To Elijah, on your first and last day of Preschool
There was a day not that long ago, that I sat at the kitchen table looking over your bouncer, wondering what I would do with you. Motherhood was so utterly foreign, and I wondered if I was doing enough, talking enough, loving enough to raise you well.
Through good days and bad days, little victories, and lots of mistakes, we have grown the two of us.
And it makes me very glad.
It felt almost too soon when you started preschool in the fall. The days and weeks and months between that snowy day in the kitchen have gone by so much quicker than I expected. I left you there for the first time, and cried to myself the whole way home. My baby was grown up enough to be on his own, if only for a little while, and I felt a new kind of puzzlement at this season of motherhood.
As if the Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays you spent learning and making new friends were simple breaths of air, moving in and moving out, today we’re celebrating your preschool graduation.
It’s impossible that time has moved this fast, but I try to tell myself it’s not.
You’ve shown me how independent and trustworthy and brilliantly caring you can be. You’ve been the leader we hoped you’d be in your world of Ninja Turtles and super hero action shirts and imaginative days at the park. You told me at the beginning of the year you’d never get a flipped apple for disobeying and you kept your word.
You kept your word.
And it makes me very proud.
I will be the one sitting in the pew with the soft sheen of tears sliding down my cheeks, full of pride and gladness. I will be the one with the catch in my voice grasping at the pregnant pauses to keep myself together.
When I cried on your first day of preschool, and when I cry at your graduation, it’s because that’s what love looks like on me.