They smile at the camera with brand new backpacks slung over their slight shoulders. He wears a polo shirt instead of the usual T-shirt; she wears a cute outfit bought on end-of-summer clearance.
I am that mother who eschews the practice of weaning kids off of late night bedtimes; we go cold turkey the night before school starts. Regardless, they are relatively bright-eyed, and at least for the few seconds it takes to snap a photo, they look happy to be going back to school.
I’m reminded of the commercial for school supply shopping, where the father skates down the aisles on the back of a cart to the tune “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year,” while his kids stare gloomily at the spectacle of pencils and notebooks. I was the female version of that dad during the elementary school years, but now I more closely identify with those crestfallen kiddos.
As a Type A kind of gal, I find a definite appeal to back-to-school time. I love a freshly sharpened pencil and a blank notebook, and as younger children, my son and daughter thought school supply shopping was fun. The empty pages are full of possibilities – a new school year is an opportunity to reset and begin again. After weeks of hearing “What are we doing today?” everyone knows exactly what they are doing.
Like those beaming kids in the photo, I used to be happy about the first day of school; in the early years, my happiness bordered on elation. The loss of a daily routine in the summer threw me for a loop as I struggled to fill our days with play dates and activities. I welcomed the end of August because I was exhausted.
As they grew, we fell into the familiar rhythm of summer, with relaxed days spent at our neighborhood pool. Still, by mid-August we were all ready for a change and a return to some structure. I was more ready than they were, but the newness of back to school still held some magic.
Now that those little ones are a high school junior and a college sophomore, back-to-school time is a mixed bag. The beginning of the school year means the end of another year of childhood for each of my summer-birthday babies. August brings me to my knees, with beginnings and endings swirling so fast I have barely processed one before another knocks me over.
While the tourism industry basks in the extra week of summer that public school students get this year, those of us with high schoolers in music or athletics know better. Sports begin almost four weeks before classes, with band camp following close behind. There’s no homework to complete, but the mornings of sleeping in until noon are over much too soon. The college kids begin heading back to school in mid-August, and are well into the fall semester before younger kids set foot in the classroom.
My house will be cleaner and quieter by the end of this month. There was a time when that made me as thrilled as the father coasting down the notebook aisle in the commercial. Yet even then, I felt a little sad at the end of each summer. Another year has passed, and my children are another year closer to leaving home.
The clean and the quiet will be the norm instead of the exception, and I remind myself of that when I stumble over a pair of flip-flops left carelessly in the middle of the kitchen. For now, I embrace the laziness of summer and the return of back to school, as the years of childhood ebb and flow. I suspect that even when I have no more students heading back to school every fall, I will still buy a new notebook and a freshly sharpened pencil, and fill the pages with new possibilities.
A Baltimore native, Dana Hemelt lives in Howard County with her husband and two teenagers. She blogs at kissmylist.com and tweets @kissmylist.
A committed philanthropist and community leader, Russel was president of R&H Motors.
The mother of four was a native of Winchester, Virginia, who spent most of her life in Northwest Baltimore.
The Columbia resident worked on the Gemini and Apollo space missions.
A St. Louis native, Edelman served as ambassador to the central African nation from 1987 to 1989.