Segullah

Mormon women blogging about the peculiar and the treasured

Dance with Them: Editor’s Introduction

I clambered up the front steps of the elementary school, sweaty and panting, with an infant, a toddler, and a preschooler in tow. It was my firstborn child’s first day of first grade. Any minute the dismissal bell would ring, and having been tardy in delivering her to the classroom that morning, I was doubly determined to be waiting outside the door when she emerged.

I passed the kindergarten classrooms just inside the school entrance, hardly believing it had been a year since Elizabeth started kindergarten. I hadn’t cried the first day—this kid was born to go to school, and I was ready to have one fewer child for a few hours. But I cried on the last day, nine months later. Was it really over, that quickly? The gestation period of kindergarten marked a reality I wasn’t ready to absorb: my daughter was growing up.

I shifted the baby’s car seat to my other arm and pulled impatiently on my toddler’s hand, hoping we could still make it to Elizabeth’s classroom on time. But just as we rounded the corner to the main hall, the dismissal bell began to clang. All at once, a dozen wooden doors swung open and a torrent of students poured into the long, deep hallway, filling its emptiness with an overwhelming surge of sound and motion.

I pulled my younger kids back against the painted cinder block wall so that we wouldn’t be trampled, then craned my neck so I could see the kids streaming from Elizabeth’s room halfway down the hall. There she was: pink jumper, white t-shirt, blue backpack. My heart twisted at the sight of her—so big and yet so small, much smaller than the other students, even the other first-graders. The crowd surged; her slight frame was swept away and soon disappeared from my view. I was losing her.

After a panicked minute I spotted her again, her brown pageboy bangs barely visible above the tide. My arm shot up. “Elizabeth!” I shouted above the clamor. Lifting her face toward the sound, she stretched one pale arm towards mine, reaching anxiously for the safety that was so close, and yet so far. I broke into one of those crying-smiling expressions that come standard with motherhood. Yes, my daughter was growing up, up, and away. But she still needed—even wanted—to be close to me.

The students streamed past, carrying Elizabeth along like a wave. Our fingers finally touched, and we both grinned with relief. I instructed my preschooler to hold the toddler’s hand and follow behind me, then I put my baby-free arm around Elizabeth’s shoulder and guided her out of the building and into the bright end-of-summer sun.

Of course, our reunion was fleeting. A few hours at home and she was gone again, navigating the complex terrain of elementary school without me. I knew that in the coming months and years our relationship would evolve from the big-mama-little-child dynamic of early childhood into … something else. I hoped we could manage to preserve our connection amidst the change, but the prospect was daunting. A dozen doors had suddenly swung open in my daughter’s life: grades and tests and best friends and cafeteria lunches, longer hours with classmates and shorter ones with family. From this point on she’d be continuously coming and going from my sphere of influence. And I figured that with every coming year I’d have less and less of her time and her focus, until she was gone for good.

I was right—and wrong. Elizabeth had definitely turned a corner in her life, and was on a path that would eventually lead her away from home. But I’d pictured that movement as a series of predictable and uniform graduated steps. A slow, steady, clean break. I soon realized that it would be nothing of the sort, with Elizabeth or with any of my children. Kids don’t grow up and away by following some tidy progression of development and separation. They’re close to you one minute, and far away the next. Loving you and hating you in the same hour. Simultaneously needing and rejecting your help. With Elizabeth, there were many times when we moved toward each other, arms outstretched, and many other times when we circled in opposite directions.

It seemed like just a year or two between Elizabeth’s first and last days of elementary school. On the final day of sixth grade I drove to the elementary school (with a different preschooler, toddler, and infant in tow) to watch the “clap-out,” the annual farewell march of the sixth graders through the school hallways. Students, teachers, and parents lined up to slap palms with the graduates, while a tear-jerky song about friendship played over the intercom. Once again I pulled the little kids against the wall as a stream of students flowed past. As Elizabeth came into view, I vowed to fix the image in my memory forever: her slight frame on the verge of young womanhood, her face filled with shy pride. She waved to me on the periphery as she passed, her other arm around her best friend’s shoulder. But when the dismissal bell rang, her face was full of contradictory emotion. And when we got home, she sat at the kitchen table and wept.

I wanted to draw her close and make it all better. I knew just how she felt. But I also knew I needed to keep my distance. That forcing intimacy would backfire, that she needed space and time to adjust to her new reality, and that if I stayed visible in her peripheral vision, she would reach out to me when she was ready.

“We have so little faith,” writes Anne Morrow Lindbergh, “in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity—in freedom, in the sense that the dancers are free, barely touching as they pass, but partners in the same pattern.”

It’s easier said than lived, of course. With seven children spread from preschool to high school, my dance card is more than full, and my balance is often tenuous. Often this is due to the fact that, while I’m supposedly an omniscient mother capable of gracefully twirling my kids into the bright sun of adulthood, in actuality I have two left feet. And while I have an amazingly talented dance instructor—one who knows every step perfectly—my days are full of missed cues and missteps. I crave those moments where I strike just the right balance and I feel a spark of true connection with these beloved kids that so often bewilder me. A touch of the fingers in the midst of our dual motion. A glimpse of grace.

That’s why I’m so pleased to introduce this anthology of personal essays and poetry written by women just like myself. Women who get up every morning to attempt the multi-faceted balancing act we call mothering—particularly, the mothering of school-age children—and find themselves stubbing toes and bonking heads amidst their best efforts and good intentions. This balancing act includes matters of independence, control, tolerance, intimacy, expectations, safety, trust, acceptance, boundaries, conflict, and–perhaps most of all–the difficult reality that both mothers and children must learn through experience. It also includes the dynamic relationship we have with God, a connection that ebbs and flows just like our connection with our children, drawing us close to Him one moment and giving us some distance the next. For wise parents understand that this is how children grow.

And growth—ours, and theirs—is a process as challenging as it is rewarding. Every day we live the complexities of loving kids who drive us nuts, of understanding kids who seem like alien creatures, of negotiating everything from breakfast menus to necklines to major life choices. As well as moments of indescribable sweetness and satisfaction, mothering inevitably includes the agony of watching a child hurt as a result of his choices, or yours, or the randomness of life and nature. And just when you think you’ve got this situation or this phase or this kid figured out, everything changes. It takes a lot of faith to trust that the smoothness and the stumbling, the conflict and reconciliation, the closeness and distance are necessary flip sides of growth and continuing connection. Sometimes, it takes a lot of hope to believe our relationship will endure because of change, both hour-to-hour and year-to-year, not in spite of it.

Ten years after Elizabeth’s first day of first grade, I opened the wooden door to our home to greet the young man with short blond hair and a striped polo shirt standing on the doorstep. “You must be Chris,” I said as I held out my hand and shook his. “Elizabeth’s in the kitchen.” As he stepped inside, a new reality hit me. A strange (although nice-looking) guy was in my house. His car (okay, his mother’s minivan) was parked in the driveway. And he was here to see MY DAUGHTER. Elizabeth had turned sixteen just a few days before—this was her very first date, and even though it was unfolding right under my watchful eye, I couldn’t quite shake my shock.

Their plan was to cook dinner together: Southwestern chicken salad and no-bake cheesecake. I ordered Elizabeth’s siblings (no longer infants and toddlers and preschoolers) to stay out of the kitchen so they wouldn’t get trampled. I was sensitive enough to stay out of the kitchen myself, most of the evening (they needed help polishing off the cheesecake). But when they headed to the family room after cleaning up, and nestled side-by-side on the loveseat to watch YouTube favorites on Elizabeth’s laptop, I kept coming up with excuses to walk past. I couldn’t help it. At sixteen, a dozen new doors were swinging open in Elizabeth’s life—driving and dating and college plans, with adulthood just around the next corner. (Doing some quick math, I noted that if she has her first child at the same age I was when I had her, she’ll be a mother and I a grandmother in five years!) Her future might include any combination of momentous experiences: going to college, serving a mission, landing a job, finding a spouse, becoming a mother. One way or another, her life will lead her away from home. And one by one, her siblings will follow. (If I’m lucky.)

Yet I realize now that despite the dips and turns that will transform their lives, and mine, and the connections between us, my kids will never be gone for good. For we’re partners in the same pattern: children of God living so close and yet so far from home, learning intricate two-steps with other dancers both mortal and divine. Yes, our lives will change—in ways both subtle and dramatic. But the dance between mother and child will never end.

  • be our friend.



  • Contact Us

    Journal subscriptions: journal.subscriptions at segullah dot org
    Technical issues:
    webmaster at segullah dot org
    Other inquiries:
    info at segullah dot org

  • More Kinds of Segullah

  • How Do You Say Segullah?

    se-goo-law rhymes
    Oo-la-lah, Segullah
    write and draw, Segullah
    coup d'etat, Segullah
    Blanche DuBois, Segullah
    shock and awe, Segullah
    Lah-dee-dah, Segullah
    looky, ma! Segullah!

  • Get published.

    The clock is ticking! Gear up to enter Segullah's annual personal essay, poetry, and fiction contests. Guidelines here. Deadline is December 31.

  • Admin