As the bus pulled away, my kindergartener inside, melancholia ripened fast in my gut, which suddenly felt heavy and hard, a cantaloupe inside.
This is kindergarten, Day 3. I watch the bus strain up the hill and disappear, and then wait some long, quiet, empty minutes till it reappears and approaches our driveway, the bus driver, recognizing my look of lost-ness, waving at me as she and my son and who-knows-who-else behind those dark-tinted windows glide back past me down the hill.
I am surprised to feel gaspingly alone, and I think how quickly that time went—not the past three and a half years that have passed since we adopted our son, which have moved at times with glacial slowness as we have struggled to understand the baggage he brought with him and unloaded into our home, our psyches, our life, but how fast the moment of his departure passed.
We had been standing together holding hands at the side of our rural road wondering aloud if the bus would stop for him on its way up the hill this time or on its way back down, when it appeared and slowed to a stop, its flashing amber and then red lights turning on, its crossing arm and stop sign swinging open, its driver motioning us across the road. I knelt down and gave my son a kiss, and he kissed my cheek, but his eyes were already on the bus’s staircase, his feet fast following, onto his next adventure—for that is what a bus is to a kindergartener. He never looked back.
This is Day 3, remember. On Day 1, as my husband and I waved the bus away up the hill—that bus having transparent, non-tinted windows—we could see him framed in his window, waving back, serious. I had just enough time to burst into tears and collect myself again before the bus reappeared on its journey down the hill, and we saw our son, his bespectacled Elmo-eyes straining to see us from his seat on the far side of the bus, and we all waved farewell all over again.
By Day 3, though, my little one looked like a pro. The driver motioned me back across the road to where I belonged, and I obeyed. The door closed, the sign and arm swung shut, the lights turned off, and they were gone. Standing there alone, waving, not certain whether my son was waving back at me or not, I recalled the chorus of voices—friends, family, neighbors, strangers—that have been telling me how fast children grow up and how suddenly they are gone, out into the world, forever on their own. (Well, more or less, most of them.) I have repeatedly said that what they tell me is bull, because to me it seems that my son’s challenging childhood is aging me so quickly that years’ worth of concern are etching their wear around my mouth and eyes in weeks or maybe months, far faster than the calendar’s pages turn.
But that moment, that quick farewell that occurred about five minutes sooner than I had thought it would, gave me a glimpse of what those who have gone through these parenting stages before me have found: Our children fly when they are ready, or when life takes them, not when or exactly how we might imagine their leave-takings.
And though I had been waiting for months for school to begin, to give me some respite, to give me time to settle my nerves, to piece my life back together, in the moments after this third big farewell, it becomes unmistakably clear to me that with my son not here, a big piece of my life is now missing.
I will return to the house, grab my car keys and, still concerned that he might get lost between bus and classroom, I will track the bus into town and to the school, where I will wait till my son emerges from it smiling, arm and arm with a brand-new bus friend.
In that moment I will understand that where I have realized a precious part of my life is ending, his is beginning.
