I was feeling, as the school year draws to an end, like I had done a pretty good job of insinuating myself into my son’s school. Jake’s only in kindergarten, but—and I don’t say this proudly because I know it belies a troubling inability to recognize the meaning of the word “overextended”—I’ve yet to miss a field trip or a PTO meeting, ended up a PTO board member, given a huge number of school tours, written my first grant applications for the school, and ingratiated myself with enough teachers to either bring attention to what an awesome guy my kid is or put undue pressure on him not to act like the six-year-old goofball he is lest he shatter all of his teachers’ artificially inflated expectations.
So you’d think, as the spring concert and Jake’s class’s performance in it, drew near that I’d be, I don’t know, on the ball or something.
The concert arrived on a lovely spring evening. We’d been planning on attending even before receiving the notification that Jake’s class would be performing. It was planned as a “concert on the green” with time to play on the playground beforehand and an invitation to spread out a picnic blanket on the grass and watch the outdoor performances without suffering on cold metal folding chairs. I’m a sucker for listening to music outdoors—doesn’t really matter to me who’s playing as long as sunshine and the smell of grass are involved—so there was no question we’d be there.
The announcement that Jake’s class had been selected to participate came home about a week before the concert date. This was a lot more exciting before I figured out that three of the four kindergarten classes were on the program, the fourth having performed at the winter concert, but my kid on stage is my kid on stage and, besides, see above paragraph on outdoor music.
The announcement required my signature and a promise that Jake would be there, which I happily provided. Then I started to fret about what to make for the potluck even though I was pretty sure I’d just let Mike make something instead.
The day of the concert, as I mentioned, was suitably spring-like, the first dry, warm day after a series of thunderstorms that left the French Broad River rushing past its banks and flooding several neighborhoods but not, thankfully, the elementary school playground. The temperatures were expected to creep so high that I suggested Jake wear shorts that day, a suggestion he always greets with the great enthusiasm of little boys allowed to wear shorts.
He selected the camouflage ones we got last summer at Target, and topped them with his black “Live Aloha” tee shirt with the white line drawing of a guy surfing. I can never figure out if “Live Aloha” is a directive to “live” Aloha, or an indication that the Aloha is coming to you “live.” But it’s a favorite of Jake’s and I kind of dig the ambiguity.
Flooded by work that day, I arrived at Jake’s after-school program later than I’d have liked and rushed with him, Lily, and Mike back to the playground so we’d have ample time for picnicking and play before the concert started. We found a spot on the hill and watched Jake take off with his friends.
It was just what you want from a warm end-of-the-school-year evening. Kids yelled and ran and occasionally stopped by to grab a bite of quesadilla and a gulp of water. Parents chatted about how perfect this would be if only they had a beer. And I felt like, nine months in, I was happily settled into elementary school.
Leaning toward a friend, I commented on how dressed up some of the kids were. One of Jake’s classmates was decked out in a bow tie with a long-sleeved, white button-down. Another was sporting the full ensemble—blue blazer, tie with white shirt, khaki pants. Little girls wore white dresses and big white flowers in their hair.
“Who puts a six-year-old in a white shirt?” I snorted. “Who buys a white shirt for a six-year-old?”
My friend concurred, and we agreed that you could tell we’re not churchgoers, or our boys would, in fact, own white shirts, even if we wouldn’t make them wear them to outdoor elementary school concerts.
Jake’s teacher had, that morning, tasked me with helping to assemble the kids fifteen minutes before concert time, an assignment that proved far more baffling than I’d expected when I blithely told her, “No problem. That’ll be easy.” If I couldn’t find my own kid, I thought in a bit of a panic, how was I supposed to be responsible for other people’s?
Still, I dashed about, wrangling children off of the play structure, tapping familiar-looking parents on the shoulder to send them after their own offspring, grabbing random kids who didn’t know me and sending them off to their teachers. Did I notice a surprising number of white shirts in the mix? I’m pretty certain I didn’t notice anything at this point except that the playground is a lot bigger than it looks when you’re traversing it in search of kindergarteners.
Eventually, the folding chairs where the kindergarten and first-grade classes were to sit while awaiting their curtain began filling up. This is the point where I really should have noticed something amiss, but apparently I still wasn’t paying attention.
Instead, I chatted with another parent as I waited for the show to begin. “Those boys are wearing white shirts too!” I marveled. “Am I the only one who wouldn’t think of buying a white shirt for my kid?”
“Isn’t yours performing?” my friend asked gently.
I don’t recall answering. I think I was too busy watching the pieces of information with which I’d been barraged for the last hour assembling themselves into a horrifying realization.
I must have nodded dazedly because she continued. “Didn’t you get that form?”
“The one I signed and sent back? It said they were supposed to wear a white shirt?” I looked helplessly over at my little cretin in his confusing black tee shirt and dirty Target camouflage shorts.
Mike says I became a bit obsessed that evening with the question of how so many parents managed to read the memo when I didn’t. But, honestly, I was just fascinated with how I hadn’t.
I surely wasn’t the only one, and I high-fived the parents who shared my shame. The kindergarten classes definitely sported more inappropriate colors than the older grades, suggesting that it wasn’t as much a matter of the memo as perhaps bitter experience.
Which was the thought that brought me to the humbling realization that no matter how informed you think you are, no matter how diligently you bury yourself in the minutiae of your children’s lives or any other aspect of your own that probably doesn’t deserve the rabid attention you devote to it, you can’t prevent a humiliating display of your own ignorance from time to time.
It bears noting that I’m aware of the low stakes here. Better for me to dress my kid like some neighborhood waif who wandered in off the street, grabbed a maraca, and started singing “Mr. Rabbit” with a bunch of scrubbed, well-dressed children than to not realize, say, that we were supposed to be doing reading homework every night or returning school library books or—well, there’s not much else kindergarteners have to do, really, so my pat on my own back is probably premature.
I’m also pretty sure that if the memo had contained some really important bit of information, I would have picked it up one way or another. So far, DSS has not darkened my doorstep, so I must be doing something right.
Nonetheless, I am the kind of person who takes comfort in checking the necessary boxes. Where Jake’s school is concerned, I like to set a good example by following the rules. Or maybe I’ve just failed to outgrow my own childhood pathology of thinking the world would end if I turned in an assignment late. (It didn’t, I finally learned in middle school, when I forgot to bring my geological epoch timeline to science class on the due date and faced a lowered-grade sanction until the teacher saw that I’d painstakingly drawn trilobites and brontosauruses and sabertooth cats in the appropriate epochs and promptly forgave me my transgression.)
At any rate, it got me thinking about avoiding mistakes, making mistakes, and letting go of the mistakes I’ve made.
The last in particular has, at times in my life, been a trial. I recall it coming to a head during law school, when my roommate suggested therapy for my inability to let go of some personal error that was haunting me, though I can’t for the life of me recall what it was. Twenty-five years, it turns out, is just about enough time for me to let go.
Still, the very fact that I was laughing even as I was trying to figure out where I’d gone so wrong on the matter of the white shirt shows me how very far I’ve come since those long-ago third grade nights when I lay awake worrying because I hadn’t yet had the chance to go to the library and look up the Encyclopedia Britannica entry on the Yangtze Indians for the report that was due in a week or so.
Just thinking about my eight-year-old night sweats makes me determined to set a better example for my children. So I messed up. In this particular case, no harm, no foul. Maybe Jake will remember this next time he inadvertently leaves his Golden Ninja Lego figure at home and breaks down in a frustrated jellyfish meltdown as we arrive at school and he realizes his mistake.
But I don’t know if I would understand how to teach the sweet skill of letting go of our mistakes to my children if I hadn’t logged some long, yoga-inspired hours figuring it out myself.
Who can say it better than the Dalai Lama?:
Time passes unhindered. When we make mistakes, we cannot turn the clock back and try again. All we can do is use the present well.
Yeah, it’s easy to quote the Dalai Lama and say, “See? Nothing you can do. Just move on.” I do it all the time with my kids—absent the Dalai Lama quote—and it means exactly nothing to them. There are, after all, few things more frustrating than not being able to go back in time and read the damn memo, and, in my experience, sweetly suggesting someone just “let it go” probably isn’t going to accomplish much except making you the target of some misplaced rage.
But there’s no changing the fact that you can’t change your mistakes. That doesn’t make not getting all upset about it any easier, but it does show what a waste of time getting upset is. At least having a good laugh at your own expense is fun.
So that’s what I’ve chosen to do—most immediately in the case of the White Shirt Incident. But I’m hoping I can learn to laugh at some of my bigger mistakes, like the ones that usually make me cry. Not only will it make me feel happier, but if I can set an example for my kids then maybe, just maybe, they won’t grow so attached to indulging their own frustation either.
My children are going to make some mistakes, probably a few whoppers, in their lifetimes. If I can offer them—much less myself—a chance of letting their mistakes be part of the amusing, surprising, human fabric of life, then I’ve done something a lot more meaningful than the sum of all the things I’ve mistakenly failed to do.
YogaMamaMe 