Goodbye Grade School

By Melanie Dale
@melanierdale

I don’t want to open the email. Nooo you can’t make me. The subject line makes my blood run cold.

Spirit Week!

Good gravy. Not another one. There’s spirit week, and also the holiday party with the sign up for treats, and a teacher is having a birthday and there’s a color-coded list of what she likes, organized by gift cards, chocolate preferences, music taste, and restaurants. Followed by a breakdown of spirit nights – not to be confused with spirit week, which is a separate entity that requires elaborately-themed costumes each day.

Spirit night is when the whole school shows up to the same restaurant at the same time so the school will get money and we wait in long lines and our kids insist we go because the class with the most attendees wins. Wins what? No one knows but it’s important. There’s spirit night, spirit week, and also parties, and I can’t forget to bring in a birthday treat for the class in honor of my kid, but it has to be prepackaged and best to just get ice cream for everybody except the ice cream lady isn’t there that day and would I be able to sell ice cream at lunch a few times a week?

Elementary school is not elementary, dear Watson. In fact, it’s super effing hard. It’s a marathon. The pace picks up from preschool, but don’t let it fool you: it’s long and requires a lot. Pace yourself.

I see it. Light at the end of a very long tunnel that smells of sweaty nap mats and glue. My final child is finishing elementary school. I don’t know the math for how many years I’ve been doing grade school with these people but probably at least forty-seven.

As much as I love superlatives, I know I’m not the world’s worst elementary school mom. Up until a couple months ago when I started phoning it in, I still opened emails and skimmed them. I signed up to send in the lower-tier items like napkins, cups, and Clorox wipes. I’d send in anything I could fit in a backpack, but not the things I’d have to show up in person for. No trays of things. No handcrafted snack foods.

No, I’m not the worst, but I’m worst-adjacent. I hate elementary school. I mean, I’m thankful for it and feel weepy with gratitude for the teachers and parents working so hard at our wonderful school. But I want to pretend like it doesn’t exist until my kids pop out on the other side knowing their multiplication tables and stem words.

Give me your stupid, smelly teens. Give me your argumentative a-holes who think they know everything. You want to get into a 45-minute argument about the history of the Tesseract in the Marvel Cinematic Universe? I’m your girl. You need someone to help organize an essay about the South African economy? Sure. Let’s go.

Do not make me hold hands or tell you your fingerpainting is quality work. I mean I will, but it’s not my strong suit.

It’s over. We did it, people. Onward and upward. 

Once my first kid graduated to middle school, the entire vibe around our house changed and suddenly I was trying to manage two completely different life stages—one involving Disney and limericks and one involving horror movies and dirty jokes. My crotch is sore from doing the splits over the gargantuan divide between middle school and grade school over the last few years. Having teens who want to talk about sex and vaping and an innocent child who just got married to the tree on the playground in a ceremony at recess really stretched my range.

For the last couple years, I’ve had three kids at three different schools—elementary, middle, and high schools. When you have three kids in three schools, you have to learn that “gas” means both marijuana and farts. The whole spectrum of what kids encounter, from drugs to flatulence.

I’ve served my time. I’ve volunteered cutting string and counting out googly eyes for projects. I’ve conferenced and play-dated. Soon I’ll be sitting pretty in the land of nobody-wants-me-around and I look forward to giving supportive head nods with subtlety from down the block. I welcome your embarrassment and need to ignore me. After seventy-eight years of grade school parenting, I look forward to retiring to a life of quiet solitude.

It’s been a good run, but I’m ready. I’m already fantasizing about the cabin on a lake where I’ll decorate my empty nest and spend whole days without the sound of another human voice. (In reality, I’ll probably let my husband talk sometimes, but in my fantasy it’s silent as a monastery.)

I was cleaning out my office this week. (I’m always cleaning out my office. It never seems to stop needing a thorough cleaning.) In a pile of old papers, I uncovered an invitation to Evie’s kindergarten “Mother’s Day Spa.” Five years ago, I showed up and she rubbed my shoulders and gave me a gorgeous six-year-old manicure and I felt loved and appreciated. What a sweet memory. I stared at the long-lost invitation in my unmanicured hand and it felt like a lifetime ago. And also yesterday. I had three kids in grade school – fifth, second, and kindergarten. We were at the beginning of Evie’s elementary journey, and now, ninety-seven years later, here we are at the end. The grade school graduations are behind us and the high school graduations are right in front of us.

The teachers and administrators of grade school are angels among us. They’re made of fairy dust and fun, and I’m so grateful for them. They make magic in the hallways and bring order out of chaos. They are not terrified of glitter.

Thank you, grade school, for teaching my kids how to stand in line. I didn’t even think about this skill until I had kids and discovered how feral they are.

Thank you, grade school, for showing them how to raise their hand when they want to talk. It doesn’t work at home, like at all, but at least I have hope for a skill set of restraint out in the real world.

Thank you, grade school, for modeling how to organize a desk. My kids suck at it, but you tried.

Thank you, grade school, for teaching my kids to keep their hands to themselves. I wish high school boyfriends could remember that lesson. Maybe a refresher course in ninth grade?

Thank you, grade school, for believing that I check my kids’ grades in the online portal thingy. I didn’t even create a login, but I’m flattered that you think so well of me.

Thank you, grade school, for approaching me so tenderly when I just want to ask, “What’d they do now?”

Thank you, grade school, for seeing the potential in these adorable hellions when I am tired and just getting them on the bus feels like an accomplishment.

Thank you, grade school, for making learning as engaging as possible. You’re a bajillion times funner than me.

Thank you, grade school, for being a relatively safe bubble for kids to be super weird. They don’t know what they have until it’s gone.

Bye, bubble. Bye, grade school. Goodnight, moon. I’m not crying you’re crying everything is fine.