Kate’s playing t-ball this spring, on the same field where I played many years ago. As I watched her game last night, I looked around the park and saw so many of the same faces I had seen on the field way back then.
But something was different, something was off.
We weren’t the kids running the bases, fielding ground balls or picking dandelions. We were the spectators, the coaches, the league organizers, the ones carrying Dora lawn chairs and passing out Capri Suns after the game. We were the parents.
We were the grown ups.
How did that happen? And who approved it? It doesn’t make any sense to me. Frankly I felt like we were all impostors, that there were some actual, real adults behind the scenes pulling strings.
I talked it over with Jenny, and she said she and Bobby had a very similar experience during Joshua’s kindergarten screening. He’s entering the same school they both attended, and they had the same feeling I did – the juxtaposition of roles, the impossibility that they weren’t still in elementary themselves, but it was their kid’s turn.
I don’t think I know enough to be a real grown up yet. Surely there are some secrets yet to be bestowed upon me, some magical moment when it will click and when I will start feeling like an adult.
But it sure hasn’t happened yet.
