When Sean was two I put him in a Mother’s Day Out program at the church we were attending.  The fact of the matter is that Sean did not really want to go to MDO. He wanted to stay home and play with Lego’s with me, but I felt some sort of societal pressure to put him in a MDO.  And because I was young and stupid, I did it. It was a mistake.

On his second or third visit to this MDO, after he’d been there about an hour, he told the teacher that he was ready for his mommy to come pick him up.  She told him that I would come pick him up after lunch. He said, “Okay then, lets have lunch.”

Up through Kindergarten, he went to school from 9-1. Which was perfect.  By 1pm I was more than ready to go get him and he was more than ready for me to come and get him.  I’ve discovered that if I can’t get it done between 9 and 1, it probably doesn’t really need to be done.

First grade, however, is a whole new ballgame. Now he goes to school from 8am to 3pm and that has been a bit of an adjustment.  For both of us.  In case you did not know, the longest span of time in recorded history is from 8am to 3pm, it’s like 72 hours.  This was true when I was in Sister Luke’s 3rd grade, it was true when I worked in an office and it is still true.  The fastest span of time is from the moment your child is born until the day they enter first grade. That is actually about 60 seconds.

I walk Sean to school every morning, and then I come home and do a few little chores and by about 10:15 I’m ready to go get him.  I’m looking at my watch and eyeing the big plastic bin of Lego’s that has been left unattended in the den.

On the second or third day of school, I walked him to school and took him to his classroom, and as I bent over to kiss him goodbye, he looked up at me and said, “Mom, go ahead and come get me ’bout noon, okay?”

“Okay, that sounds great!” I said.  No, I didn’t say that.  Instead, I just kissed his forehead and reminded him to be respectful and be obedient, as I always do.

“You know I will,” he said.

“I know,” I said. “See you later.”

Half-day kindergarten worked for me and half-day first grade would work for me too. And half-day high school. And college.

He oughtta be able to crank this assignment out by noon, don’t you think?

I started writing this blog in July of 2005. In that time, I’ve published over 1,000 stories about my life as an older mother of a little boy.  And I’ve got another 1,000 stories that I have sketched out in notes but have never gotten around to writing and yet another 1,000 stories that were never written because I thought, in that moment, that I would jot down a note about it as soon as I could find a pen and I would write about it later.  But in the distraction of life I never found the pen, never wrote the note and I simply forgot about it.

Or worse, it’s not entirely forgotten, just mostly forgotten.

Often at the end of the day as I burrow into my pillow waiting for sleep to take me away, I want to turn to my husband and tell him about some remarkable thing that Sean said or did that day.  A small, sticky, persistent gnat of a memory buzzes around the dark perimeter of my brain, taunting and annoying me.  It won’t be shooed away and it won’t light long enough to show itself.  All I know is that something happened that day that I want to share, but I just can’t quite reconstitute the memory.

So I turn to AD and I tell him, “Sean said the funniest thing today.”

And he says, “Really? What? Tell me.”

And I say, “I have no idea. But it was really funny.”