Being Six
I sit on a chair at a table made for five and six-year-olds. I awkwardly try to shift my knees out of the back of the little boy that had been slowly scooting his chair closer to me for the past few minutes. The six kindergartners I am overseeing at the “Read Stamp and Write!” table in my son’s class are all looking at me expectantly.
I explain that they are to take the list of words in front of them and read each one out loud, spell them with alphabet stamps, and then write them out with a pencil. The boy next to me is stamping out the “r” in “car” with a “?”.
“Oh, wait, you need to find the “r” for “car.”
“Do you want me to use the normal “r”? I want to use the “pirate r.”
We move on. His paper still reads “c-a-?.”
I look at the boy in the Ninja Turtle jacket and notice he hasn’t signed his name on his paper.
“Don’t forget to sign your name!” I say.
The girl next to him gives him a comforting pat on the back.
“He doesn’t like it when you help him. Leo tried to help him once and it made him cry. You are going to make him cry.”
We move on with a nameless paper. I don’t want tears at my table.
“Kim!” One of my son’s good friends runs up to me. We are on a first-name basis. “Taran is trying to log into Fortnite at the computer center!”
I look in the corner and see a small crowd of boys gathering around my son, who has a wicked grin on his face. I run over and shut down the browser and log him back into the reading program he is supposed to be in. His teacher doesn’t hear the exchange and I don’t tell her about it.
As I walk away he mumbles, “You are the worst mom.”
Then it is time to switch centers and my son’s group is next at my table. He plops down next to me and gets right to work. The first thing he does is crosses out the first word “want” and writes in “van.” He finds the “v” stamp and starts to spell it out.
“You are supposed to be spelling “want”, not “van”.
“I like “van” better,” he says. He finishes the word and then crosses out the second word “come” and writes in “bum.” I look the other way and decide not to remind him to sign his name.
After two more group changes, I see my son walking toward me with a face that is about to crumble into a sob. He dramatically falls into my lap and lets the tears loose. Another boy has drawn a line with a pencil across his list of sight words he had found around the room.
I finally convince him to rejoin his group, but regret it as I see revenge spark in his eyes and he grabs a pencil and goes straight for the other boy’s worksheet. As I jump to intervene the boy raises his paper over his head and says, “It’s okay. He will never be able to reach it.” He is taller than my son who immediately crumbles into tears and I decide that in order to not cause a scene I will let him stay with me for the remaining ten minutes.
The rest of the time is blissfully uneventful and the next ten minutes of cleanup and packing up backpacks is as chaotic as one would expect with twenty-five hungry kindergartners.
As he hugs my arm and waits for the bell to ring he says, “This was the worst day of my life.”
Fifteen minutes later, after a snack of strawberries and toast, he is happily jumping on the tramp.
“I. will. marry. you. forever. Mom.” Each word breathlessly expelled with its own jump.
I blow him a kiss and feel my heart go warm as I walk back into the house.
