Elementary School

I took treats into CK's first grade class today.  He was thrilled and mortified all at once to have me and his siblings there.  When we walked into his classroom his smile pushed his cheeks into his eyes and his excited slits of eyes jumped up and down and said to me, "Mom!  Mom!  My heart's so happy I could spin around five times fast and fall down on the floor."  That's what his eyes said to me.

And do you know what my eyes did to me, my ridiculous, crazy, over-emotional eyes, they started to gloss with tears.  There my boy is happy as an elephant in a box of peanuts and I can't look at his teacher because I'm about to cry.  I couldn't even say "hello" without a tremble in my voice.

Do you remember elementary school?  Gosh, when I step a foot into CK's school I feel the six-year-old me wiggling and squiggling inside myself.  I can feel the stress of trying to remember the fifth of the five senses.  "Seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling...oh geez what's the other one...oh man...is there anything else on my head?  Oh what could it be?"  And then I can feel being told I'm forgetting the sense of touch and I look again at my hands feeling so fooled and betrayed and I think, "Why aren't you closer to my face so I can remember about you?"  And I feel the same heart-wrenching disappointment I felt when Mrs. Lord came to my desk and told me my capital R was all wrong.  And then even after trying with all my brainpower to get it right, I can feel again that hopeless sadness, believing that I will never be a person like all other people capable of a correct capital R.

And then along with those feelings, I feel that happiness so pure only a kid can experience it - that giddiness in being at the highest square in four square, getting 100% on my spelling test, guffawing at my second grade teachers Donald Duck impersonation, getting a Little Debbie oatmeal cream pie for wiping down all the tables after lunch - oh those moments of heady joy utterly insensible of pain.

So seeing my CK clutched in a moment of bliss in his first grade classroom smashed those two sides of elementary school memory together for me.  I worry too much about the hard things CK goes through at school - the finding of friends, the getting through of boring reading lessons, the not-receiving an animal stamp on his good behavior chart because he was day-dreaming when the teacher was talking.  So to think of that struggle and then to know that this moment of being the star and passing out Little Debbie cakes and fruit snacks in his classroom could counter-balance the menial and make him feel for a second that feeling that makes life the precious thing it is, it made made all that part of me that is tender for him painfully happy.

Do you think I have elementary school issues?  Maybe I have elementary school issues.  Ha!  But anyway - today was a good day for me and the CK.  Simple joys can make life so darned beautiful.