Leaving Home, Part 2

Thank you for all of the kind, supportive words as we send our son off to college, Poetry Friday friends! I appreciated your comments last week.

Today was the big day. I dropped the kid off at the airport first thing this morning. I was teary, but I did not cry! By noon, he had made his way to CWRU, found his dorm room, and met some fellow early-arrivals. His texts started to get a little cagey after that. When he began to tease me for being nosey, I knew he was fine. Whew.

Sending our guy off into the world got me thinking. Robbie had just finished 5th grade when I began working on the manuscript that became THE LAST FIFTH GRADE OF EMERSON ELEMENTARY. This summer, Advanced Reader's Copies of the book began making their way into the world. The ARC has been traveling around the country, paying reading visits to my fellow 2016 debut authors.

(Where in the heck is THE LAST FIFTH GRADE? Find out on this map.)

It's an odd feeling, knowing that the book (and child) you spent years preparing for this moment is finally *out there.* It's out there having experiences with people you've never met. They are forming opinions about something (someone) that's not you, but is a huge part of you.

I'm grateful for author friends
who have welcomed Ms. Hill's
fifth grade class into their homes.

There's always a comfortable
place to stay during a visit.

Sometimes the book gets to go
on field trips, like this one to Lake Erie.

And there are new friends to meet,
like Abby Cooper's Lou,
and his pal Squishy Giraffe.

I am amazed at the parallels between a child leaving home and a published book. As a parent/author, you've reached the point where you've poured every skill, lecture, ounce of wisdom, and experience that you can into your baby. He's had teachers, mentors, coaches, and relatives to support his growth. Now he has to put everything he's learned and experienced to use and make the best of it.

Thanks to Amy Ludwig VanDerwater for sharing this poem with me when I was feeling anxious about packing our son up this week. Sharon Olds' observations speak to me, both as a mom who is launching a child, and as an author getting ready to launch a book.

The Summer-Camp Bus Pulls Away from the Curb

by Sharon Olds

Whatever he needs, he has or doesn't
have by now.
Whatever the world is going to do to him
it has started to do. With a pencil and two
Hardy Boys and a peanut butter sandwich and
grapes he is on his way, there is nothing
more we can do for him. Whatever is
stored in his heart, he can use, now.
Whatever he has laid up in his mind
he can call on. What he does not have
he can lack. The bus gets smaller and smaller, as one
folds a flag at the end of a ceremony,
onto itself, and onto itself, until
only a heavy wedge remains.
Whatever his exuberant soul
can do for him, it is doing right now...

Read the rest at The Writer's Almanac.

My dear friend Heidi Mordhorst is hosting Poetry Friday this week. Get out your fresh fruit and your juicer and join her for a cup full of delicious poetry at My Juicy Little Universe.

Thanks to the Sweet Sixteens debut author group for the photos! You guys are the best. Let's just hope my son is as good about sending pictures home as you are (ha).

Poetry Friday: An Elegy

On Monday evening, a dear friend's son passed away. He was 15.

I first met Grant, his mother and his sister in the spring of 2002, when they joined our Moms Club playgroup. Grant and my son, Robbie, were going to be in the same kindergarten class that fall.

Kathy and I became friends -- talking about how school was going for the boys. I could sometimes provide her with day to day insights, through Robbie, into life in the classroom. Kathy appreciated these insights because Grant had cerebral palsy and Robbie was (what they call in edu-speak) typically developing.

My son is in the mashed-up  middle row. Grant is in the front row.

"Can you ask Robbie if they went outside today?" Kathy might call and ask. There was mud on her son's jeans and she had no idea how it got there. I will never forget the day she called me, thrilled, because Grant's aide had sent him home with a map. Not a normal map -- this one explained the various, multi-hued stains on Grant's T-shirt. Some came from lunch, some from an art project, some from recess.

Another time, she called me, laughing. At recess, Grant's aide had been approached by a serious little boy. He thought it would be a good idea for the two of them to ride Grant's wheelchair down the slide. That was my vehicle-obsessed son. (I drafted a picture book about this incident. Maybe I'll go back to it some day.)

Due to redistricting, the boys ended up at different schools, but Kathy and I stayed in touch. The kids saw each other for birthday parties, or get togethers, but less and less frequently. When my son was diagnosed with dyslexia, Kathy understood the frustrations of coping with the school system. She helped teach me how to be an advocate.

She also understood the process of letting go of that fantasy kid all of us create during the waiting time of pregnancy or before we take home an adopted child. We all let go of that fantasy at some point, as we parent a real, wonderful child -- a human being -- with all of his strength and weaknesses, all of her needs and wants.

Losing a child is unbearably painful. I am hurting for my friend. It was a gift to have her son in our lives. I had planned to share an elegiac poem by a well-known poet. Instead, I wrote about one memory of Grant.

The Map (firstish draft!)

by Laura Shovan

She emptied her son’s backpack every day

after the bus put up its wheelchair lift and drove away,

after she rolled him up the ramp and through the door.

Once there was a map in his backpack, mirror image

of the pale blue T-shirt she dressed him in that morning,

ironed and clean, now streaked with God-knew what.

The map of his shirt said a black smudge was finger paint

(it was nearing Halloween, his aide wrote,

they were doing spiders), green was grass from recess,

the glowing orange splotch – not a pumpkin –

Miranda “borrowed” a highlighter from the teacher’s pen jar,

drew a lopsided heart on his shoulder. The brown was chocolate

(they told Robbie not to share his MnMs, but…)

When her son died, she thought about the map.

If he had worn a map on the last day, what would she know?

The spider and the grass, the misshapen heart,

chocolate melting on a quiet tongue.

Today's Poetry Friday host is Karissa at the Iris Chronicles. 

Poetry Friday: Rachel Hadas & Poetic Form

Happy Poetry Friday!

One of the poets I went to see at the Dodge Poetry Festival earlier this month was Rachel Hadas. She is called a neo-formalist. During the craft-talk, Hadas had some interesting things to say about the value of form in modern poetry.

I loved this one (aimed at classrooms, I'm sure): don't encourage students to discuss what "the poet was trying to say." He or she has said it.

Hadas said that we can't know a poet's intentions. It's probably better to talk about what the poem is doing and how -- the tools the poet uses that allow us to read a poem and say, "This is how the poem feels to me. This is what it means to me."


She used this wonderful simile: poetry is like a blank check. The reader fills in his own connections to some extent. Hadas' well known poem "The Red Hat" is a great example of this idea.

After reading this poem to us, Hadas said the experience described in "The Red Hat" "is something that every parent and child negotiate all over the world."

The Red Hat

by Rachel Hadas

It started before Christmas. Now our son
officially walks to school alone.
Semi-alone, it's accurate to say;
I or his father track him on the way.
He walks up on the east side of West End,
we on the west side. Glances can extend
(and do) across the street; not eye contact.
Already ties are feeling and not fact.
Straus Park is where these parallel paths part;
he goes alone from there. The watcher's heart
stretches, elastic in its love and fear,
toward him as we see him disappear ...

You can view the entire poem, read by both Laurie Wessely and Roy Bumiller for National Poetry Month, on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRJmNWeFBSQ

As Hadas pointed out, even poems that are rooted in specific experience will "float free" of their occasion and speak to a larger truth.

Have a wonderful Poetry Friday. In Maryland, we're putting on our red (and purple and blue) hats. It's getting cold! Andi at A Wrung Sponge is on poetry-post round-up duty today. Check out her blog for more poems.

Overstimulated at 11

My Baltimore's Child article is filed (look for it in the January issue -- "What's in Your Parenting Toolbox).

I've read all of my students' opposites poems (about 90 third graders) and given them feedback. Hope to post the lesson, a model poem by Elizabeth Coatsworth and a class sample tomorrow.

DJRobman had his first middle school research project disaster tonight. Missed wrestling practice. Still working on "spy satellites" at 11:30 PM. Ugh.

Time for bed. No time to work on Archieology today. So -- Amok in parenting, check. Teaching, check. Writing...maybe tomorrow.