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First Day of School

  • Writer: Tara Mielnik
    Tara Mielnik
  • Aug 10, 2015
  • 3 min read

Moms everywhere are posting about their kids' first day of school. Cute photos, all of them, showing excited kindergarten and first graders, indifferent middle schoolers, sleepy high schoolers. Some moms are what I call Pinterest Moms, with fancy lettered blackboards indicating what grade, what teacher, what school. Others, more my style, are just happy if their kids will even look at the camera. (My personal favorite was the selfie one mom posted, showing her middle schooler in the back seat of the car -- you know who you are!) I hope each and every one of your children had a blessed first day back to school, even if it wasn't wonderful. For so many of you, I know it wasn't wonderful. Too many of you went to a high school that felt like something was missing -- because it was. Because HE is missing. I don't know if you look at an empty desk in American Studies and think he should be there -- he should. He was so excited about getting in to American Studies, and had picked two books off the reading list for this summer. I read them both instead. He already had an idea for his first article for his Journalism class (about the new gym at school -- he had an "in" with the historic zoning people who helped guide the design), but won't be on the masthead this year. He wasn't looking quite as optimistically at Physics or Algebra III, and was probably still holding a grudge that he didn't get in AP Human Geography, and frankly, he was worried about AP European History. He loved his high school. He loved the challenge, he loved his friends, he loved the community there. He loved the days when he got to "eat out" for lunch.

The school library made a display including some of his favorite books. If you need a "Mitchell Reading List" here are some of the ones that were included:

  • Harry Potter (series)

  • Hunger Games (series)

  • To Kill a Mockingbird (and I included "Go Set a Watchman" because I know he would have read that, too)

  • And Then There Were None (Agatha Christie)

  • Catching Lincoln's Killer (and Manhunt, by the same author)

  • Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime

  • The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

  • A Walk in the Woods

and the two books he was excited about for American Studies summer reading:

  • Summer, 1927

  • Devil in the White City

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Meanwhile, two kids had totally different first day of school pictures to make this year. Both without Mitchell. Carson, of course, has had six (counting kindergarten) first day of school pictures with his brother. This year, we took one without him, even though neither of us really felt like we were into it. And for ten years, we have taken a First Day of School picture of Mitchell and his best friend. They met in kindergarten, so we don't have a FDoS photo of them from then (although we have a bunch of others from that year!), but beginning in first grade, and every year since, we have a FDoS photo of the two of them -- even when we had to meet at Chik-Fil-A after school because they went to different middle and high schools. No one, not even the two of them, could explain their friendship. We have always joked that these two shared a brain. More than "friends", definitely not "boyfriend/girlfriend", closer than "brother/sister." I love her (and her sister) like my own daughters, but have no idea how to define their friendship. Those girls don't have brothers, and my boys don't have sisters, but I think these four kiddos are as close as any siblings ever could be.

Like many other "firsts" we have ahead of us, our "First Day of School" will never be the same.

 
 
 

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