The other day, on the way home from the last session of a beloved afterschool activity before the summer, my eight-year-old son reflected: “It’s strange how people come into your life, and you see them all the time, and then they just disappear.” He was thinking of his teachers, both in school and out, and the power of his insight gave me pause.
As an adult looking back, the school years can blur together – I can barely distinguish what I was like in first grade versus fourth grade. Children, however, measure time in dog years. Each year seems to bring decades more life experience. Over the course of a year in school, our hope is that our children’s teachers both educate and nurture. That our kids must say goodbye every year to their much-loved teachers is, as my son’s comment helped me to see, wrenching. (And helps to explain why emotions in our home are running high at the moment!)
I wrote about my three-year-old’s transition to preschool earlier this year. How I sat outside his classroom’s door for six weeks until he was ready to go it alone. At home, I watched as he and his older sister played school, both of them taking the role of the teacher. I listened to the slow, helpful cadence of their voices as they negotiated conflicts between their dolls, set the play table for snack, and sang the cleanup song. (Just the other day, after he and his sister could not agree on what to play, my son half whined, half shouted at her: “I’m just not flexible!”) He slowly began to be absorbed into the rhythms of school and after a few days of a vacation, would ask when he could go back to see his teachers again.
My eight-year-old recognized that when he says goodbye to a teacher, he’s leaving a little part of himself behind. The classroom is a universe unto itself and as he leaves, that second grader is no more. And while he may not yet be cognizant of it, my three-year-old is acknowledging the same thing. It took some time, but he allowed himself to be entrusted to the care of someone other than my husband, an adored babysitter, or me. In school, he has for the first time become a friend to his peers. He has become a child who hugs his teachers, thrives independently, and understands his classroom to be a place where he will be cared for and valued. Now, though, it’s time for him to say goodbye. He has been a whiny wreck the last two weeks, and I imagine he is trying to understand what happens – to his teachers and himself – after the last goodbye circle.
In responding to my eldest son’s comment, I shared that sometimes, even if we don’t see someone every day, we carry a piece of them forward in the lessons they’ve taught us. He listened, and nodded in agreement. And at the end-of-school assembly, I watched as he made his way around the room, doling out hugs and handing out cards to his teachers from this year and years past. And a few days later, on my little one’s first morning of camp, he gave me a tight goodbye hug, and went to join the circle. At that moment, I understood: It’s not just the teachers who disappear, it’s children who disappear into themselves, which is another way of saying, they grow up.
Tali Rosenblatt-Cohen is a freelance writer and editor of New York Family’s Parenting In Progress blog. If you see a sniveling mom of three wandering the Upper West Side, that would be her.
