Back To School

We here in Seattle are rugged individualists. We do not start school the day after Labor Day. No sir, we start two days after Labor Day. I secretly believe it is to give the parents an extra day to recover from attending Bumbershoot. Maybe it's to give everyone a chance to get back from their last ditch camping trip of the summer. Or maybe it's to give us this spare day between holiday and routine to speculate and ruminate and drive each other crazy.

My jBird has proclaimed herself the "luckiest girl in the world" because she gets a locker in her new school, because her mom bought her the tackiest shirt on Earth to wear for back to school because it was deemed "cool" by that fascinating eight-year-old rubric, and because she gets to ride the bus this year. The Hooligan is more quiet about his inner-workings, preferring instead to give involved descriptions of space machinery. But today he told me that "School is awesome because there are so many possibilities." They are ready to go. They've been counting down the days for a month now. Tomorrow is the day. Today is the day they will eat popcorn for breakfast and watch too much TV and wrestle with each other in great, giggling, tumbling chaos that spills into every room of the house and out in the yard. Today they will get on each other's nerves and holler and then hug. Today is summer. Tomorrow is not.

Tomorrow they will go and learn the geography of a new school. The odd chemistry of making new friends. The arithmetic of when to sit quietly, when to stand in line, when to run and play. The poetry of being on their own amid a crowd of friendly strangers. Tomorrow when they dress it will be for school. When they eat breakfast it will be with an eye toward getting them through the day. When they step out the door, it will be into the unknown. Tomorrow they are going back to school.

Tomorrow I am going back to school, too. I will have to learn the silences of my house. I will have to regain the trust that the things they've learned that are far more important than reading and writing will stick with them as they navigate their days. I will have to resign myself again to giving them away to others for what is the best part of their days. That I will only see them sleepy in the mornings, worn out in the afternoons, and recharging on the weekends for the next several months. I will have to remind myself that this is for a greater cause. I will have to remember how to go about my days without stepping on midday Legos, stopping to make lunch for three, listening to the non-stop narration of two little lives. I will re-learn how to paint by myself, write by myself, eat by myself, clean by myself, shop by myself, even go to the bathroom by myself without the inevitable urgent conversation through the door. I have a lot to learn.

I am glad to learn it, though. These small people given to my charge are ready, so ready, for this next step. Their little wings are wet with newness, their fawn legs are wobbly but strong. They are thrilled with learning, with stepping out, with independence, with challenge and with the chaos of all those new people to meet. They gobble with their senses and absorb new knowledge as if through their skin. Who would I be if I were to deny them that? If I kept them babies in my nest and squashed their first attempts at flight with my feathered, motherly ass? I talk big. I'm all bravery and centered and selfless in my speech. I'm terrified. I always am. I resolutely do not think of the worst possibilities and smile brightly and say "It will be so much fun!" And indeed, it will. For all of us. I crave a quiet cup of coffee, uninterrupted time to think. And yet I quake inside. Have I done enough to prepare them? Will they be all right?

Of course they will. It is they who have taught my wobbling fawn legs how to walk like a mother. It is they who have helped to unfurl the wings of my heart to soar higher than I ever thought imaginable. It is they who have prepared me for this. This incremental letting go. This watching two distinct people who carry a little bit of me in their DNA to walk around, to succeed, to go further bit by bit away. It is they who have taught me that I have no control, only love and fragments of my own experience to share with them. They will be fine. I will be fine. Tomorrow, school starts for all of us.

Today I will watch them play and enjoy this spare day.

Alligator Wrestling

The bus driver looked just like Miss Piggy's evil, red-headed stepmother. I dared not look at her girth shoe-horned into her seat as I got on the bus every day. It was best not to look her directly in the eye. Like Medusa, her power was reduced when viewed in the reflection of the rear view mirror. On a good day, the only thing the mirror showed was the small balding spot in her crispy red hair. On a bad day... hoo boy. The head would slowly move, planetary. First the eyes, dark and glassy, rimmed with sparkly green eye shadow, pasty and thick with the notion that green was the only acceptable color for redheads. Then the snout would emerge in that terrifying piece of glass and the whites of her eyes would flash as she searched the mirror for the cause of the hubbub. It was never me, but even so, my shivering spine sat a little straighter just in case. I'd look for as long as I could and then avert to something desperately interesting out the window.

He was in my grade, but at least 3 years older. A foot taller, a menacing wisp of shadow on upper lip and cheeks. His clothes were dirty, mismatched, holed and patched. His hair hung in lank twigs, uncut around his head. His face was haunted, hungry, and angry. He was not cowed by the threatening, porcine glare in the rear view. It only served to push him further once he got started. He was named after an alligator - Cayman. He lived with his mysterious family in the hills around our town. There were always whispers and rumors of the things his family got up to - unspeakable, foreign to my whole world.

My sister was in first grade. It was her first year on the bus. She was skinny and small for her age, but made up for it in personality and confidence. She could talk the paint down off a wall, sell you the seat you were sitting in, and make you love her all the more for it and beg for more. She had some friends on the bus and usually they would cram three to a seat and giggle and talk about My Little Ponies. I, being older by four years, was far too mature for such things. My friends got off the bus earlier than I did and my brother had just switched to the Junior High bus, so I mostly sat and watched and tried to avoid any unpleasant seat companions. It was a long ride out into the country where we lived, too winding to read and sadly, I'd become immune to the New England scenery that others paid good money to come and ogle.

It started with a scuffling. A quiet, subtextual shoving and hissing. Cayman and another boy arguing about a seat. I ignored them at first because it wasn't uncommon. Usually it sorted out until they could get off the bus and beat each other up. That day, though, there was a small girl in the seat in question. Small and skinny for her age, but outspoken.

"Get out of my seat!" I heard the familiar little voice holler and I tensed. More scuffling.
"SIT DOWN!" came the screeching edict from up front, so Cayman plopped into my sister's seat and contented himself with hissing threats at the other boy. When he bored with that, he turned his attention to my sister, who was looking resolutely out the window. I couldn't hear him from where I sat, but could see him keeping a constant patter of malevolence directed at my sister. Something made her turn and tell him to shut up.
"Leave me alone or my big brother will beat you up."

And then it all happened in a series of disjointed images. He stood up and hovered over her, she cowered. He uttered something unintelligible that turned her white and I stood up, made my way toward the scene. With jolting, jostling bus feet I lurched toward her, having no idea what I would do when I got there. I could barely hear the screeching of the bus driver over my own respiration. And then a zip, flash of skin and hair, menacing waggling and my sister's cries. My own animal instinct and revulsion took over. I grabbed the back of his greasy coat and he wheeled around. While he was turning, a fist that belonged to me, but was somehow detached from my experience punched him as hard as I could in the jaw.

I'd never before or since punched anyone in anger. The sick, oddly intimate sensation of bone meeting skin, meeting skin, meeting bone. The faint crunch of knuckles. The flashing anger in his eyes. He punched me back. Right in the face. I'd been raised in a chivalrous, civilized family. We never punched each other, and it was just known that you didn't hit girls. I had never anticipated punching him in the first place, much less the stinging, throbbing, eye watering return. That punch rattled loose some rage within me and I went in for another attack.

He clawed at my coat, my arms until he caught one and twisted it behind me. It was then that I realized that the bus had stopped. Stopped because of me. I was fighting on the bus. One of the unforgivable sins.
I dissolved into tears and my sister sat frightened and mute in the seat beside me.

She was out of her seat. She had to turn sideways to fit down the aisle and even then, the seats indented her flesh obscenely as she squished through. Scraped and bruised and terrified, I waited as she made her sloth-like progress toward us. No one spoke. I don't think I even breathed. "TO THE FRONT OF THE BUS! BOTH OF YOU!" It was a punishment worse than death itself. To sit with Cayman, in the front seat, right behind the bus driver. The longest ride of my life.

The next day as I timidly boarded the bus, I was curtly informed that I would have to ride in the front seat for a week, to and from school, because I "started it". I hadn't told my parents about the incident because I was afraid of getting in trouble for fighting on the bus. I swallowed my outrage silently and served my sentence without a word.

As an adult I look back and see an angry and troubled boy from a disorganized, probably abusive home. A whirling dervish of emotion and hormones and intensity, angry at the whole world and not given the tools to deal with it appropriately - so he fights, he exposes himself to little girls, he punches in the face. Instead of fearing him, I fear for him. I want to get him the help he so obviously needs. I never learned what became of him. I fear the worst. In the bus driver I see a tired, beleaguered woman. Underpaid and overworked, probably a little afraid of some of the hellions on her bus. We were the rough route. The route that wound out into the sticks, where kids were named after alligators. And my sister. She survived, she laughs about it now, pokes fun at me for being so uncharacteristically tough, grateful to know that I was and am the kind of sister who will defend her and come to her aid at any cost.

And me? I've ended my fighting career. That one knock-out round was the beginning and the end. That was enough for me. Just the one punch. But I'm glad to know I have it in me.

Written for Mama Kat's Pretty Much World Famous Writer's Workshop. The prompt? "Tell us about something you've punched."