“Mr. Noah isn’t too lazy to teach.”
I forget how loyal he is, how kind and generous to others he’s always been. He’s never had a mean bone in his body, and Gary and I have always marveled at how much better and more evolved a person he is than we are; how different he is from us. Was it the luck of genetics and biology? More engaged parenting than we’d had? Conscious differentiation on his part? Gary always says that we could learn from him, but we never do, instead just blurting things out without thinking. Like now.
“You’re right. It’s not laziness. He just needs extra time to manscape his goatee.”
“Mom. Stop.” He looks at me finally. He is all Gary, with his perfect ears and straight nose and blue eyes, though I know the lips and chin and, sadly, the crowded teeth, which will need straightening, are mine. “You don’t have to come, you know. Jackson’s mom and Gavin’s mom and Robert’s mom couldn’t come. I can just say you’re too busy. It’s no big deal.” He looks out the window again, away from me to somewhere else.
I blink and feel the sudden sting of tears. “But I want to come.” The sentence is a repentant whisper that leaves me confused: Why, when I miss my little boy so much, am I pushing away what’s left of him? “Dude. I was just kidding.” I’m begging now. Like plate tectonics, something inside me is finally cracking and shifting. Melting. “I want to come. I really do.”
He shrugs. “Are you bringing the dog?”
“I have to,” I say, as if I’m explaining why I have to drag an oxygen machine in with me, that my survival depends on it. “It’ll be worse if I don’t bring her.” I look down at my lap, in the space between my body and the steering wheel and the harness strap of the seat belt, and see the top of the dog’s head inside the sling. It’s then that I notice all the dog hair on my black sweater and wish I’d thought to run a lint brush over myself before leaving the house on such an important morning.
“It’s worse for me if you do.”
“I know. I’m sorry. But I can’t help it right now.”
He shrugs again—whatever—and just like that we’re finally at the school, pulling into the no-parking zone and leaving the car in front of the MORNINGSIDE MONTESSORI: WHERE PEACE RULES mosaic sign, the one we helped make one chilly late-October afternoon during the school’s annual Harvest Day, when Teddy still sat in the backseat and had long drummer hair and wore Led Zeppelin T-shirts and kissed me hello and goodbye without restraint or shame.
And then, as if we aren’t three minutes late for morning meeting and the tapping of the peace gong, I take my hands off the wheel and touch his head, the one without a bird on it, and then his hair, pretending to fix it. To my astonishment he lets me and doesn’t pull away, and for a brief moment before we leave the car and race into the school where I know I will embarrass him terribly, we are who we used to be, before the world as we knew it changed.
Morning Meeting
In the school’s multipurpose multiage room, Mr. Noah’s voice, very community-theater-director, rises above the low roar of the hundred or so K-6 children burning through the unrefined-sugar highs of their organic breakfasts. As head of school, in layers of flowy cotton and wool and his man bun affixed to the top of his head with a single black lacquered chopstick, he moves through the crowd, which includes the handful of middle-schoolers—fewer than fifteen teens who have decided to stay for the school’s brand-new seventh and eighth grades instead of switching to a different private school or going back into the public school system. Passing them, he stops to play Kissinger to two boys from the lower school, probably seven years old, or eight, who are fighting over a fuzzy mallet in front of a big bronze disc suspended from the ceiling from what looks like macramé pulleys. There is pushing, shoving, and fierce fleece-hoodie pulling.
“Boys! Boys! You can’t fight over the peace gong! It defeats the whole purpose! We share here!” Mr. Noah separates the boys and then, after some whispered diplomacy and with all hands on the mallet, brings them back in. They tap the gong together.
I turn to roll my eyes at Teddy but he is no longer next to me, or right behind me, or wherever he was when we’d rushed from the car into the school. I scan the sea of small heads and hooded jackets, hoping to find him in a group of boys, yelling and laughing and doing something completely idiotic and annoying and un-Montessori-like, but by now I know better. He’s become a solitary child—neither academic nor athletic; neither popular nor universally loathed; no longer a tween, but barely a teen. It is an existential purgatory, not knowing who you are and who you will become. Even though I can’t see him I know that he is waiting somewhere on the periphery of the faux gymnasium for the unspeakable torture of Bring-Your-Parent-to-School Day to begin: alone, without a friend to confide in or roll his eyes to. My heart balls up like a fist in my chest. No wonder people day-drink.
We’d moved him here to this small private school from public school for second grade, when the fact that he’d entered kindergarten without knowing his letters had reached such a fevered pitch of concern on the school’s part that they practically forced us into medicating him for depression. Gary and I would have been happy to agree to that if he’d indeed been depressed, but we both knew what being a sad child looked and felt like, and Teddy wasn’t a sad child. Except when he was in school. When he wasn’t in school he was full of energy and glee, playing with the boys down the street all day outside and becoming a tiny monster-guitarist at the nearby music school that was run by one of Gary’s old friends. But no matter what we told the team of special educators who came together every few months to review Teddy’s individualized education program (IEP), and no matter how much I tried to convince them that Gary and I weren’t against medication at all—in fact, we were extremely pro-meds (“Between the two of us, we keep most of the big psycho-pharmaceutical companies in business!” I’d joke, until they looked at me like I had a bird on my head)—it never did any good. My explanations sounded like excuses, the kind every middle-aged mother made when she was desperately clinging to her own distorted version of reality. The fact that Teddy might have a minor learning delay and some processing issues—what was now called executive functioning—not depression—was never discussed until we applied to Morningside Montessori and an informal diagnosis was made based on the assessments and school progress reports we submitted for admission.
Just as I start to back away from the crowd to look for Teddy in earnest, Mr. Noah begins the school’s daily briefing. He claps his hands close to his chest, then mimes for everyone to sit down. “Time for morning meeting, Peace Pals.”
In seconds, peace prevails, and there is the soft thud of a room full of little and medium-size bodies dropping to sit on the wooden floor. My eyes fill the way they often do now, at the tiniest moments of grace or beauty, always without warning. I find a wall to lean against, then wipe my nose on the back of my hand, then take a deep cleansing breath to signal to my body and brain that it is time to focus on the News of the Day.
“Our annual intensive all-school deep-dive Autumn Inhabitancy begins soon, which we’re very excited about,” Mr. Noah says, holding a large photo above his head of a group of people in animal costumes. From where I’m sitting, I think I can make out a cow, a horse, and maybe a moose. “This year, for something new and very different, the People Puppet Theater is coming all the way from Vermont. They’ll need room and board for a few weeks, so ask your parents if you can be a host family.” He stops to gasp. “I mean, how fun would that be? To have real live People Puppets in your house? Puppets-in-residence! It reminds me of college!” He stops to sigh wistfully. I squint, and though I can’t be certain, I think one of the layers of clothing he’s wearing—T-shirt, oxford cloth button-down, lightweight quilted down vest, cotton neck-smock—is some kind of bib. “But this morning we’re very excited to have Teddy Vogel’s mom visiting us for Bring-Your-Parent-or-Grandparent-or-Beloved-Guardian-to-School Day.”