One For My Children

I'm a little heartsick about some of my students this year.

You see, I don't want them to leave to go the middle school.

The side effect of long talks tutoring after school and carving out time for walks out to the baseball field and caring and hurting and getting exasperated and loving is that you get all interwoven until you forget that you're not technically flesh and blood. 

And then they leave, and it feels all wrong. 

I was feeling torn up about one of them in particular (who I would keep forever if I could, and I mean that) as I was leaving school. 

I'm so full of feelings that I'm inarticulate. I sound like a 10-year old writing in her diary, but that's the best I can do right now. 

Why does public education have to stink so much, especially once the kids hit middle school? I mean no disrespect to the teachers who put their hearts unreservedly into their work, but the reality is that some of these kids I love so fiercely are going to have to fight hard to remain decent human beings, let alone become the sort that see higher and deeper to the big elemental stuff life is really made of. I pray they have the fight in them. 

I wrote 20 letters between yesterday and today, trying to pour as much as I possibly could into black and white to give to some of the students who I thought needed words the most. I don't know if it'll do anything permanent, these words. But at least my children are leaving with words in their hands as well as their heads. 

After school today I went to a book talk a friend was doing at a local library about Alzheimer's and about his journey caring for his grandfather. It was a great talk, honest and compelling and thought-provoking. 

The only thing I had left in me to do with all that brewing inside--the first-time-around children, and the second-time around children--was to listen to some good music, to wade in the creek in the dusk, and to try to let things settle. 

Some days are like that, I guess. 

Life's no cakewalk.

And I need to keep learning how to trust God with all of it--the messy, the confounding, the raw, the hard to understand.