Reason Number 17: Homework

The seventeenth reason for not crying during your daughter’s senior year of high school is homework.  Homework is a normal part of growing up life, and it is typically not a very treasured one.  Helping with homework is a job that I kind of despise.  I’m neither patient nor a particularly gifted explainer of things and sitting still to meticulously grind through content I mastered decades ago does not thrill me.

While our entire family is lamenting the many activities and responsibilities I’m not capable of engaging in right now due to my lame leg, almost all of my children have celebrated my inability to wriggle away when they sit down to ask for my help with homework.  Since I’m confined to the couch anyway, they have almost all found occasion to plop down next to me with a book or laptop in hand and demand my undivided attention.  Last week, my oldest and my youngest needed the most help—Clay with a book he wanted to read out loud with me, Grace with a writing portfolio project that represented the culmination of a semester’s worth of essays.  After long days spent alone with the dog and the remote control, the presence of their warm young bodies wasn’t altogether unwelcome, though, as I’ve noted, I don’t really like helping with homework.

Clay and I made our way through most of The One and Only Ivan, a book about a shopping mall gorilla and his friends.  The other night, with the fireplace blazing and the early dark bearing down outside, Clay unselfconsciously snuggled up against me, pillowing his head on my belly.  He read several pages, and then he turned it over to me to read, alternating randomly at his whim.  During one of his turns, I looked down at his face in profile—the nose and lashes, the smooth forehead and the impossibly fair hair—and for a heartbeat he was both his beloved self, all rambunctious little boy energy and charm, and his big sister, now so lean and tall and nearly grown.  They look so much alike—blue eyed, golden haired, full lipped and narrow chinned.  Time whooshed forward and back—to the time my girl was small and shy and snuggled securely at my side in the same easy intimacy, to the time he’d be big and hairy and awkward, altogether unwilling to engage in this effortless affection, to the perfect present now.  And I didn’t cry.

Then he read this, and I still kept it fully together.

“I’m scared, Ivan,” she calls from inside the box. “I don’t want to leave you.”

A part of me doesn’t want her to leave either, but I know I can’t tell her that.

“Think of all the amazing stories you can share with your new family,” I say.

Ruby falls silent.

“I’ll tell them your elephant joke,” she says after a long pause.  “The one about the refrigerator.”

“I bet they’d like that.  And be sure to tell them about Bob and Julia and me.”  I clear my throat.  “And Stella.”

“I’ll remember everyone,” Ruby says.  “Especially you.”

Because of course, we’ve already established that crying over books just won’t do.  And besides, this is about an elephant named Ruby and a dog named Bob, not a mom and an almost grown daughter and a fast growing son.  Elephants and moms will always remember.  And, anyway, the girl will come home often with her laundry and her new ideas and new stories for her old family.  We weren’t reading about us.  Not crying.

I’m not crying that for many days after, that big girl sat willingly beside me asking for help with weak verbs and tricky punctuation.  (I am a bit of a grammarian.  And now I feel compelled to note the weak verb (this from Grace’s curriculum) and juicy word (this from Clay’s) in that last sentence).  Grace was visibly impressed with my mastery of language, and, indeed, if I had a superpower, this would be it.  It’s not the sexiest of strengths—this ability to form thoughts and pictures with words relatively effortlessly—but it can be useful.  Words have always been my medium, and I know instinctively where commas belong and how best to punctuate and modify an awkward sentence to make it sing.  Sharing this with my girl—to impress her when so little about me seems worthy of her admiration these days—was a gift and a moment worth remembering.  Not crying. 

She didn’t rest her gleaming head against my body.  She didn’t stumble to read aloud to me, or let me stroke her hair as she worked, so I didn’t cry.  It’s just homework and grammar and fleeting minutes spent on a couch before a fire.  Helping with homework sucks anyway.  I’m not crying.  You’re crying.