It's tough

Wednesday was my kid's last day of kindergarten, and I wasn't able to hold it together. I cried at his last day of preschool, too. My hope is that these will be the two saddest days of his schooling til he leaves elementary school, as both of these "graduations" meant they were his last days at those respective schools.

Due to my son's needs and his IEP, his two years in preschool, one year of kindergarten and three summers means he'll have attended (I believe) six schools, not counting random days where he had to attend a satellite preschool due to teach workdays. This includes multiple years of being ferried between two schools at midday, first by me and later by a bus. Kindergarten marked the first time in his IEP that he went to one location for both school and after-school care. It was great, and he loved his school a lot. He had a friend that he was extremely attached to (perhaps a bit too much).

People tell you a lot about how tough it is to be a parent, and to be honest, they're underselling it. I'm operating from a two-parent home with a flexible work schedule and an unbelievable amount of privilege both in what we can afford and what services are available to us ... and most days it still seems impossible. Frankly, it's astounding that anyone survives parenting kids up through, I don't know, the first 10 years. I'm not even out of the woods yet! I couldn't tell you!

I'm lucky to be part of a school district that sends out regular notices about its top-down commitment to all students that they deserve an education, regardless of immigration status. A school district that attracts right-wing lunatics from out of town and out of state to protest make-believe occurrences in the schools, which gets quickly shut down by parents and the school board. We're living in a world where masked federal agents are arresting elementary school children and staking out schools to arrest parents who have the audacity to pick up their kids from school. While all of this can turn on a dime, I feel pretty confident that my son and my spouse and I will never be targeted by these thugs, so I can't even imagine what it must be like to try to be a parent and have to live in this reality where you and your kids can be separated at any instant.

Mostly, parenting is a long stretch of days thinking that you've never going to get through this and that it's going to last forever, until one day you realize that you've been dealing with a whole new set of impossible problems and the things you thought would last forever haven't happened in months, or maybe in years. But it's still a sliding scale of impossibility unspooling in front of you.

Since our kid was a baby, I've subscribed to a theory that each parent's limit is precisely the edge of what your specific kid demands of you, and no more. If your kid is a perfect angel who loves to cuddle and help with the laundry, your limit is whatever tantrums they occasionally throw. If your kid never sleeps and refuses to toilet train, your limit is the worst of those days. Wherever your kid lands, there you are. If your kid develops a whole host of new needs and anxieties and issues, your limit adjusts accordingly, without you even being aware of it. It's easy to be envious of the parents with a lighter limit, but it doesn't mean the despair on their worst days is any less valid than yours.

I'll probably end up missing my kid's last school more than he does. In fact, that's probably what I'm here for.