Fourth, forever
We recently dropped Aidy off for her first stint at sleep away camp. She was there for just one week with a good friend from home, and the car ride to the location, a lovely site set among mountains and a large lake, was marked by an enthusiasm-borderline-mania typical of our youngest child. She told me she was so excited that she couldn’t breathe. That she was so excited she was going to die (which I when I gently asked her to please tone it down when in the company of her soon-to-be fellow campers and hopefully new friends). She told me that she was so excited, “she felt like a real person.”
A real person. A strange thing to say, but I think I understood what she meant. She was all hopped up on the singularity of this new experience, embarking on an adventure of independence. And yes, I suppose that’s what becoming a “real person” is all about.
It’s funny, though, Aidy, and her “real”-ness, has been such a hallmark this past year; her essence as a girl of this age (9, almost 10) wrapped up in a torrent of friendship and possibility and the urgent need to catapult each day to top tier status. As real as it gets.
This academic year was notable for our family in that each of my children went to a different school: the elementary school, the middle school and the high school in our district. And, because Nora also goes to a half-time magnet arts school, too, that’s four. Four schools, four newsletters, four calendars, two parents, 53,938 text messages that began, “hi, I totally forgot…”
It was busy mentally, busy physically. So many competing activities and quandaries clamoring for our attention, thankfully all related to the normal (well, normal for us) trappings of children this age. Everything notable, nothing too over the top.
But even considering so much excitement emanating from all three children - even with the time Nora sat down with her guitar, center stage, and sang “Lilacs” by Waxahatchee at her music department’s coffee house, and even with Gabe learning accordion, making our house sound like a central casting French restaurant - the story of this past year was fourth grade. Not in the way Aidy is always the story. The way she enters a room, stage whatever, with an agenda and a song, blond wavy hair and a brush in hand to tame it. How she announces, “Life! Life’s great.”
Fourth grade itself was the story. The friends and experiences that shaped this academic year. This age, so squarely in the height of childhood. Like a 24/7 film about being a kid. And maybe you try to make it about something else for a couple minutes, like the fact that you have to go grocery shopping. But you can’t steer it that way. Because that’s not the plot.
Aidy’s opening line as we walked home from school pickup (after a request to hang out on the playground, as she and a friend dumped colorful backpacks at our feet and were scaling the chain link fence, lightning fast, before we parents could answer yes or no, hurling their bodies over the top and landing hard, a cloud of dust, then they ran, ran toward the climbing structure) was, often enough that I started looking forward to it: “Mom, you are not going to believe what happened today.”
And whatever came next, it lived up to the hype! One time it was that someone (never identified but they had their suspects!) left tiny axolotl figures in several of the kids’ lockers, eliciting immediate delight among classmates and parents, too. Another it was that their teacher - who Aidy and her friends adored fiercely, and, I’m sure, will remember with a pure nostalgic joy when summoning the tangible recollections of these school days as adults - told them to crumple up their morning work…and then started a snow(paper)ball fight! They wrote poems about their personalities, not yet overly affected by the self-consciousness that questions authenticity. They helped one another with math assignments. Their class had an affectionate prank relationship with a fifth grade class and the hijinx were epic: desks were switched, areas were reorganized, there was an alleged TPing incident (“WHAT?,” I cried out when I heard this, “That is CLASSIC pranking, Aidy, classic! And, um, it was allowed?”)
She’d talk the whole way home, engulfed by it all, and that’s what it felt like, and still feels like, this age. Like wildfire. Requests were urgent, everything’s urgent, like the end of the world is nigh and all that will save us is a sleepover, please, tonight, it has to be tonight, we’ve never even had a sleepover before (lies!) Parents assaulted on the sidewalk outside the school, or the coffee shop, or at soccer practice, when all we wanted was to have a few moments of peace and not make any decisions. Or at least that’s how I felt. I got annoyed at one point. Annoyed at Aidy’s constant insistence for more, and more, and come ON, more fun, but then I broke. Fighting incidentals isn’t worth it, this is what my third child has taught me. And Aidy and her friends don’t revel in the moment so much as they demand it, like they’re the only ones who can see the time slipping away and can’t stand the audacity of our resting state.
At the end of the school year, I chaperoned the annual and beloved fourth grade field trip to Quassy, an amusement and water park that’s a Connecticut mainstay. I love Quassy. It’s got a real 80s vibe and is small enough that you can sit on a lawn chair and, if your kids are old enough, let them loose. That wasn’t entirely possible on this particular day, of course, because I was officially responsible for not only Aidy, but for a few other fourth graders’ whereabouts. So I, along with my fellow chaperone and friend Steve, followed our assigned group of children around as they raced with dizzying speed from one location to another. From ride to ride to waterslide to Dippin Dots, to a hastily eaten lunch, to a quickly-formed huddle to determine if Aidy was going to go on the upside-down one, and the others said she should and so she would. “I’ll DO IT,” she declared and was in the line in seconds flat, no second thoughts, no hand wringing. I couldn’t believe their prowress for decision making, I was inspired by it. I fret over what we are going to have for dinner. I watched Aidy make that decision over a few piercing looks in her friends’ eyes, a set jaw, perhaps a sudden realization regarding the brevity of these gorgeous once-in-a-lifetime, but not really, moments. “I’m going to do it” she said. She did.
In just a few short weeks we’ll start packing up this shimmering season, this real-person summer. Aidy will get assigned a fifth grade teacher, and the beginning of the school year will wreak havoc on my emotional state, like it always does, and won’t ever stop doing, before we all settle in a little. Not yet, though.
I don’t normally like to play in the pool with my kids, which, fine, maybe makes me a boring mom, but remember! I’ll take them to Quassy any day! Recently, however, I got in with Aidy when she beckoned. Her always-present social circle was otherwise occupied and she wanted to swim through my legs, she wanted me to throw her, and I complied. Really she just wanted me there, in the midst of her backwards summersaults, elbows flailing. Standing in the bright sunshine, semi-blinded, as she swam circles around me, I tried to catch her, but she was so fast, so incessant, I could only laugh.