Tomorrow Jr “graduates” kindergarten…
Yesterday he started intensive swimming lessons in a building that I remember being a department store.
This week my social media “memories” keep reminding me that 5 years ago I was saying my final goodbyes and leaving our treetop brushing condo for the last time, and pointing my packed Keri-mobile toward the town we had selected.
The town where I was raised.
I’m going to tie this all together, I promise… stay with me here.
Time passes.
Amirite?
Time. Freaking. PASSES.
And the version of me sitting, this afternoon, in the present-day, in my newest (and still unnamed) MUV, waiting outside of the school to get Jr after his last full day of kindergarten? Well, she was scrolling through Timehop cooing over pictures of younger days in her kiddo’s life when this came up:
Today… 5 years ago today, after a particularly (shameless) emotional last night spent in wine-soaked bitterness deep reflection, I walked out the door of a home that had meant so much to me and to our little family, for the last time.
It was SHIT timing to see that particular gem, people.
The bell was going to ring, and I was about to walk, FOR THE LAST TIME EVER, and pick up the kiddo who in this family is THE kiddo, from kindergarten for the last time.
EVER.
Just like that time I shut the door to my beloved (though outgrown) Tree House for the last time.
EVER.
So I hiked down the grassy slope toward the kindy playground in a blurry haze of ridiculously-ill-timed but totally appropriate tears, and waited for my ginormous son to emerge from the door where I had dropped him off a pretty-much-pre-schooler just a few months ago.
He is fairly used to my being misty eyed, so he just handed me a paper light-saber he made with his friend and told me he didn’t forget his jacket as he burned stride-rite rubber up the path away from the school.
He ate his snack and added to the Lego world he is building in our family room while I stared at him more than my spreadsheets for the next hour or so, then it was time for us to leave for his swimming lessons.
When I was growing up here (yep… right here, in this town, where you’ve been back for 5 years so get over it, Keri,) I took TONS of swimming lessons. I was a TERRIBLE pupil. I was scared of everything. EVERYTHING.
Until my mom abandoned the lessons we had been plugging away with, summer after summer, and tried a totally different place. With teachers who were supportive but still firm, and a bit of a different approach.
BOOM, I was a fish. You couldn’t get me out of the pool. (You still can’t get me out of the pool in the summer. Pool good.)
After several rounds of typical rec center lessons for Jr, I am after the same water epiphany moment for Jr, so I signed him up for THE swimming lessons that get results in our area.
It isn’t your typical pool – it is a fancy-pants situation built just for swim lessons, and it is in a shopping center that has been around as long as I can remember.
Actually, it occurred to me today (of course) that it is in the spot in this particular shopping center where a location of a small Colorado department store called Eakers used to be. Where my mom used to take us to get school clothes and birthday presents for family and coats and all of that… Where my sister and I probably picked out bathing suits for swim lessons when we were Jr’s age.
If you are thinking that this thought made me tear up AGAIN while in the observation area of my kid’s swim class as I also saw him finally stop fighting his back float in his teacher’s arms – you are clearly catching on to my uncontrollable blubbering unique sensitivity.
Because Time, effing passes, people.
Department stores turn into swimming pools, hometowns get left, and sometimes returned to, babies become 1st graders, and a million other insignificant-yet-everything little changes connect our pasts and our futures and on and on into forever.
So I guess it’s just another “no big deal except everything” kind of week in Keri-land.
Pass the kleenex and the wine.
Reluctantly Suburban 