Three mornings a week, when my youngest daughter was still small, I would drive her two miles up the road to her nursery school, where we would kiss goodbye in the car, then walk hand-in-hand into the church that served as her schoolhouse, and down the long, tiled hallway and into her classroom.
Some days she hopped beside me. Some days she skipped. But every day, she was careful to jump over all the gray tiles on the floor, always trying to land on white.
"What would happen if you stepped on a gray square?" I asked her at least a dozen times.
"Something awful," she always said.
My daughter was four then, under the spell of the old childhood chant, "Step on a crack, break your mother's back," and certain that she could keep awful things at bay simply by being careful about where she put her feet.
What awful things? She never said. She just held my hand and skipped along and echoed what I routinely said to her: You have to be careful, you know.
She is 34 now, with a four-year-old daughter of her own, who just happens to have gone to the same nursery school, where the tiles are still gray and white, and the classrooms are still at the end of that long, narrow hall. Charlotte attended this school not one year, but two, so she walked down the hallway twice as many mornings with her mom as her mother did with me. And yet not once did she play the good-luck, bad-luck game. She's never even heard the rhyme about stepping on a crack.
"I told her about it," my daughter said, "and how I didn't step on the gray squares all the time I went to this school. She laughed at me and called me silly."
Different, But the Same
Children chant different rhymes today. They play different games, sing different songs, watch different television shows, read different books. Everything is different – except feelings. They are the one constant in this constantly spinning world. How a child feels walking into school, and how a mother feels letting her go. And how they both feel when the year is over and it's time to move on. These things never change.
What I felt the first day my daughter left me is exactly what my daughter felt 30 years later. And how I felt when the year was finished, when it was the last day, the last time I would hold her hand and walk down the long hall with her skipping beside me?
My daughter cried at Charlotte's graduation. She cried a little while dressing Charlotte and she cried a little more in the car. But it was when all the little kids paraded in behind their teachers, who were also crying, that my daughter lost it.
She wiped her eyes, blew her nose, and took a deep breath. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry," she said. "I don't know what's wrong with me."
But I knew.
A New Child
It's what you want, to watch your kids grow. To be there in the audience, smiling and applauding and taking pictures. To witness the transformation between baby and toddler, toddler and preschooler, preschooler and kid.
But it's what you don't want, too, because for every new child she becomes, you lose the child she was.
The graduation ended. Four-year-olds got flowers and diplomas. But they were more interested in the doughnut holes and bagels that were part of the celebration.
Charlotte and her mom and I went out to Kelly's for breakfast. It's where we always eat. Charlotte ordered eggs and toast and her mom and I got English muffins with egg and cheese, as we always do.
"It'll be okay," I told my daughter.
It's been okay for me.
I lost the child my daughter was to the teenager she became, the teenager to the young adult, and the young adult to the woman my daughter is. But I never lost her.
There she is across the table from me. And beside me, lucky me, there is Charlotte.
Read more of Beverly Beckham's observations on Grandparents.com:
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