Grade 2, Everything New

August 26, 2021

I was in Mrs. Holtzman's second-grade classroom in Bloomingdale Avenue School in Cranford, NJ, and it was September 9th. I remember this specifically because she was explaining to the class that it was 9-9, or 9-slash-9... the ninth day of the ninth month of the year. I already knew what that was about, as I happened to have been born on May 5th, and two years earlier much had been made of me turning 5 on 5/5. This isn't new to me, I remember thinking as I carefully drew 9 / 9 at the top of my worksheet, but pretty much everything else is. I looked around the room: New arrangement of desks, new books, new teacher, new stuff to learn, a new smell of fall in the air. It was exciting and uncomfortable and borderline scary.

That hyper-awareness of constant newness was vivid to me as a kid, but it receded during my 20s as I settled into work routines. It resurfaced when I had Madison. "All of this is new to us," I remarked to my husband. "But way more important, everything is new to her. She's never been in the world before. Every single thing that happens is a first. So of course it's going to be hard for her."

Keeping in mind this particular fact—that everything is new to a kid even if they have technically seen some version of it before—turned out to be one of the most important factors in helping me stay patient. Those newborns turned into 2-year-olds who said NO and 4-year-olds (and 9-year-olds and teenagers) who could make big mistakes and nevertheless argue about them. The first (and second and third and twentieth) time a kid encounters something, it's still new and awkward, and even if a part of your grown-up brain thinks they should know better, well, they clearly don't know better yet.

So the next time you ask your kids what's new in their world, you already know the answer, because every day is Grade 2. But it's good to ask, anyway.

—Deb

P.S. We should remember that patience with our kids should translate to patience with ourselves too, especially this year. We're still in Covid, we're still figuring things out, and even though we did a version of this last year, it's nevertheless mostly new again. Be gentle.