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Twenty minutes before the school bus is due to arrive at our door, our sweet little girl, says, “I need to dress like Helen Keller today for my book report.” It is the first Jonathon and I have heard of the need to dress up. She’s still in her jammies. Teeth unbrushed. Hair uncombed. We’re like scrambling to even make the bus. And now we have to pull an early 1900s woman’s outfit out of our magical closet. Problem, we don’t have a magical closet.
She finally finds a play skirt to put on over her jeans when the time comes for her report today. She found it, because I could find nothing in her closet that remotely resembled what she needed. The last book report was handled more here, at home. Mary, her grandma, made her an outfit to dress up as a junior herpetologist. It was way cool. But this book report is done at school with the children taking more responsibility for the whole think. And she did. She found the skirt. She has all her stuff in her time capsule that has to do with Helen Keller. She has shown the contents of her box to no one here at home. I got a glimpse of a picture of a key, and I know the story well enough to go, oh, that’s good. But she’s on her own. So why if she’s on her own were we trying to conjure a outfit out of thin air twenty minutes to bus time?
All my friends with kids now in their teens and especially twenties, say the same thing. That no matter how old they get, there will still moments when the kids turn to you and expect miracles on the spur of the movement to make their life work. I am both looking forward to this, and a little afraid. Because I’ve noticed that the older Trinity gets the less easy it is to pull off that miracle. Ah, for the days when a little something sweet and a story would take care of all the ills in the world.