Stirring worry into coffee

I had a Dylan Thomas Under Milkwood moment last week.

It was the night before school started, and as I tucked my children up and kissed their foreheads in the orangey red glow of the night lamp, I felt that if one could have peeled back the roofs of a hundred other farm and town houses right then, one would have seen one hundred other mothers leaning softly leaning gently leaning over their soon to be in big school children, mothers who were only just keeping their nerves and anxieties at bay about as they worried, worried, worried about whether the children would be alright as they sat on the chairs in front of the old wooden desks that children had sat in front of for centuries.

The mothers trained these anxieties like dogs, reining them in behind a mask of cultivated excitement, the starved creatures only breaking free when they drank coffee with another mother who that night would also lean softly lean gently lean over in amazement that this was the last kiss of not being in big school.

The mothers stirred their worry into their coffee cups – worry about the heaviness of the suitcase compared to the fragility of their children, worry about the strictness of the teacher whose angry words would ring out and leave vibrating paper thin ear drums and penetrating not yet hardened hearts. Worry about the playground bullies finding the soft skin of the newly uniformed on their radars and doing unspeakable things that we may never even hear about.

The worries of the mothers were transferred like an infectious disease behind hands covering mouths trying to keep the dark side, the underside, the fearsome side away from the minds of the little beings whose greatest excitement was the tantalizing opportunity to become regular traders, entrepreneurs and small business men at the tuck shop. Fantasizing about how they would gleefully fill their faces with sugar straws and black balls and glucose suckers, free at least, away from the nutrition police unto whom they were born.

So the mothers and the fathers and the worries of the mothers and the worries of the fathers all walked together towards the school hall for the first assembly where they would say their devotions and pray as they had to let go, even if they had not prayed for years.

On the way, they were captured in a photo, five of them uniformly clad in collared and in buttoned grey shirts and grey shorts, short shorts, oh such sweet short shorts that led to little legs, but oh such fast little legs, which led to little feet bare feet. With their arms around each other’s shoulders they smiled at their uncertain parents who were thinking of the past five years that were filled with littler boys, years that had disappeared into Slippery Slides and Water Worms and Jumping castles and Treasure Hunts where those smiling and fresh little faces had shared birthdays, ketties and childhood diseases.

And during the devotions in the school hall that followed, the photo that was captured on 10 different cell phones, was sent around the town to sisters and brothers and copied around the country to aunts and uncles and grandparents who could not bethere and mms-ed around the world to friends who have left and friends who won’t come back and friends who are missing out and whom we miss.

And the photo scared away the scavenging worrying and worrisome dogs that had been the mothers’ constant companions ever since the beginning of term had loomed. The mothers looked at the five boyed five smiling ten eyed photo and forgot that they had ever been anxious, forgot that they had ever troubled their coffee with concern. With ridiculous and unjustified smugness about having done something right brush your teeth greet the adults don’t steal be kind to others get into bed now because it is late don’t pick your nose, the mothers collectively burst with pride.

Because the photo like a lion roared, “We are ready!”