elementary

Friday night I met with my writing group, had a glass of wine, dug into Auzelle's poems, walked home in the humid dark, and started feeling the sparkly urge to write a poem. About the layers of being connected to and separate from another human being (are there poems about anything else?).

Saturday morning, one of the moms from Dash's new school organized a pre-first-day play date so kids and parents could get to know each other, and it was nothing short of a smashing success. Every parent was friendly and chill, and the kids started a group project of Moving All The Sand From The Sandbox Out Of The Sandbox. Dash hit it off with twin boys who were adopted by two dads, and I can't tell you how excited I am that Dash won't have to do all the queer-adoptive-family explanatory lifting himself.

So we're feeling pretty optimistic, and the blurry unknown is coming into focus. This morning I wrote the poem that took shape Friday night, even though Sunday morning is a different place (and Sunday afternoon, when I'm posting this, in a sleepy post-Dodgers haze, is another place still). But here it is anyway, that moment, a prose poem.

*

Photo by La-Rel Easter on Unsplash

Elementary

1.

I hate kindergarten.

Me too.

It’s so boring.

I know. 

We sheltered in a cinderblock cave and glared at the sun-soaked playground. The endless recess, the smug glee of other five-year-olds. Denise Moretti and I knew better, two wise old cynics in ruffled dresses. We might as well have smoked. 

Eventually I peeled away. Learned to hang like a sloth from a metal bar, turned a grounded rowboat into a prairie cabin. The adventures of Janet and Mark, successors of Dick and Jane, remained dull as sand, but when Denise said--maybe in spring, when the hillside ice plant offered thin-petaled flowers--Let’s talk again about how we hate kindergarten, I told her I didn’t. A betrayal. I left her on that splintery bench and rowed off toward first grade.

2. 

You took to daycare like the frog in the pot. We didn’t boil you, but we made you believe these hand-offs were normal. You learned to walk on indoor-outdoor carpet. You marched to the bathroom in a line. Also: the teacher whose face opened when she saw you, a daisy turning to the sun. Also: the boy you wrestle-hugged each morning, two only children merging into brotherhood. These simultaneous truths: We missed something and gained something, and it is all fine as a box of worn blocks. Smooth wood oiled by many hands.

3.

We are rugged veterans of this village life, and yet. In nine days I’ll wait with you in front of heavy doors for strangers to buzz us in. A security measure, though real estate is the gunman in our neighborhood. Children eat free lunches in the shadow of a crane. 

You: uniformed in navy and royal blue. Me: the doubting general, wondering why my metaphors bend toward war. Knowing what will form in those trenches: the fear, the friendships. Alpha, bravo, charlie. 

You curl on our bed two Saturdays before, trying to name some nameless need. You call it cake, you call it water park. Mama and I form a tent around you, hush your kicking feet. 

I want to go to the water park NOW.

I know. 

I know what is coming, and I send you off anyway. If I could hold your hard days in my calloused hands, I would. If I could save your baby skin. And yet this truth clenched like a forgotten sock: I don’t mind turning my back. Every mother is as kind and ruthless as an ER doctor. Here is your backpack, here is my long nose touching yours, here is my heart, intact.