“A photograph is a return ticket to a moment otherwise gone.”
Unknown
I always see September as a fresh start. I view the end of summer and the start of a new school year in much the same way that many people see New Years, flipping the calendar from the old year filled with highs and lows, new life lessons and abandoned fitness routines as well as resolutions both realized and long forgotten. With eager and fresh ambition, we flip the calendar to a brand new year, one that is free of mistakes, void of mishaps and setbacks, brimming with both possibility and potential. In many of the same ways and with similar perspective, our kids wind up their last carefree days of summer and begrudgingly enter the more structured and routine days leading into fall.
In an earlier post I already told you that as a kid, I adored the first day of school. The new clothes, the shiny new school supplies, the brand new backpack. I loved everything about it. And then when my kids reached school age, I loved it for them. Not because I was in a rush to get them out the door, singing “it’s the most wonderful time of the year” on the way to the drop-off. I loved (and still do) having the boys home in the summer because I think even when they were little, I had an appreciation for how fast time goes and wanted to soak up every moment with my favourite people. When summer would turn to fall and school was back in session, during elementary school I volunteered to chaperone all the trips, I never missed a school concert and I baked the nut-free cupcakes for the class for my kids’ birthday. I never missed an assembly where my kiddos were getting an award, I made it to all the volleyball games and every parent teacher conference. As a working mom, that is no small feat. It required taking vacation time as well as the kindness of my boss who remembered what it was like to have a little one and how fast they grow up.
I am mildly Type A (by mildly, I mean the opposite of mildly) so I always had my kids school supplies organized, colour coded and packed up a week before school started. Outfits were purchased and planned for the first week. School lunches were packed into bento-like boxes before actual bento boxes were all the rage. And on the first day of school, we’d be ready and raring for our traditional picture. Until this year.
Our boys are now 15. The days of snapping candid or posed pictures of them are mostly gone. Aside from Mother’s Day which is the one day of the year where their protests are completely powerless, I don’t get the teenage permission slip signed to take many pictures anymore. Add in online learning and working from home, and our schedules have honestly not aligned to fit in a first day of school pic.
Now I know what some of you are thinking. If they are doing online learning and this year has as big an asterisk beside it as the Houston Astros World Series win, would I even want to commemorate back to school 2020? My short answer is abso-frickin-lutely..
As dramatic as it may sound, I truly believe we are living in a historic time. This is one of those moments in history that people will look back on for decades. The Year of Corona. The year schools and businesses shut down. The year we all had to wear masks everywhere we went. The year everything changed. The year the world banded together by staying apart.
But yet I am scrolling through social media and still seeing everyone’s back to school pics of their kiddos and I couldn’t be happier about it. I see pics of kindergartners venturing off in these uncertain times while their parents lament how it’s even possible that their kids are big enough for school. I see pics of little learners who still think their teachers (and their parents) are the greatest people ever. I see pics of tweens and teens who would rather have broken their streaks on SnapChat than have had their picture taken but they gave in to their parent’s request for “just one photo.” I see pics of kids starting new schools, embarking on new educational milestones like starting high school or post-secondary, even moving away from home to study (and we thought our kiddos starting kindergarten was hard!). I see pics of kids donning masks that have now become part of their school uniform and while we obviously wish there was no reason to have to wear them, those masks are a bit of a unifier in that we are wearing them for ourselves but we are also wearing them for each other in the hopes that one day soon, we won’t need them anymore and we can all be back together again.
While these pictures are of so many different kids, all at different ages and stages, there are a few things that are constant among them. 1. They are fortunate to be heading back to an important institution that we weren’t even sure was going to open its collective doors in time for back to school. Whether they are participating in person or online, our kiddos have access to education and that’s not something everyone can say. 2. On some level, even if it’s the most micro one, there is something they are looking forward to about back to school. Maybe it’s seeing friends, just getting out of the house, the prestige of a new grade – whatever it is, there is something they are looking forward to. Sometimes we have to look really hard for it, but it’s there. And 3. On the other side of that camera, there is a parent who is equal parts excited and sentimental – excited that their children are growing and learning and experiencing new things and sentimental that they are doing it all so fast.
While I can appreciate that 2020 has been a beast and we are eager for another chance to flip the calendar to welcome in 2021 in the hopes of putting all of this behind us, I’m going to try my best to savour every moment. The older my kids get, the faster I feel those calendar pages get flipped so I’m going to do my best to focus on the page we are on. And while I haven’t yet captured my boys’ back to school photo for this year and we are still working on figuring out what they are excited about for this year, my excitement and sentimentality can be marked as fully present during roll call.
The other night, I showed the boys some of my Facebook memories of first day of school pics from years past. There were littler versions of friends they still have as well as faces whose names have since been forgotten. But most importantly, there were smiles from my boys remembering the excitement they felt on those first days and reminiscing about funny memories from earlier grades. I’ll get my picture eventually. It won’t obviously be from the actual first day of school and “past me” would have struggled with that. But “present me” is totally fine with it. My boys may protest or grumble about it but they will eventually agree. And they’ll be glad they did when one day down the road we reminisce about the weird year that was Grade 10 and it brings smiles to their faces, smiles that not even a mask can cover up.
