I arrive at the main building just in time to see her leaving, her backpack on her back. She is walking next to Mr. Bill, the husband of the woman who directs Emma Grace’s after-school care. He is a lovely man, as is his wife, and every day, at one o’clock, he arrives to take Emma away.
She spends an hour and a half there, and then Mr. Bill brings her back to me where I am waiting with the boys at the front of the school building. The children’s school day is over at 2:30, and they spend the next hour or so with me, waiting for the upper school day to end.
Today was the first day I arrived in time to see her off. Not even on her first day of school did I manage to leave the high school building for this quiet and significant event.
And today, somehow, she is the only one in the van. The other children who normally go to after-school care there had other plans.
Was that it? Seeing her alone to the van, standing outside and blowing kisses as Mr. Bill shut the door, watching my littlest one go bravely off to Somewhere Else.
Then I walk back to the upper school building.
“I just heard that you’re back to work after ten years off?”
This from a teacher in the lower grades, kindly stopping me on the sidewalk for a brief chat. We are fifty strong in the faculty, and individual conversations must be stolen between classes, in free moments, and sometimes when we are passing one another on the sidewalk.
“Yes,” I answer her. “I was home for ten years. We’ve been homeschooling until just now.”
“Oh,” she says, “I was home with my children for ten years, too.”
The van is pulling out of the parking lot. Is it that, or is it the fairly bumpy class I just held, or is it the kindness in her voice that suddenly makes my eyes fill? I am thinking that I am grateful for my sunglasses.
“I loved it,” she says.
“Yes,” I say, and this is all I can muster.
“It was hard going back after that,” she says. “It was really hard.”
“Yes,” I say again, and then I manage it– this simple word of truth, this simple fact on which I hang all my hope again and again when I watch Emma Grace walk bravely toward her classroom; when Everett, blinking back tears, walks toward his; when William tells me about his day and I know it is oh so much less than I used to know. “Yes,” I say to her, “but it is good to know that you are just where He wants you, and He has been very gentle with us in all of this.”
She says she is so glad, and she says that she will pray for us. And I, too, am glad and grateful, and I remember again that it is prayers like hers that have made the difference for us in these recent days– prayers, and Isaiah’s sweet promise: “He gently leads those that are with young.”
