“First sentences are doors to worlds.”—Ursula K. LeGuin
Last night was Will’s first soccer game of the school year. It’s still more than a week before the first day of school, but soccer has been underway for a while now. Yesterday’s game felt familiar: the boys tore up the field and all of us parents sat on the sidelines, growing damp and agitated in the August swelter and the intensity of the game.
This week has seen another first: Will driving me to soccer practice—or, rather, Will driving himself to soccer practice with me coming along for the ride. Such is the demand of his learner’s permit, and I obediently comply, texting in the passenger’s seat like a teenager and occasionally fussing with the radio.
Firsts are, typically and understandably, active things, things one does rather than doesn’t. First step, first kiss, first day of school. The inevitability of the latter has recently made itself known at our house. It looms in the piles of school supplies, in the boys’ fresh haircuts, in the list of things yet to do.
In consequence, I almost missed the first that is today. It’s a rare inactive first, a not doing rather than a doing, and it is quietly changing my life: I am not at school today.
Today is the back-to-work day at our school, the day when the returning teachers Must Absolutely Be There, a day of meetings long and short, and the beginning of the preparation for the Beginning. This day has always been every bit of enormous for me, marking a necessary shift in focus from my life at home to my life at school. It introduces lesson plans and class lists, and it presages piles of papers—my primary reading material over the next nine months.
It also means the renewed fellowship of faculty, that low and constant rhythm that serves as support to our work; and it promises the students– those worlds of effort and ideas that somehow become, over those months, a new world of shared laughter and deep mutual regard.
This is the first day in six years that this is not my first day.
Instead I am at home and will be for a while, the first time since Emma was born that I will not be teaching, the first time not homeschooling, the first time not in graduate school.
What in this world will I do?
Laundry. And cleaning. And laundry. And driving. And watching kids’ games, and shuttling kids to lessons. And laundry.
And reading things Just Because I Want To.
And writing. Oh My Yes. Lots and Lots of Writing.
I Can’t Wait.
