Over the Fence

The day I open the email from my son’s fifth grade teacher requesting photos for the elementary graduation slideshow, I promptly turn to my husband and say, “I am unwell.”

I put the task off as long as possible, despite my son reminding me every single day that the pictures are due the following week.

“Moooom,” Everett pleads, dragging my name out with both urgency and irritation, “the class that turns in all their photos first gets a PRIZE.”

I nod and tell him I understand the assignment. I give him my word that I will dig up the photos and email his teacher as soon as I can. But the idea of a forced stroll down memory lane is making me feel feelings I do not wish to feel, so I wait, and wait, and wait.

Memory lane doesn’t seem to affect my husband the same way. He has willingly opted in to some feature on his iphone—I assume made possible through robots in The Cloud?—where a random “memory” will pop up once a day. Like a picture of our boys at ages three and five playing on the floor with wooden trains. Or a picture of Presley as a baby, her hair sticking straight up after a bath like a Troll doll. First days of school. Holidays. Ordinary scenes of our children at home, faces stained with melted popsicle juice.

Every time my husband shoves one of these pictures in my face, I recoil and mime a dagger going straight into my heart, a piece of my motherhood dying.

“Don’t show me that!” I say, swatting him on the arm.

I do not need the reminder that once upon a time, my now lanky eleven-year-old son was small enough to sleep tucked inside a baby carrier against my chest like a baby koala. I do not need the reminder that his feet are now as big as mine, that he has strong opinions about the way his hair is styled, that he is on the precipice of walking out of elementary school forever.

After Everett asks for a third time, I finally dig through my hard drive to find two photos for the slideshow: one baby photo and one photo from kindergarten, as the teacher requested. I comb through dozens of options, images I haven’t looked at in years, and feel a familiar pang. I find a picture from the first day of elementary school, of Everett standing on the porch in the outfit I had carefully selected from H&M, back when he used to wear whatever I bought without complaint, back when he used to wear adorable denim cutoffs and not a steady rotation of black basketball shorts. He’s smiling with his whole face, a bright red Lightning McQueen backpack perched on his tiny body like a turtle shell.

I pick two photos I think Everett won’t mind being shared in front of his classmates and attach them to an email to send to his teacher. For a brief moment, I imagine being in the crowded auditorium a few months from now, sitting next to other parents watching our eleven-year-olds walk across a stage celebrating the end of their tenure in elementary school.

I take a big breath in, slow breath out, trying to calm my racing mind. I still don’t know how we got here. How any of this happened so fast.

I am about to be the mother of a middle-schooler.

***

“Oh, I didn’t realize your house was right next to a school,” a fellow parent says, nodding toward the soccer field on the other side of our backyard fence.

“Yep, that’s where the kids will go to middle school someday,” I tell him.

It’s Everett’s sixth birthday, and even though we’ve only lived in this house for three weeks, we decided to throw a last-minute party. The house is cluttered with moving boxes, but the backyard boasts a giant patch of grass, the perfect canvas for a bright blue bounce house.

“I mean, of all the years to live right next to your kid’s school, I think middle school might be the best, right? Because it’s actually the worst?” I joke.

The other parent laughs, nodding in agreement.

The first time we walked through this house—a “charming fixer-upper” (see: small, unkempt, mostly falling apart)—the dreamer in me was so focused on the possibilities, I barely noticed the middle school. I never thought about the potential noise, or the fact that our entire street would be jam packed with cars every weekday at 2:50 p.m.

Shortly after we moved in, Everett became enamored with watching the big kids over the fence. Every day, he’d climb up in the persimmon tree and watch hoards of pre-teens running laps during PE class. Sometimes he’d bring his yellow plastic binoculars for a closer look, staring through the leaves like a little spy.

One day I found him perched in the tree, one hand holding onto a branch and the other holding Alexa above his head, blaring “Happy” by Pharrell Williams over the fence. It reminded me of that scene in Say Anything where John Cusack holds the boombox over his head outside of Diane Court’s house, serenading her.

“Ev, what are you doing?” I yelled.

“I’m playing music for those kids!” he called down from the tree, grinning ear to ear as if this was the best job in the entire world, him working as an unpaid, six-year-old DJ.

Five years later, I still catch him up in that tree sometimes, gazing over the fence to see what’s there, what he can expect, what it will be like someday when he finally follows the yellow brick road down our street and around the corner to his own personal Oz.

***

The week before fifth grade starts, we all file into the classroom to meet the teacher. After two years of Zoom and masks, I am beyond grateful that Everett’s final year of elementary school will have neither. Even better, Everett got assigned to the teacher he desperately wanted—a self-proclaimed Star Wars enthusiast. The entire classroom is decked out in Star Wars posters, figurines, LEGO sets, and the like. Brett and I exchange smiles. Everett is going to love this.

The parents huddle around clusters of desks, some of us bending our bodies into tiny blue plastic chairs, eyes on the teacher and whiteboard in front of us.

We listen as he tells us what to expect, how fifth grade is different from fourth grade because the goal of fifth grade is to prepare students for middle school. He uses words like “responsibility” and “accountability” and “motivation.”

Oh yeah, and by the way, sex ed is coming.
There is going to be a lot more homework.
The workload will be more challenging this year.
Please don’t forget: sex ed is coming.

I glance around the room to see if anyone else’s eyes are as wide as mine. Our last in-person back-to-school night was in the fall of 2019. Everett was seven years old, about to start second grade. I suddenly feel like I’ve been sucked up in a time warp and spit out somewhere new.

This is not my first rodeo. I’ve been attending back-to-school nights for years, starting with preschool. But this one feels different. This one feels like the teacher is speaking a different language. Like the classroom is filled with different air. Like everything is about to change.

***

We did not know when we bought the charming fixer-upper that construction would ensue on the middle school shortly thereafter. The entire campus was going to be rebuilt from the ground up—a much-needed makeover compliments of taxpayer dollars. Parents all over the neighborhood were ecstatic.

However, the homeowners whose backyards butt up against the school’s property line (like ours) weren’t quite as thrilled.

For more than two years we endured a steady soundtrack of jackhammering and bulldozing, while clouds of dust and debris traveled into our yard, covering our patio furniture, our lawn, as well as every wall and window of our home.

Half a dozen times we received an email in the dead of summer when the temperatures in Sacramento can reach 108 degrees. We need to pour cement before it gets too hot. We’ll be working at 3 a.m., just a head’s up. At three in the morning the whole house would shake like an earthquake. Picture frames rattled on the walls. Bright spotlights shone through the fence and straight into our bedroom like a movie set. Every time my husband and I would groan out loud. The baby is finally sleeping through the night and now this?!

While my boys had far outgrown the days of Bob the Builder, watching a live construction site of excavators and cranes proved to be irresistible entertainment. They’d often wander outside and push their faces up against the slots in the fence, completely mesmerized by the chaos happening on the other side.

We also did not realize they were building up—as in straight into the sky. The middle school is now one of the first things you see when you walk into our backyard. Grass. Trampoline. Shiny new building sticking up over the fence.

***

The day I take Everett to the middle school preview day, I feel a flash of—what is the opposite of nostalgia?

A kaleidoscope of memories flash through my mind: the lockers, the insecurities, the drama, the gossip, the loneliness, the smells, the peer pressure, the hormones pulsing through our bodies like electricity. I remember my stomach being tied up in a constant knot, little cliques of girls starting to form, all the social rules changing. I remember being invited to in-home “dances”—parties at which a bunch of awkward tweens would move their limbs around a basement to the tunes of “The Boy is Mine” and “Ghetto Supastar.” I remember anticipation and angst filling the room when “Truly Madly Deeply” came blaring through the CD player and kids paired off into slow dance partners. I have faint memories of spin the bottle being played at those parties, along with seven minutes in heaven, which seemed perfectly normal when I myself was a pre-teen, but now that I am a mother, I am nothing short of horrified.

Walking through the freshly-painted hallways with my son, I am brought right back to my own middle school days, only I am a mere spectator now.

I cannot stop staring at these children, who all seem so much bigger and more grown than my precious fifth-grader. I feel like I’m at a museum, studying a different species: Tweens of 2023. The way they walk! The way they talk! The way they style their hair and hold phones in their hands (phones! with Internet!).

It’s all too much. My eyes widen in fear; his widen in excitement. He strolls the campus captivated and eager, pointing out the main attractions as if we’re at Disneyland. Mom, look! The library! The lounge! The basketball court!

Outwardly, I try to match his enthusiasm. Inwardly, I am freaking out. I am worried about everything that plagued me in middle school and then some. Back then we didn’t have access to pornography in our pockets, active shooter drills, social media wreaking havoc on our minds, lethal drugs that look like candy.

I talk to other parents in hushed whispers. I’m terrified of middle school. They nod, relieved someone else said it first. Me, too. Me, too.

It’s hard to believe that on Everett's first day of kindergarten, my biggest fears were that he wouldn’t remember to go to the bathroom and that he would miss me too much.

A guide leads us up a staircase to the second level. We stick our heads in the art classroom where the teacher is blaring grunge rock music and the kids are making a mess with some kind of chalk. I tousle Everett’s hair in the doorway, wondering if we should choose art as his elective next year. He shifts his backpack, which is full of books and sagging on his small frame.

“My backpack is really heavy,” he sighs. We both realize at that moment he didn’t even need his backpack and should have left it in the car.

“Can you carry it for me?” he asks, looking up at me sheepishly.

I nod, slipping the bulky backpack off his shoulders and onto my own. I’m glad he asked. There are so few things I can carry for him at this age.

We keep moving through the tour, breathing it all in: the locker rooms, the cafeteria, the hum of kids buzzing in between classrooms. I can’t help but wonder, after all those years of mystery and intrigue gazing over the fence, if this school is everything he dreamed it would be.

As if reading my mind, he turns to me and whispers, “Mom, I can’t wait to go here.”

His earnestness feels fragile in my hands. I swallow my fears, my kaleidoscope of cringey memories, and smile back at him, suddenly feeling the weight of his backpack sitting squarely on my shoulders. The weight of this moment. The weight of what I will say next.

I tilt my head down toward his ear and whisper back, “Middle school is going to be great.”

Words and photo by Ashlee Gadd.

Ashlee is a wife, mother of three, believer, and the founder of Coffee + Crumbs. When she's not working or vacuuming Cheerios out of the carpet, she loves making friends on the Internet, eating cereal for dinner, and rearranging bookshelves. Her book, Create Anyway: the Joy of Pursuing Creativity in the Margins of Motherhood, is available wherever books are sold. You can also keep up with her work at Substack.

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