a cowboy at the rodeo, as he listens to Little Women on his headphones.

Bean is the most extroverted person I know. He hates to be alone, loves to meet people, always wants to talk talk talk. It’s one of the main reasons he and Ginger fight. She wants to be left alone, and she’s crabby as hell if she doesn’t get that space, and he is in her face, basically all the time, and he can’t understand why she can’t be nice.

And then there is Mickey. Is the third child always so sweet? He wants to cuddle, he wants to play with his Star Wars figures, he wants to read a book by himself on the rug. He loves trains, dogs, and dinosaurs—he has even named his own species, called Raptor Daptor. After his bath he comes downstairs naked, with his towel draped over his head. “The emperor is coming! The emperor is coming!” someone has to announce and he laughs as he completes a processional through the living room.

He is heading toward three: throwing stuff, willfulness, rejecting any and all vegetables. But it’s all so predictable that it feels easy. He says to me, “I love you, Mommy” and asks to pet my arms.

I can feel him growing up, too.

One day, my house will be empty of toys. It’ll be beautiful once again, rather than how it is now: fingerprinted and cluttered, poop crusting the toilet always, an apple core on the table despite my constant refrains to throw said apple cores away. My children will be teenagers, and then adults, and then I’ll see a haggard mom with her young kids and I will smile at her like a lunatic. I won’t say, “Enjoy it! It goes so fast!” because, honestly, some days it doesn’t go fast. Is there a longer stretch of time bedtime with kids? No. There is not.

Also, every mother already knows how fast it goes. We’re always grieving for the children we had the day before.

On Tuesday, Patrick came upstairs and said, “Did Bean call you?” Bean has a new Gizmo phone watch, which allows him to leave voice texts and messages. I played the one voicemail he had sent me: “Mommy. We’re on lockdown. In the cafeteria.” He was crying. “I’m so scared. I love you. I’m sorry.” After that it was muffled and he hung up. Shaking, I texted and then called him. No response.

The world turned sideways—it was actually on its side, shimmering, I was dizzy, as I called the office. No answer. I called again, crying. My body was shaking.

It was the longest, worst two minutes of my life.

The office finally answered. The secretary assured me they were fine. The lockdown was over. There had been a robbery at the nearby Del Taco and the suspect had fled, the police had chased him. Everyone was safe.

The fear and sorrow and panic has not left my body, three days later, and my child is fine. He was in no actual danger. I cannot imagine what parents whose kids are actually harmed, who are murdered, feel. It is too much.

An unfathomable loss—

After school on Tuesday, Bean was still upset. He told me how he hid behind a pallet of water bottles. Rolled into a ball, crying. He said calling me and Daddy was the only thing that kept him from losing it altogether. He said, “I didn’t want to be killed. I was excited about going to the library after school and didn’t want to miss it.”

Imagine, being so young that you don’t want to die because you’ll miss hanging with your friends after school. The immediate, present-tenseness of being ten crossed with the brutality of fearing for your life—it’s inhumane.

I asked why he said he was sorry on the message. He said he didn’t know.

I told him he never had to be sorry. We were crying, hugging.

I keep seeing Bean, in my mind, hiding behind those water bottles, scared, and my heart aches. I want to scream. And go to him, and hold him.

At night it’s hard to fall asleep.

xoxo

Edan