Kindergarten

Last night, when the job listing showed up in gray, the jackpot color, not the usual red "no jobs at this time", I read the words "Kindergarten" and immediately thought of 1990, the year my youngest son was a kindergartner, and I was his teacher's regular sub.  I knew all the kid's names, and the routine of the class.  I knew about Eli, the little guy with FES, and I had usually talked with Pat, the gregarious lovely teacher, at length in advance. I knew the lesson, the interval for recess, how the routine on the rug went. (Children adore routine).  I welcomed the chance to spend the day with my own son. It was a win/win, in our little rural school where everyone knew everyone, and the principal met the kids as they disembarked from the bus with a hearty welcome and a joke.
Teaching a pack of little ones who want anything but sitting still can be sort of like doing aerobics. I know this, and I know that unfamiliarity makes it much harder, but still, I was excited to be in  kindergarten again!

So, 22 years later I walked into a Kindergarten room, unrehearsed and right out of my new 55 year old life. They whupped me into shape right away. Little kids are so wonderfully transparent. Just when I thought I was a goner, I would put my hand on the shoulder of the kid who could not sit still, and felt him calm. I whispered in ears often, and this they listened to. We sang some songs, lullabies our parents sang to us. It was precious to hear the high child singing recount the song they loved best.  In a few years it will be impossible to get them to sing a song alone, in front of their peers. How lucky I felt today, letting them perform, gently reinforcing to the class how "we listen with respect".

At the end of my day with them, I wanted a small amount of closure, so I said, "I teach yoga, and we have a way of saying goodbye, namaste,.. ) and I bowed to them.  Every child's eyes were on me, they were still and silent for the first time in 4 hours. It was cosmic. It was the perfect way to end my morning with them.

I didn't practice yoga in 1990.   I wish I had, it  might have calmed me in my racing, anxious, fragmented young widowhood. It might have.

To be grateful now for my practice is what I have. To see little kids, and to always see my own kids within them.. To see myself mirrored in their guilless responses, and the future of the world in their eyes.