Yesterday in the car, on the way back from carpool, we had an interesting discussion. I asked T., as I always do, how her day went, who she had sat next to at lunch, who she had played with at recess. The response is usually the same--she rattles off a string of girls' names, one of whom is always a girl named S., her BFF from the neighborhood. But yesterday she left S. out, and the girls' names were different ones from the usual.

"You didn't sit with S.?" I asked. "Or G.? Or K.?"

As it turned out, S. had decided that this week she and G. and K. would sit with some different girls, because she had "promised" them that this would be "their" week and not T.'s. As she told the story her face looked a little lost, the way it gets when she's processing something difficult, or especially confusing. I have been bracing myself for this type of thing. It's hard to be the new kid at school, and although she and her friend S. do love each other, S. has already built up a little pool of friends. I expected the dynamics to be present some problems--just not this early in the school year.

"Hmmmm...." I said, which is my customary response when I'm trying to sort something out for my children, but also trying to tread carefully. Better not to make a big deal out of it, I decided. T. didn't seem too upset and there was no reason to give her cause to feel badly about it.

L., however, was quick with his reply. "You know, I just don't understand girls," he said.

"What don't you understand?" I asked.

"All these games," he said. "The popular stuff, the I'll-sit-with-you-today-but-not-tomorrow games. Why does it have to be like that?"

I sighed. "I don't understand it either," I said. Why does it have to be like that?

While the carpool line at T.'s new school often makes me want to pull my hair out, I actually enjoy waiting in the line at L.'s new middle school. Most days I can get there early enough to get a good spot, and I can settle in and read a little, or catch up on grading, or just sit and think--a rare practice these days. My favorite time is when school is dismissed and the kids--with that coltish, all-arms-and-legs look tweens have about them--emerge from the glass doors at the front of the school building. The upperclassmen are involved in afterschool programs and activities, so I suspect most of the kids out in the first rush are sixth graders. Some of the kids are small, like L., others seem so tall, others seem older beyond their years, other younger. There is one boy I see every afternoon, and he always seems so lost and shy, his arms crossed defensively in front of his chest, his shoulders bowed over tiredly from the weight of his backpack. L. keeps asking me to point him out, but I never manage to time it right.This kid looks like good friend material for L., I'll often think. I sit and watch the kids each afternoon, and pick out potential friends for L., sizing them up and wondering how I can engineer some type of introduction.

Or not, I'll remind myself, over and over again.

I try and exercise some self-control. I try not to ask L. too often about who he might have spoken with at school, or if, maybe, he had a conversation at lunch. He'll mention so-and-so, who made a comment to him.

"Oh?" I'll ask, casually. "Is he a new friend?"

"Oh no," L. will reply, just as casually. "But he's not an enemy." For, alas, this is how L. sees the social world, thanks to his elementary school years: those who are enemies, and those who are not.

Monday night at dinner, T. and Scott and I had a lively discussion about the fine distinction that exists between tooting your own horn, and bragging. T. was confused. "What horn?" she wanted to know. We explained the expression to her, and spent more time having fun demonstrating examples of horn tooting and bragging. T. did a beautiful imitation of bragging, complete with the sing-song voice inflections and Scott was pretty good at supplying examples of horn tooting. But it struck me that there is a very fine line between the two, and a huge part of the difference centers around the tone and delivery, and people's perceptions of the horn tooter.

I spent much of Monday listening to a lot of public horn tooting from colleagues, and it occured to me that most of it--if not all of it--came from men. They also seemed so at ease with it, and so skilled at pulling it off, making me wonder: is horn tooting something boys learn? Do they learn how to do it because they feel entitled tof? Is it considered unseemly behavior in a girl, who might be taught early on that it's better to sit back demurely and wait to be noticed? Do we overlook horn tooting in men because we expect it and, unconsciously or consciously judge women when they do it? 

I'm back at work today. As usual, I'm kind of happy, kind of sad, kind of excited, kind of melancholy. Summer is the big pay-off time for us all; it's the time of the year when we truly appreciate the rewards of being teachers. We may not have much money; we may not be able to afford big vacations or new things for our house or expensive camps and schools for our kids, but we do have two months of pure family time each year and I wouldn't trade that for anything. But all that family time does make it very hard to say good-bye to the summer and almost painful to think about how in three short weeks everyone will be back at school and work and our lives will take off in the usual hectic, chaotic, often difficult ways that always usher in the new school year. Having two months together as a family also gives us invaluable time to help both kids prepare for the upcoming school year, and to prepare ourselves mentally for the challenges that a new school year always brings.

Most summers I head back to work feeling a little frustrated that we didn't accomplish as much as we wanted to with the summer family time--especially when it comes to working with L. on some recurring specific issues and the handful of new ones that always seem to crop up. But this summer we've been spending a lot of time preparing L. for the transition to middle school. With help from L.'s new therapist, we're working hard on a new positive behavior system (more on that later)  and on establishing good routines for him now to help ease the transition. For the first time in a few summer, I feel we are finally making some headway and producing some positive changes to L.'s routine. Here's what we've (and by "we've" I'm including L. of course) accomplished so far:

Kids are good at wishing away the days. All young people are, I think. Lately L. spends his off-computer time pacing around in circles in his room, thinking about the day he'll be thirteen, and able to play a video game rated "Teen" that he has his eye on. T. talks about being a teenager some day, like the big girls at the pool, and her face lights up with a strange, pleased smile, as if she can scarcely imagine that day. 

"Let's not get ahead of ourselves," I'll tell L. when he talks about thirteen. Because I don't want him to be thirteen--not yet. I don't want to spend too much time thinking about T., long-legged and gigging, circling the pool with her friends, talking teenage talk, making teenage plans. 

Teenage plans.

I've been thinking about the last time I wished away time like that. It was the summer before I met Scott, and the last time I traveled to Greece as a single person alone, just me, my twenty-four year old self. I had spent the year before growing my hair long and it was down past my shoulders. My sister and I shared a room in the little mountain house my parents had recently bought--a family investment, a place we could return to year after year. I was restless that summer. We'd make our way from the stone house across the small village in pitch black, our flashlights only strong enough to illuminate about a foot in front of us. We were headed to the big renovated farmhouse at the basin of a small valley, where some Greek friends of my parents lived in the summer. There, with no light around for miles, you could stretch out on the hood of one of the cars and see stars forever. If you fixed your eyes only on the sky you could actually feel the darkness pressing in on you, and your body carved out of it. The darkness had weight, and form. I would feel awed in front of it, but also small and insignificant and alone. 

L.'s old elementary school started up on Monday. For the first time in six years L. did not head back to school this last week of July. We drove downtown yesterday, too, for a family trip to the library. It was a desperate attempt to get everyone out of the house for an activity that didn't involve the usual yelling, protests and name-calling from L. that seem to accompany most attempts to leave the house these days. Now, in the dog-days of the summer, the suffocating heat and humidity, I'm all about keeping it easy. After what feels like months of battle, I'm too weary of the struggles to get L. to the pool, even though that's the simple answer for all of us. T. loves to go, so we've been alternating taking her while the other rotates through L.-approved outings: a trip to the pet store, the Asian grocery store, or the library.

Yesterday though we got everyone out, despite the heat. We drove past L.'s old school around dismissal time and the carpool line was busy as usual, the lights were on in the building, the sidewalks filled with kids. It felt strange, passing the place by. What would his first day have been like? I thought about the teachers we missed, and wondered if his old resource teacher missed him too, that first day of school.

"You'd be at school today," I told L. "If you weren't moving on to middle school."

He made an unmistakeably disgusted sound from the back seat.

"Do you miss it?"

"No way," he said. "No way."

I've been having trouble sleeping lately, which isn't something that normally happens to me. Usually I'm so tired that I nod off around the end of whatever 10:00-11:00 show on television we happen to be watching; or I find myself reading the same line in a student's paper over and over and over again until my eyes blur. By then I'm usually so sleepy that I'm out by the time my head hits the pillow. But it's summer now. We've been staying up later, and enjoying the extra sleep-in time in the morning. I'm just not tired the way I usually am at the end of the day. The news lately hasn't made sleep any easier to get, either. This is what I tell myself during the day. But at night. in that vulnerable window of time when I lie there in the dark, laid open and made bare to the darker parts of my world, that's when worry finds me. It seeps into my mind, and finds its way through the cracks.

I worry about harm coming to my children

I worry about the news, and the unfathomable things happening near and far

I worry about the future and the world we live in and the how my children will make their way through it

I worry about my job

I worry about family members far away

I worry about the start of the new school year

I worry about the fragile, precious, vulnerable parts of my children

I worry about how I can't protect those parts, not really, certainly not all of the time

I worry about L., and his future

I worry about that alter-future of L.'s that is out there; the one we don't want to look at face-on. It's dark and frightening and may not even exist. Or it might

I worry about middle school, and will he make it?

Will it be break him? Will it be a turning point?

Will T. adjust to her new school? Will she make friends?

There are some nights when I wish I could wave a wand and find the kids fast asleep in bed. I am sure that I am not alone. L. is pretty good these days. The bedtime routine used to be an extraordinarily long, drawn-out affair, with lots of rituals thrown into the mix. By the end of it I was often too worn-out and sleepy myself to salvage much of the evening. Something happened when he turned eight, though, and then nine was even better and now at eleven the only struggle we have is with enforcing the "Power Down" rule at 8:00 each night. T. has a much shorter routine than L. had at her age, but it's a routine nonetheless. I still read to her each night, and each night we have "snuggle time" together in her bed. I cherish all of this so much. I'm not foolish enough to wish it away, even if my patience runs thin some nights, when I know I have a lot to do before I go to bed myself.

Our snuggle time is sometimes the only time she unburdens herself freely, without prompting. Worries and questions come forth, sometimes peppered in-between silly talk about this and that, and plans for the next day. We lie together, our heads touching on her pillow, and try and sort it all out.

The other night she asked me, "Mama, do you wish you had two sons?"

"Not at all," I answered. "I am so proud and so lucky to have a daughter."

There was a pause, in the dark. "But two sons would be nice," she said.

"No," I said again. "One son and one daughter is the best for me."

"Because mamas need daughters?"

"I needed you," I said. "I'm just so lucky."

*********

Later, after talking a little about L.'s birthday, she asked me if I liked her bed.

"I love your bed. It's so comfy," I said. "I just love it."

"Do you like snuggling with me?"

There is a five-year old boy in our neighborhood, a creative child, a deep-thinker, a sensitively-sometimes-tenuously-wired soul who reminds me a lot of L. when he was that age. It's fitting, then, that this little boy also admires and even worships  L. in the way small boys admire and might worship an older boy they look up to and want to be like. The other day on our way back from the pool I mentioned something casually to L. about whether or not he had noticed the way this small boy looked at him and admired him and L. all but stopped in his tracks.

"What? Why?" He was genuinely stumped.

"Because you're a neat kid, who does neat things, and he wants to be around you."

A pleased smile crept around his lips and when we continued walking I thought I noticed a new bounce in his step, and a certain proud swing to his arms.

"I still don't understand why," he said still perplexed, but happy and pleased all the same.

I thought about this on and off for much of the afternoon. I wondered if this was normal, this failure to perceive himself as someone worthy of worship and admiration, or if his confusion was just another example of his lack of self-reflection, his inability to project himself out into the world, to empathize, to step outside of himself from time to time and see what others see. We struggle with this so constantly these days, it seems. He can be charming and polite one minute and then, when under stress or in a situation which triggers his acute sensory sensitivities he can be horribly rude and oppositional without even realizing what he's doing, or saying, or how he appears to others.

That was a pretty rude thing you said, we'll point out to him time and time again. 

What? he'll respond, swatting our comment away with his hand, as you would an annoying fly.

I have been trying, slowly and often not perfectly, to let go of my attachment to certain things. Not to people, mind you, but to the small (and sometimes large) expectations I set up for myself (and project onto other people) on a daily basis. When things go wrong--when my expectations aren't met, I sometimes feel cranky and disappointed, even though the reasons why are petty and often so much smaller than the actual expectation. I do think I'm a go-with-the-flow type of person but I'm also hyper-aware of how moods can be derailed by setbacks. L. struggles with this especially, and being sensitive of this has made me sensitive of my own expectations. 

On Friday I spent about an hour pitting cherries for a fresh cherry pie. I got up early to do this, since I had to drive L. to another doctor's appointment that day and we wouldn't be getting back until after 1:00. After lunch I rolled out the dough, mixed the cherries, and baked the pie. It was a beautiful pie, overflowing with dark, sweet cherries, the crust browned perfectly in all the right places. I was happy that I'd be bringing it to share with friends and, I confess, I imagined the compliments as they dug into the first forkfuls of berries. It could be, I thought, the best cherry pie I had ever made.

Do you feel like this heading in an unfortunate direction?