In case you’re
wondering why there haven’t been any recent updated to my blog, I can summarize
the reason in two words: summer vacation.
As of the middle of June, those wonderful long breaks, called school
days, ceased. Like many stay-at-home-moms
with some resemblance or existence of a budget, I cannot justify putting my
kids in an all-day camp.
As a result I am
left with the task of filling the time in-between scheduled summer activities
with long meaningful, educational, and emotionally rewarding experiences for my
children. In short, I keep them away
from the T.V. and from fighting with one another.
At the end of the
day, once the little darlings have gone to bed—one of them with a lot more fuss
and struggle than the other--I can’t wait to jump into bed myself. Words like “Google search hits” and “key
words” just don’t carry the same weight as a “good night’s sleep.”
I miss
writing. A lot! Luckily, with much encouragement from my husband,
I got myself into a creative writing class through an extension class at a local
university. I started at least writing,
if not blogging, again regularly.
One of the recent
class reading assignments was a short story by Edward P. Jones, The First Day. It is about the first kindergarten morning
in the life of a five-year-old girl.
Well actually, the story is not about the child, who happens to be the
story’s narrator, but rather about the child’s illiterate mother’s struggle to
enroll her daughter in the right public kindergarten. The story openes with a beautifully-crafted,
seductive sentence:
“On an otherwise
unremarkable September morning, long before I learned to be ashamed of my
mother, she takes my hand and we set off down New Jersey Avenue to begin my
very first day of school.”
I slowly savored
the story, admiring its flawless poetic narration. Then, shortly after finishing it, I called it
a bluff. The five-year-old narrator is
so aware of her mother’s struggles with the public school system paperwork and
placement that she seems to completely ignore her own childhood fears about
starting kindergarten. While the mother
may be noticeably upset about not being able to enroll the child in one of the
schools, the five-year-old remains calm and attentive to her Mom. Her observations of what her Mom’s going
through that morning shine with the emotional maturity, wisdom, and perception
of an adult. (And how many adults recall
their first day of school with such clarity?)
Any mother whose child started kindergarten in a not-so-distant past
would call this story a bluff. If such five-year-old existed, she would be
auctioned-off to the highest-bidding couple for billions of dollars.
The First Day is included in the prestigious
volume, “The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories,” edited by
the literary giant, Tobias Wolff. Needless
to say, neither the story’s author nor the editor is a mother of a
kindergartner.
Noticing this lyrical
story’s fau pax makes one feel good about being a mother, about knowing something
from direct experience. Life and
writing seem to require a strong and steady balance. If you lean too much in one direction, your
miss the other. Forgive me, Edward P.
Jones and Tobias Wolff!
