What We All Wish for Them

Moving between the legs of tables and of chairs, rising or falling, grasping at kisses and toys, advancing boldly (...) retreating to the corner of arm and knee, eager to be reassured (T. S. Eliot)

Photo by Museums Victoria on Unsplash

There is something quietly hopeful yet tremulously tender about the first days of September — the new, hopeful reorder of routines, the fresh canvas of possibility. Yet, that same breath of anticipation brings in its wake the rawness of reality. I think of the words of the mother included in an EHCP (Education, Health and Care Plan) that opened my week: that her son may live on. Independently. Happily, I added in my mind. A child bullied by peers and maltreated by the teachers, due to a learning disability, later kidnapped in cruel circumstances, now in a different country, happily awaiting admission to a special school. That very day, hope and anguish collide elsewhere. A friend’s child lay in intensive care — an attempt to bridge the unbearable pain of not belonging, of being other, unaccepted, searching for identity, followed by the death of his mother. I thought of Thomas Hardy’s line: “And yet to every bad there is a worse,” — and felt the weight of that “yet.”

And yet, in the quiet corners of our souls, we cling to those wishes: to live, learn, belong, and persevere. As Mary Oliver reminds us, Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? That question crowns September with urgency: how can each child — each of us — be invited to answer that? How can we afford them the safety, care, and compassion that make answering possible?

Parents whisper a wish for their children: live joyfully in your own becoming. It is simple, and yet it trembles with gravity. For every child who moves into a classroom bright-eyed and thrilled, there is another who retreats into fear.

I’m reminded of Rainer Maria Rilke: “Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.” Life, brutish as it may be, sometimes offers us the chance to “believe in the rightness” of being alive; to allow being alive itself to become the beginning of something greater. And living happily — independently — is a profound development, often long delayed, fragile.

I hold in my heart each child who waits — for a home, a school place, for acceptance, for an adult who stays. I hold parents whose aspiration is not grandeur, but joy, a life meaningful in small ways.

“Each of us must come to care about everyone else’s children. … The good life for our own children can be secured only if a good life is also secured for all other people’s children.”

Lilian Katz

Let us — as community, as society, as human beings — commit to that: to give each child space to live on. To hold the words of Khalil Gibran close, from The Prophet: “Your children are not your children… They come through you but not from you…” Even as parents hope, children are other, and yet eternally precious. Let our love be the invitation to find their own path, to step into brightness — or at least to have a hand steady enough to catch them when the fall seems endless. May we all allow life to happen — and rise to meet it, with care, intent, and a conviction that every life, no matter how wounded or questioned, is worthy of being lived in fullness.