The Best Thing. The Hardest Thing.

(note: I previously posted this piece on the daily blog I keep on myspace; because I know there are different readers here, it seemed worth posting it again. Also, the fact that I haven't written here since January--I've been busy!--there's teaching! Mothering! Writing that daily poem [number 41 today, or it will be, once I've written it] has left me feeling rather guilty. I've never thought guilt was a terribly useful thing, but there you go, I seem unable to extricate myself from its grasp completely.)

I shouldn't have been so quick to think I wasn't going to enjoy my day with the third-graders yesterday, since it was a small class, a pretty good class, and the entire day was given over to language studies--reading, spelling, vocab, writing. For math they trundled down to the computer lab, and for social studies, I read to them again. The day also produced what I am sure is going to be my favorite moment in teaching, ever. Early on, we were doing a spelling pre-test, which meant I read them a list of words they hadn't studied yet, they wrote them down to see how well they did with them, and then they have the rest of the week to study before their real test on Friday. For each word I had to also make up a sentence--and as I told them, Ms. M. can make up a sentence like nobody's business--and my own sentences are waaaay better than the examples the teacher's manual gives (which appear to have been written by someone whose first language is not English; is it possible they're outsourcing that job to India, too?) At any rate: the word was still. I said, okay guys, this one has a couple of different meanings. For instance, you can look out the window and say (inserting a big sigh); It's still snowing. Or you might look out your window and think, Down in the field, those deer are standing very still. From the back of the room a hand shot up and one of my young friends said, Excuse me. It can also mean that metal thing my grandpa keeps in my barn.

When I got home it was time to take a look into the future, this time by way of the internet rather than my crystal ball. Or even my magic eight ball. Yesterday was the day admission letters went out from Phillips Exeter Academy--acceptance or rejection--and this year, the decisions were also to be posted on the personal accounts of all applicants, the one they set you up with when you begin the process so you can track what the office has received, what they still are waiting on. Sure enough, there was Maeve's decision, and the first line read: Congratulations!

A couple of months ago I sat here for a long time and struggled with writing my "Parent's Statement" which was about the final part of her application process. I still have a copy of what I wrote--what I don't have is a copy of the internal process that was going on while I wrote it. In fact I had put it off about as long as I was able to do so...in fact, it may be--I don't remember now--that it wasn't even a mandatory part of the process, whether or not I had any opinions one way or the other about her was likely inconsequential. I can't imagine any parent not having an opinion, but I know those parents are out there. At any rate. I wrote my piece about her, all the while painfully aware that what I was doing was trying to convince them to take my daughter away from me. I told them about her intense intellectual curiosity; I told them about the sponge-like way she soaks up learning and about how math is what's hardest for her, although that hasn't stopped her from signing up for the tough courses, or, for that matter, from pulling high 90's in them. I described her enthusiasm: gold in her pocket, I called it. I told them the story about how, as a sixth-grader, she spent two weeks away from us at Girl Scout camp and how the first day had been horrible, the second day had been a little better, and by the end, when we'd picked her up and were on the way home, she turned to me in the car and said you know, Mom, it's too bad I have so long to wait before I go to college, because I think I'm ready to live away from home now.

Finally I told them how difficult it was for me to write all of this because their saying yes meant my saying good-bye a full year before I'd thought I would. If you get to know her the way I know her, I added, you're going to miss her as much as I'm going to miss her. And, well, here's where we all get to find out how much, how deeply, that's true. I'm glad that I won't have to do any of this during the college application process, because I'm pretty sure at some point my own heart would give out and I'd start saying no, it's not true, she can't leave, give her back, make her small again and let's somehow freeze time right there, shall we? That's been the oddest thing about this impending change, how the shock waves from it have had the effect of knocking me back in time, in memory: since I found out, all I've been able to think about is the beginning, my pregnancy, her birth, what those early years were like, how different everything has grown. My wise friend Inanna wrote to me from Chicago last night: yes, first it's school, then it's off for the good job, then marriage, then grandchildren for you...it's called life, Anne. Of course it is. But true to form, I still feel as though I'm in dress rehearsal, not quite ready to go out there and convincingly deliver my lines. As of this morning, Maeve still hasn't decided whether she's going to go--making her pro/con list, there turn out to be more cons than you might imagine, given the opportunity this presents. Which ever way she decides to go, I'll of course back her up.

A.A. Milne wrote, "Wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest a little boy and his Bear will always be playing." Right before Maeve was born I learned of a superstition--Balinese, I think--that babies are believed to still belong to the gods for the first hundred days after they're born, and so are never allowed to touch the ground in that time. I'm superstitious anyway, and was never more so than I was around childbirth, and so for the first hundred days of Maeve's life I never set her down except when she went to sleep; on the hundredth-and-first day we made a great show of letting her finally touch the Earth. And then I was never away from her until the day I gave birth to her brother, when she was nearly three years old. What I'm saying is that somehow we've managed to stay close--freakishly close, as she sometimes says, Lorelei-and-Rory-Gilmore close. And so I know that Maeve's going to hate it when I write this, but here it is anyway: no matter where she goes and no matter what happens to her on the way, in an enchanted corner of my own soul a woman and her little girl will always be spending their day together in that little house on the lake beside the woods, where they first started out all those years ago.