Friends Mean Something

** I have a bunch of cute pictures ready to attach to this post, many fitting and many of Adara on the schoolyard or doing homework, but my husband has my mac in Germany and I'm at home with this old junky PC and it simply won't allow me to attach photos. Such a pain, but one I must accept. So I apologize, but no pictures, just words tonight.**


Today was the first day back to school for many. Not for us. This is old hat. Adara is mid-way through her 3rd week of Kindergarten and it feels like she has been at this new school for years. She loves it. She has made friends and I can tell, that to her, Friends mean something. They mean everything.




I have been thinking a lot lately about what that means to have these special friends. What is means to her to make a friend. What the bond means to her, what the bond meant to me. When you are 5 years old and have spent the vast majority of every breathing moment by your mother's side for your entire life, going off to school and saying good-bye for 6-and-a-half-hours 5 days a week can feel like a lifetime. Long enough to scare you. But Adara was not scared. My independent, quiet and timid but adventurous at the same time, oldest child, walked into Kindergarten that first day and gave her Daddy a quick wave of the hand. Just a quick, simple, no-looking-back, wave. No tears were shed. No body peeling was necessary. She was ready. It never fails to amaze me how children always know when they are ready. There is no amount of prodding or begging or pushing that can be done to make a little one do something before they are fully prepared. But when they are ready, step back, big world.


I was not ready. Luckily Adara's incredible preschool teachers told me that last year. I went back and forth, back and forth, agonizing the decision over which Kindergarten to send her to, which program to send her to, whether to place her in Transitional Kindergarten or real, full-fledged Kindergarten. She was/is so young. Public School scared/scares me. I will admit it. I was raised in private school -- whether it be Catholic or Independent -- and my high school class had 49 students. "Those are your own fears, Caitlin," Adara's nursery school teacher told me last Spring, "Those are not Adara's and you can't let them become hers." How true is that statement, not only in referring to school but referring to life.


As parents we all hold our own fears. We all hold our own hesitations and our own pasts, whether dark or sunny. We all had our challenges, our traumas, those moments that we cannot let go of, that we cannot forget, that we strive to protect our children from experiencing themselves with every ounce of our being. We are mothers and so we are protectors. That is our job. But it is also our job to prepare them for this world. And this world can be harsh. I hate to even say it, or think it, but try as we may, we cannot hide our children from the pain and the heartbreak that they will experience, because they WILL experience it. The very best we can do, I believe, is to raise them well, teach them well and be there for them every step of the way. But sometimes being there must mean being in the bleachers or being in the crowds. Eventually, we have to sit back and let them live their own lives.


Adara told me yesterday about the red light, yellow light, green light reinforcement system that is in place in her classroom. It terrifies me that she might someday see her clothespin pinned to the yellow light -- or dare I even say it, the red light! (And yes, I have seen the recent social media links about this exact behavioral reinforcement system, but I have also ignored it, on purpose). It is what it is and frankly, she is excited by it. "My name is always on the green because I am a good listener," she tells me. Part of me cringes. Part of me holds my breathe. This is life. One day, she might be on the yellow light. One day, when I was merely 5 years old, my clothespin was moved to that yellow light. And it was upsetting, it was traumatic, I still remember it, but I also remember that I moved on and that I moved back to green light. And guess what, I married happily, I had kids, I earned my Master's Degree with honors. I am more than that green light.


I will strive to teach my daughter also that she is more than the shade of the circle light where she sees her name. But I will also strive to teach her respect, and to be a good listener and a good learner and a good citizen. That is what I hope public school teaches her -- that she is one member of this big, incredible, diverse and varying world. She is one person but is one person whom we need, to get along, to see no race or color or socioeconomic or religious differences. She is one person just like every other person in her classroom and in her school. She is one person and one equal. One person in this great big puzzle of a world.


At the same time, she is my person. So I will fight for her, I will protect her, but I will also let her go. I will watch her fly. I will watch her fall. I will let her make her own mistakes, I will watch her fail and I will help her back up again and watch her pull herself back up again. I will watch her be her best and I will be proud.


She is loving kindergarten and she is thriving. She has already learned a lesson that it has taken me 29 years to learn -- and that is that friends are important. Friends mean something. She needs her friends to get by and she knows that. I can sense she knows that when she looks around shyly each morning outside of her classroom, hanging onto my leg until the moment sweet little Amelie arrives. The second her school friend is there, everything is alright. She is ready, she is confident, she is her best person. She gives me a quick kiss and runs right away.


I am the same. I need my friends to get by. My friends make me my best person. Alan has been working like crazy (Ok, he always works like crazy. Lately, he's working like crazi-er.) He has been in Germany for a full week now and we still have two more sleeps until his return. The days could be long, the nights could be lonely, but for the first time in my life, they have not been. For the first time in my life, I have friends and I know they mean something. I have the best friends in the world. The ones who watch my kids so I don't have to miss a race that I've been pining after, the ones who then watch my kids after the race so I can nap and be a good mother for the rest of the day, the ones who scoop my kids up for soccer practice, who bend backwards and flip and flop and drop their own plans to make ours a little easier, who invite us over to family parties where we know we are outsiders but don't feel like it in the least, who drive many miles through LA traffic (and that alone means something!) to keep us company on quiet afternoons, who hold, change and bathe our babies and love us as we are -- imperfect, scattered, messy, cracked and broken at times -- with every ounce of their being and not because they have to, but just because they are our friends and because they know that Friends Mean Something. Some days, they mean everything.