“So tell me about William. What he likes, if he likes school, how he felt about coming to school, what he likes to do at home…. Tell me about him.”
This from William’s teacher, in the first round of my First-Ever parent-teacher conferences. It was a week ago: a half hour with three of my colleagues but, for the first time, not on a professional basis. I wasn’t going to talk with them as a fellow teacher; I was going to talk with them as a mom.
What is William like? Well, where to begin?
I don’t remember now what I said. I think I told her that he had some real nervousness about starting school, but that he was completely comfortable with it already. That he really liked her, and held her in deep respect, and wanted Very Much to do well. That he loves to play x-box, but isn’t allowed to during the school week, that he sometimes likes to roller blade in the parking lot after school.
I told her that he plays soccer, and sings in the church choir, and enjoys every subject but likes social studies best (the Greeks and their myths– the child takes after his mother). He plays the piano and does his chores and wants to be an astronaut and an inventor and a cartoonist. And he loves Calvin & Hobbes.
I said that he reads and reads and reads, and we laughed at the absurdity of my scolding him: William, put your book away please! when it is time for bed or dinner.
I think we may have talked about how easily he makes and maintains friends, how he looks to praise and encourage the other, how just a few Fridays ago, he excused himself from my presence after school and went back to the main building. There he took the time to write personal notes to his brother, his sister, and his friend Anna, and left them in each of their classrooms so they would find them on Monday.
I think maybe I told her about that.
She told me how responsive he is, and how well he listens, about their conversations about books and how he tries and tries to convince her to read Harry Potter. She said that he is always the first to apologize when he is wrong but that he firmly stands his ground when he is not. He sometimes has to stand up when he is working hard at his desk. He gets along well with everyone in the class.
Yes, she said, William still has his glitter. And we want to keep that, she said.
And that made me smile, because I thought it was such a great way to put it. William does have a glitter– and of what is it composed? Innocence, confidence, a love for the Good maybe, and the Joy that comes with these.
I’ve always called him, quietly, my Golden Boy. But I always thought it was because of the way the sunlight catches his hair.
“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its settting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home….”
-William Wordsworth, “Ode” or
“Intimations of Immortality from
Recollections of Early Childhood”
