I’ve been crying a lot lately, and I don’t know why.

One time it was after school drop-off for Mattéa, my seven-year-old, at her K-2 elementary school. Deafening happy chaos of 200 5-7 year olds loosely assembled on the on the blacktop, parents pulling out their phones as we walk away at 8:30. Kindergartners sometimes still clinging to their parents’ midsections, second graders resisting being picked up and hugged before turning away to teachers and friends.

I tell myself that statistically, mass shootings are less common at schools like ours, but the evanescence, the fragility of this scene, is all too present for me. So one day at 8:32, I got back in the minivan, turned on “Goodness of God” (my designated crying-to song), and just sobbed. It’s going so fast.

I also teared up at church (another church, not our own) — we were visiting the nearby one up the road, where our ex-music-pastor was starting his new part-time role. My eyes got that prickle of first tears as Eric joined the other singer with a soaring harmony — a moment of mixed yellow-blue end-of-Inside-Out mix beauty and sadness. Beautiful music, mixed with broken relationships: this moment was not happening with all the folks still at our old church, but separated. In heaven, we’ll all be singing together, but here on earth, our erstwhile community is scattered across the East Bay.

I haven’t actively cried about my parents, but I think I’m grieving them somehow: they are officially OLD, no longer capable of being the firm, energetic disciplinarians they were as parents, now to their grandkids. During Gabe’s last visit, they were reportedly semi-sunk into passivity, unwilling or unable to keep the grandsons off the Nintendo Switch. Though perhaps we didn’t charge them sufficiently; maybe they are stuck in the limbo forced on them by the adulting of their children.

But my mom’s arthritis in her fingers has reached eye-catchingly knobbly proportions. She doesn’t get up on ladders any more for fear of falling. My chronically sedentary pop now has one of those 21-compartment pill boxes. They are OLD. I need to call them.

How do you grieve things that aren’t dead yet? Our culture is bad enough at grieving things that have actually died — quick, have a funeral! Move on! — so it seems like we’re even less prepared for what I’m going through.

The simple relationship and sense of stability and grounding I had with city, church, California, children, and parents is gone. “It’s not that simple” seems to be the theme. Having to live with ambiguity. Accepting change. Adjusting to the new. Acknowledging that things will never go back to how they were. Living in tension.

There are many ways to try to describe this liminal state (there’s another one!) but what they all seem to have in common is an absence of closure. It would be so nice to have some sense of permanence, of things that can be counted on, but I don’t think that’s forthcoming, or returning.

Climate change (wildfires in California), that’s not going away any time soon.

Life stage changes, with the kids and my parents, that only goes one direction. With the kids, them all shifting into the ‘big kid” stage from the “little kid” stage before, has had equally salient benefits and drawbacks: the benefits are being able to leave them home alone, which equals freedom for me to exercise [something I’m viscerally grateful for], and for Laura and me to go on dates without having the hassle of a babysitter. That’s a major unlock for our relationship, a get-out-of-jail-free card from the hapless, haggard lifestyle prison you see so many young parents trapped in. Also them being capable around the house of doing their daily chores and self-care: massive. It’s minimal hand-holding.

But the price of their growing independence is the loss of that innocent sweetness and delight and attachment, most noticeable at school pickups and drop-offs. They will all still give me a kiss before getting out of the car — the last vestige of little-kid tenderness? — but when we arrive or part they’re so blasé, so desensitized, their attention focused almost exclusively on their friends or their own thoughts, yammering on about whatever they made, the treat they got, the social drama that unfolded.

Other ways I'm trying to summarize this: grieving things that aren’t gone, but aren’t really there. Or, grieving things that are neither here nor there. Or, how do you grieve what’s not gone, but not the same either?

In all these different areas of my life, I’m surrounded by things that aren’t gone, but aren’t the same any more, and it’s making me cry. I just want to have simple emotions, unified emotional experiences, but everywhere I turn, it’s a mix of joy and sorrow, my whole life, taking place in the mixed-blue-and-yellow memory spheres at the end of Inside Out.

Sphere one, the kids: Gabe, Grace, and Mattéa are now old enough for us to leave them home alone in the evenings, and it’s marvelous to be free of the babysitting shackles, or being trapped at home in the afternoons. They can also ride bikes around the neighborhood by themselves, take walks around the block, pack their own lunches, load and unload the dishwasher, fold their own laundry. They’re becoming these capable, independent little people!

. . . and the little-kid sweetness is gone, the delight to see you at school pickup, the problems that are so small (“Daddy, can you take these two Lego pieces apart?”) you can usually solve them. The price of independence is a blasé attitude upon reuniting, the accumulated fatigue of backpacks and homework, the cynicism bred by classmates stealing their backpack decorations, the cussword bathroom graffiti, and the general ambient joy-squashing nature of institutions graying their spirits.

It’s painful to watch the effects of institutionalization on the kids as they progress through the grades . . . at Mattea’s school (TK-2nd grade), the life bubbles out of the assembled tykes, hair everywhere, backpacks all decorated with fidget spinners and tiny stuffed animals and charms, these 4-7 year olds’ scintillating humanity unable to be fully constrained by the strictures of the system.

But by 3rd, 4th, 5th grade, the system has won: Nobody’s bounding over to their parents’ car in the afternoon; they trudge to their rides like parolees, knowing their time on the outside is short. They don’t bother to redecorate their backpacks after having items stolen. Their hair has flattened, acclimating to the environment’s downward pressure.

It’s obvious to me now, from this vantage point, the advantage of home-schooling: the cupped hands around the fragile flame of individuality. My siblings and I, though the younger three all went to the local high school, all survived with some of the child-spark still flashing.

But neither Laura nor I have my mom’s gift for home-schooling — so how do we preserve that spark in our children? How do we stay happy when so many things are changing? How do we love things that are broken? How do we live on the beach when the sand is slipping through our fingers, and the tide is coming in?

*****

P.S. Related post: listen to what happened when I plugged this text into NotebookLM, Google’s new text-to-”podcast” tool. I also share extensive thoughts about the resulting “podcast,” and what makes for human authorship in this age of AI.