I get out the bag I stashed with the pencils, pens, erasers, sharpeners and glue sticks. I get their new backpacks and lunch bags and write their names legibly in permanent marker. I fill their pencil boxes with the necessary items. I put kleenex and hand sanitizer in the front pockets for easy access.
I pick up my son's backpack. This year it has a big 3-D picture of Lightning McQueen. I wonder how long it will be before he's "too cool" for a Lightning McQueen backpack. I stroke the picture, knowing that soon he will be graduating to Batman, Iron Man, and before long, just a regular old backpack, just like his sister graduated from Ariel and Hello Kitty to Hannah Montana.
Tomorrow he starts learning about peer pressure. He starts hearing from 2nd and 3rd graders on the bus what's "cool" and what's "dumb." My years of influence are waning and quickly. I know I've done a good job, I know it. I know I've done a good job with his sister, when the bully girl in her class offers to be her friend for her swim goggles and my daughter says "Why would I give you my goggles? I don't like you." I hope I've done and am doing everything I can so that my kids know that they are special and okay just the way they are. That even if other kids tease them for things imagined or real and beyond their control, that they are wonderful and unique and magical. But the years that they believe I am more right than their friends, those years are soon going to be far behind us.
God, please hold my hand just as tightly as I will hold his when I walk him to the bus stop for the very first time. Please hold my son, his innocence, his beauty, his trust, hold him close and protect him.
Tomorrow, the real world. Tomorrow.
