Her face was stricken–slightly pink, mouth wide, eyes shining–and at first I thought she was on the verge of tears. “What’s wrong?” I asked my friend, who was standing outside the classroom where both of our boys are starting their third-grade year, and as I got closer I saw that I had misjudged: she was holding in laughter.
“What’s…teabagging?” she stage-whispered, wiping her eyes, and after I told her my Urban Dictionary/Sex in the City-taught definition, she nodded her head. “That’s what I thought.” Then she explained that one of the boys in our sons’ class had just yelled the word in a sentence and the teacher had responded, “Who’s teabagging who?” and other than the obvious grammatical error within that question, there was so much wrong with the situation that all we could do was break apart in laughter.
“Gonna be a big year,” I said as we parted ways.
Having kids, or maybe just being alive, sometimes feels like a series of returns to the same material, the same lessons, the same events. Like when you first hear Samantha explain a sex act and then hear your kid’s classmate scream it out two decades later, or when you find yourself waiting alongside the other parents in the sweltering heat to find out if your children are happy with their classes and teachers again, or when you note the familiarity of changing seasons–the sun arriving later, the mornings cooler. They’re all stops we’ve made before, places we’ve been before, with new details, new flourishes thrown in.
Last weekend we saw the Sydney Symphony Orchestra perform the score to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 as the movie played on a screen in the Opera House’s Concert Hall. It’s a place I frequent regularly, though it recently underwent an acoustic-friendly renovation, and it’s a movie I’ve seen several times, and it’s a series The Husband and I have seen every performance of since Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone way back in 2017 when we first moved here and left the kids with a sitter for the Saturday-night show. For this year’s show, though, we booked the matinee and brought the kids along and met friends there. The same, but different. We forgot headphones for The Kid, which was unfortunate (more for TH because he was sitting beside him and got to hear TK’s negative Yelp review of our parenting). When the show ended with Voldemort at a tomb and a flourish of flashing lights, we were all ready to go home. But it was still magical.
Not as magical is the studying I’m doing to get my Australian dental license (licence), this return to two-decades-old knowledge I’d forgotten as soon as it became irrelevant to my specialty, and then to my life once I quit work then hauled ass across the world, but here I am again, doing mock tests and reading textbooks and wondering which way this will turn out even as I explore other career options. I don’t care about dentures, I scream into the void, which in my case is actually not a void, but full, and I wait to hear back on that from management.
Because the flourishes–the differences–this time around, they are more than just details: they’re the whole thing. This time, I’m a mother. This time, kids with disabilities are not just a part of my specialty’s focus; they are a reality of my life and a source of the passion that drives me to speak to classes and help design programs and comment on Facebook posts in a voice/from a side of the issue I wouldn’t have recognised a decade ago (when I was treating autistic kids but not yet raising one) because there were certain places I hadn’t been yet–access codes I hadn’t been given–that, since I’ve been there and gotten those codes, have changed who I am and what matters to me.
Accidental activist, I should write on my LinkedIn profile. Which reminds me, I should update my LinkedIn profile.
This work–this ism of activism–can’t help but pit me against so many other isms I either didn’t notice before, or was even, shamefully, on the other side of: racism, ableism, the various “phobias” that are really just forms of misunderstanding and, yes, hate. These lines being redrawn by the fringes coming to the forefront, the quiet part being said out loud: don’t they belong in a different class/school? Why should we study THEIR history? Policies being paraded as principle by people who haven’t gotten any access codes of their own and lack the curiosity to ask about them.
Meanwhile, I’ll remember the headphones next time so that we can all enjoy the flourishes–the extra details life is full of, indeed which make a full life–together, in a place where everyone belongs and can keep coming back to, all of which makes it magical.