My Daughter, On the Knife's Edge

As I recall it some forty plus years later, sixth grade was all about experiences and very little about education, at least of the academic sort.  I met my BFF Kim that year, the girl around the corner, the alluring Thelma to my practical Louise. We both simultaneously fell in love with Danny Jones, the juvenile delinquent-in-training from our class who neither of us ever had an actual conversation with, which perhaps made our love for him even more intense.  The real world intruded too -- one school day we sat through a couple hours of graphic slides depicting men and women who had smoked as kids and lost their tongues and voices as adults, and we watched in stunned silence as our teacher, tears rolling down her face, announced Robert F. Kennedy's assassination in June 1968.  In truth, we were still children, still a couple of years from even crossing the teenage threshold, yet adulthood, for the first time, was encroaching.

Fast forward a few decades and here I am, experiencing it all again, in Kanha, who just finished her sixth grade year on Wednesday.  I know less about the details of her day to day experiences at school of course but I see the precipice she sits upon.  On Friday night we went to an end-of-year junior choir party with the other singers and their families from our church.  The kids, from six or seven to Kanha's age, talked and ate and played together for a couple of hours.  The older among them, including Kanha, had dropped their attitudes at the door and just had fun.  After dinner, we all, parents and kids alike, families mixed among each other, stood in a big circle as the choir members taught us adults the Flea Fly Flo song and a few dance moves to go with it.  I watched Kanha, who stood almost exactly opposite me (when I could get away with it without appearing the hovering mother) -- her streaked bangs swinging in time to the music, her shiny smile, the abandon she invested in the song and dance. She looked to me who she had always been -- my kid.

Fast forward again, to the next morning.  All dressed up and ready for her friend Amelia's bar mitzvah, the social event of the early summer.  She walked down the stairs and I gulped.  The same hair, the same beautiful smile, yet in that dress, ready for that grown-up event, she in fact looked preternaturally grown up.  I felt an emotion that was just becoming familiar -- pride and fear wrapped up in one conglomerated ball.  I suspect it's a feeling I better get used to.

On Sunday, things felt like they had returned to normal.  She played a great soccer game and we stopped for a gigantic ice cream cone on the way home.  In her uniform, relaxed and playing with Theo, she looked eleven, exactly her age, teetering on the knife's edge between being a kid and an adult.  May she slide over, if not gracefully, at least with very very few cuts along the way.