Parent-teacher conferences, again

Another year, another set of fall parent-teacher conferences.  I look at the pictures in last year’s post and I’m struck by how little Whit seems.  I see him every day so the growth is imperceptible.  It’s only when I look at images and details from a year ago, like this, I realize how startlingly he’s growing.  All of his little boy summer blond was just cut out of his hair, and he’s now the height when he stands in front of me that I still think his sister is.  That is, he’s what I think of as the height of my older child.  Not anymore.  Grace is growing too.  A mouthful of holes has grown into a set of big, adult teeth.

Grace and Whit continue to be their very own selves, growing more and more into the personalities that they’ve been exhibiting since they were very small.  They are distinct individuals, with strengths and weaknesses now showing like flags.  Also becoming clear are the ways that their repeated bumping into each other is shaping them.

Grace continues to be a conscientious perfectionist and an over-achiever.  She loves to read but Math is her favorite subject.  I especially loved hearing about how she is a generous friend who is quick to help anyone who needs it, and who is aware of those who are alone and/or sad in the classroom or playground.  She is eager to perform and to please her teachers, for better or for worse.  I can sense that she’s taken, either by choice or default, the “straight man” role to Whit’s comedian.  I can tell that this sometimes frustrates her.

Already she can feel the weight of expectation on her shoulders; my reaction to this is ambivalent, both an intense identification and a deep guilt that this heavy cloak is part of the legacy of being my daughter.  She also inclines towards shadow, as do I – whether this is innate or learned I can’t know.  “My poor, poor daughter, tugging behind her the heavy freight of [the] moody melancholy” she inherited from me, I wrote a while ago, and days like today I’m keenly reminded of it.

Whit is different from Grace in so many ways.  He is laughter to her seriousness, rebellion to her rule-following, light to her cloudiness.  He is beginning to sound out words and demonstrating facility with numbers, but continues to struggle with paying attention and sitting still.  Some of this is, naturally, age-appropriate for a five year old boy.  Some of it, I’m beginning to see, is a way of deflecting attention from a task he’s not comfortable with.  If he just acts out, changing the subject by making people laugh, he can avoid having to do things he’s not confident about.  I think this is a reaction, too, to his older sister, a way of claiming his own territory.  What I feel about this behavior in Whit is very different from the dizzying self/other vertigo Grace gives me: I feel a combination of abject horror and complete respect at the way he challenges authority.

Whit has, however, occasionally demonstrated the same raw vulnerability that I recognize so personally in Grace.  He misses places, people, and times of his life with an fierceness that reminds me of my own.  He has, acutely and specifically, bemoaned the passage of time.  These moments remind me that my children are not as simply and neatly categorized as it’s tempting to think.  Whit, too, inherited my sensitivity; he just handles differently than Grace does.  I believe that his default to humor, to being a clown, is also a way to escape his own moods: by making others laugh, he is lifted himself.  Isn’t this true of many of the funniest people you know?

I’m humbled tonight, again, by the complicated, nascent human beings I live with.  I’m certain, as I’ve always been, that they do not belong to me – they are just passing through, and it is my honor to shelter them as I share these magic years.  What multi-faceted people my children are, resilient and fragile at the same time (the same is true of most adults, I’d posit).  My mind is swirling tonight, full of images of their babyhoods, more recent moments, disbelief at the speed with which it’s all flying, all set to the soundtrack of the lullabyes they each still listen to as they go to sleep.  Which I can hear faintly from their rooms now; somehow it feels like the familiar words are floating from years past, when they were babies, from the years we have already spent together.