Balancing Act

“I constantly go between wanting you to stay my little baby forever, and being excited about all of the amazing things you’ll do in this life.”

—Anonymous

When the alarm clock finally stirs me from sleep, the light from the hallway greets me. It is 6:15 a.m. and it appears I am already late.

I stumble-shuffle my way down the hall. Much of the night’s sleep eluded me thanks to the Tik Tok videos my wife watched on Instagram. I can’t blame her too much, though. She’s recovering from knee surgery and can’t do much during the day except nap. Then she’s wide awake when everyone else is asleep. I clean out eye crust as I continue to make my way down the hall.

“Hi Dad,” I hear from the living room. The light is on and my son, Joaquin, is hunched over tying his shoe laces.

“Hi?” I half ask, half say. “You’re up early.”

“We got up when Mom’s alarm went off,” he says.

The bathroom door swings open and out walks Abby, Joaquin’s twin sister.

“Hi Dad,” she says, waving as she passes by.

When I get in the bathroom I stop for a moment to make sure I’m still not dreaming. My kids are notoriously hard sleepers and yet here are two of them wide awake, fully dress and waiting on me. It’s almost like an episode of the Twilight Zone, but it is something much worse: it’s the first day of school.

At 11-years-old my babies are entering the sixth grade. Last year they were the big fifth graders ruling the hallways at the elementary school. Now someone has hit the reset button and they are at the back of the line as newbies in a new school. This will be the year full of new experiences: moving from class to class, participating in school-sanctioned sports, creating their first science fair projects and playing in orchestra. I’m excited for them….and, at the same time, I’m nervous.

Middle school is different than elementary school. First of all there is the cycling through classes instead of having one single teacher. This requires that they start to employ organizational skills, using a planner to map out their week and to mark when assignments are due. Second, because of the constant moving from class to class they will have homework, something they are not very accustomed to. This scares me personally. When I was in fourth and fifth grade I was never given homework, partly because I was a reader and my teacher favored readers. Also, the work was easy and I got it done in class. Back then I didn’t know I was receiving a disservice.

By the time I hit sixth grade I had absolutely zero study skills. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. To make matters even more complicated I had one of the toughest English teachers in the history of teaching English. I’ll call her Mrs. T.

Mrs. T loved to give homework. I think she double majored in homework because we had plenty of it—including the first week of school. This often meant reading long passages or multiple chapters in assigned books. These were followed with reports and essays meant to stretch our writing capabilities and build the foundation of doing research and thesis defense. To most parents, including myself now, she was an ideal teacher. She was doing her job. She was trying to reach us by introducing us to a wide variety of authors and poets, essayist and speech writers of all races and nationalities. She held us accountable for late assignments, docking points for each day they past deadline. If I could go back in time I would shake her hand and say she was one of the best teachers I ever had, but at that time, as a little sixth grader with zero sense of how school should work I was drowning and there was no body to help pull me up.

My mom’s way of helping me learn how to study was forcing me to sit at the kitchen table every night and threatening to take away my allowance as I slugged through the assignments. When it came to math she’d tell me to read the chapter and try to figure it out. I was hopeless when it came to math. It wasn’t until I was in college and a professor said math was just like another language. Once you learn the foundational principles in math you can learn any portion of it. But as a sixth grader it was like trying to learn the Russian alphabet.

My mom had good intentions. She tried to do the math problems with me. She also spent time going over spelling words and quizzing me on the reading. But none of that taught me how to study. Better yet, I didn’t learn how to teach myself.

While not having homework in the past is somewhat worrisome, I don’t see Abby and Joaquin struggling the same way I did. The COVID pandemic has helped a bit in introducing doing work outside of the classroom and being responsible for it. They’ve had to learn how to teach themselves, going past just the reading and learning how to research things on their own. They’ve had to teach themselves how to learn in a virtual classroom as they patiently waited to go back in-person. However, that doesn’t completely ease me of my past mistakes.

The third difference is that they are the youngest class in the school. They went from being the “big kids” to being back at the bottom. It wouldn’t be so bad, it’s not like they haven’t been the new kids in school before—as pre-K students in a pre-K through third grade school—but this is different. Seventh and eighth graders can be jerks. These are the times where hormones are out of control and true personalities are starting to emerge. I worry about some kid picking on my son because he likes to draw Pokémon and likes to read about history and science. I worry about girls making snide comments about how trusting my daughter is and the fact that she likes to compete in sports. Especially in basketball against the boys.

I worry about the peer pressure they will face. Kids seem to be in warp drive when it comes to wanting to grow up. Younger and younger they start to pair off as boyfriend and girlfriend. This is dangerous. Most of these kids are between 11- and 14-years-old. They don’t have the tools to handle a relationship. I argue most adults don’t have them either, but that’s for another day.

With a relationship comes the pressure to do things. The world is becoming ever more liberal in terms of standards. Gone are the days where people actually courted one another before physical intimacy. Now days we have Netflix and chilling. Hookups are more frequent. And this is happening at younger and younger ages.

My wife and I have taught our children differently. We’ve taught them that there is a time and place for such things. That to give yourself to someone is supposed to special, and that you should only give yourself sexually after you’ve been married.

I hope they remember what we’ve taught.

I’ve been thinking on these things for a while now. But seeing my twins with their bags on, ready to go, I realize the biggest difference of all—my babies are no longer babies.

The toughest job of any parent is recognizing the fact that children grow. They start to mature and as they do some of your job duties start to change.

Over the summer my wife and I have tried to help ourselves settle on this fact. We developed a weekly chore chart with a list of rewards if they stay consistent and complete their chores for the week. We’ve also allowed them to go inside their friends’ houses, stay out somewhat late for their ages and we’ve been giving the freedom of staying home while we run small errands in town. It’s helped a little bit, but as the twins and I load up into the van I can’t help but feel the urge of wanting to walk in with them and help them to their lockers.

On the way to school we talk about which class is their first. We speak about what they look forward to the most and if they are ready to see their friends they haven’t seen over the summer. There is excitement in their voices as they answer, and maybe there is a twinge of nervousness.

I’m glad I’m not the only one feeling that way.

We get to the school early. Breakfast is supposed to start at 7:20 a.m. and it is just 10 minutes after. We wait by the gym doors as we’ve been instructed. They will open at the designated time and that will signify the start of the new school year for us. We watch as other cars pull up and pass us by, dropping off kids by the main entrance. By 7:15 we see our first teacher walking toward the school. He’s dressed as a pirate with a black cap on his head and a flowing, red silk cape behind him. Soon another teachers pulls up, this one is dressed like Waldo. More cars pass us and doors open with big kids and small kids exiting. Soon there is a crowd waiting outside the front doors. We joke about how hungry they will be since they aren’t following the drop off rules. We make comments about the costumes and try to guess if any of the adults we see will be one of the twins’ teachers. I’m rooting for one of them to have the pirate.

The clock tips over to 7:20 and as if a silent bell has gone off, I hear the clicking of seatbelts. The doors open and one by one they each tell me they love me.

“I love you, too! Have a great day!”

As the doors close I watch them make their way to the side walk. No longer are they in diapers, waddling around as they try to learn balance and how to work their feet. They are dressed in jeans with graphic t-shirts on. Their backpacks are slung over their shoulders and they are chatting away, looking to master new skills.

Throughout the day I think about all of our children. Our youngest, Jamesetta is a third grader, one of the big kids in her school. I don’t worry about her so much right now. I know her teacher and like her. She taught the twins when they were third graders three years ago. And Jamesetta has always marched to her own tune. That brings a measure of comfort. She doesn’t let others push her around. Go about the day, wondering how the twins have managed finding their classes. How did it go meeting all of their new teachers? Will they have homework the first day of school? What do they think of the new building?

I distract myself by reading, working on notes for a book I’m planning. I try to develop my own routine, my own swing of things. By 1 p.m. work is a welcomed activity. I can spend a couple of hours copyediting news stories and concentrating on layout designs while the last hour of the twins’ school day winds down.

A million questions roll through my head as I wait in the car line. I watch as the buses pull up one by one, remembering the time I had to ride the bus. It was such a pain because I played the violin and carried it with me back and forth each school day. It made sharing a seat difficult at times.

I watch as wave of students spill out of the front doors, some checking bus numbers others looking and pointing toward their rides. As I inch closer to the body of kids lined up along the parking lot I see Abby and Joaquin standing at the end. Abby is chatting with another girl, a wide smile across her face. Joaquin is standing with his brand new bass, head thrown back in laughter as another kid with his own bass says something to him. I smile. For the first time this entire day I realize that these two are going to be OK just as their little sister is. They are capable children. They can find their own way around and are already forging their own path.

I will always worry, I can admit that, but I am learning just as they are. While they are learning mathematics and language arts and music, I am learning to let go a little at a time. It’s hard, but it’s also rewarding.

On the one hand I’m at the ready with a baseball bat to defend them. I’m standing at attention with a pencil and a calculator and a determination to slay long division problems and relive the nightmares of quadratic equations and hypotenuse if need be. And on the other hand I’m peeking around the corner, listening through the screen windows as they scheme and make plans with their friends. I sit in my living room with only the sound of clicking computer keys breaking up the silence as the kids are across the street having dinner with the neighbors. It’s been a week full of understanding and realizations. The biggest of these is that I am at an intersection, just like the twins are. Where they are gaining more responsibilities I am giving up a few of mine. I only have a few precious years left where I hold controlling stock in their lives. With each passing year my shares diminish until one day I am a board member in name only and they will be complete owners of their lives. It’s scary to think that I’m at this halfway point of sorts in the game of parenthood. However, it is a equally exciting to see what they will yet accomplish and become. And, judging by their faces after their first day of school, it looks like it will be a bright future ahead.