Little Friend...
I wanted to share a story of a journey my younger daughter has been on since she started school that saw a twist in the tale today. I feel compelled to share because these are times where things can often so feel so dark, so when there’s a ray of hope and light it’s important to amplify those.
Claire, my youngest, started junior kindergarten last year. She was 3 years old; small and quiet. A well loved member of her class immediately, she’d often be lovingly referred to as “little Claire” by classmates and even by some of those giants “in the big kid yard”.
We’re very quick and clear with anyone who misunderstands her - she’s not shy. She’s sometimes shy, it’s a temporary state, not who she is. So settling in to JK was always going to be a bit of a journey for her. There were difficult days, but she quickly warmed in and started carving her place in the world, as we all do.
As those first couple of months passed by she grew to love school and she developed some wonderful friendships with some wonderful kids. By the mid point of the year it was clear there was one friend, we’ll call them her Little Friend, who she had formed a special bond with, who was her best friend and she had formed a special connection with.
Every day I walk Claire to school, I consider it the most precious benefit of my remote job. I would drop Claire off at the entrance and then walk around the corner to the fence that runs alongside the kindergarten playground where Claire and her Little Friend would chat away with me for the ten or so minutes before the bell would ring.
The Little Friend it was fair to say was someone we all had love for and was a big part of that formative time and space in Claire’s life.
As spring rolled on we started to plan for summer, could we reach out and make sure they could continue to play in summer? We sent home our phone number and the odd little note in her backpack through the school and never heard anything. We found it odd, but it is what it is.
We were at this time unaware that life at home for Little Friend maybe wasn’t that great. There were some hints that their situation might have been a bit off - they would without missing a beat inform you “oh, I don’t have a mom”. Increasingly you’d see a cast of extended family dropping them off at school. We had no idea what any of it meant, we hoped nothing, we hoped there was only happiness as that’s what Little Friend deserved, that’s what all little friends deserve.
We approached the last week of school and my wife Rachel was getting desperate. Like all millennial parents we have that allergy to letting our kids experience preventable discomfort. Naive maybe, but a hill we’ll die on.
Rachel wrote a long note to send home, and I had struck up a bit of an acquaintance with the family member who was doing most of the drop offs and I was laying every hint I could. I even handed over our phone number to be delivered to Little Friends parent as we approached the end of the year.
We heard nothing back. The last week of school arrived and Little Friend was a no show. No good bye for Claire, no seeing the boulder finally pushed to the top of the mountain and the connection secured with the parent or family for the summer. We had a sinking feeling that we might have seen the last of Little Friend.
As summer began we had heard a rumor that Little Friend might have moved to the next town over. We would find ourselves casting a wide net in our summer activities; maybe we’ll go to the popular park in the next town over, we might have the better beach, but today we’ll try going over there instead. Every moment of outdoor play was one of extended vigilance for Rachel and I. Surely today was the day we met Little Friend's father and we realized it was all a big misunderstanding, that those notes and phone numbers were never received.
The summer did not bear fruit, we found ourselves rolling up on Labour Day and the first day of school feeling rather hopeless. I don’t know if we really thought there was any chance, but Claire was excited to return to school and to see her Little Friend. Maybe it was naivety, maybe that allergy to anything bad happening, but we went into the day hoping it would work out.
No Little Friend. Claire's teacher confirmed that they had moved on to another school and wouldn’t be returning. Claire is a slow burn. Something will happen and several days later you’ll be laying in bed after finishing reading her a story at bed time and she’ll turn to you and drop some bomb shell playground tea or tell you about the thing that’s been noodling away at her for days.
With Little Friend it was about 3-4 days into school, Rachel was driving her somewhere and from the back seat the quiet voice cut like a knife, “Mommy, Little Friend is gone and I’m really sad about it”. Cataclysm. Devastation. The well telegraphed meteor finally hits true and they both cried through the rest of the drive. Later that night Rachel and I sat in the basement and cried some more. We had failed in our mission to prevent anything bad ever happening to our child, an impossibility obviously, but in that moment it felt like we had somehow failed and let her down.
I hesitate to share this part, but it’s important to the journey and Rachel is a woman who dated using apps in a big city, and I’m a former member of a police service and a senior citizen of the old internet who knows how to find things, so naturally we dug around. Rachel found some social media profiles, pictures, etc. We cobbled together a bit of a family tree. I dug through some court records and put together a bit of a picture of the absent mom.
Little Friend had it harder than we thought, harder than any child of 4 or 5 should ever have it. Somehow it made it all way worse, somehow there was fresh heartbreak here. It was one thing knowing with certainty Claire would never see this special person again, it was entirely another to know that there was an unevenness in how they would live their lives. On to bigger and better things? C’est les vie, god speed, all the best. But to live a life that is unfair or difficult, it was insult to injury.
We continued to go out of our way to spread ourselves around when choosing where to play or spend time outdoors, keeping an eye open, being vigilant always. Hoping beyond hope for a chance encounter that would set the world right.
As for Claire she would occasionally mention Little Friend. The scar was there, and she had learned the important lessons that come along with the passage of time, of a life lived with your heart exposed to others, and the reality of life not being the idealized smooth ride envisioned by your millennial parents.
She has a great group of friends and has relished her role as one of the big kids in Senior Kindergarten. When I drop her off at school now there’s a rotating cast of anywhere between 2 and sometimes 5 or more girls who join us along the fence, some mornings I feel like I’ve adopted an entire Kindergarten class of little girls, and it makes my heart full to see her so happy among her friends. She loves her school, and she loves her friends. She’s becoming her own human more so every day. She loves her dance, her walks at the beach, grabbing a poutine or ice cream after a day spent living life outside in this beautiful town where she’s built her own community, her own sense of place.
Which is why when our landlord contacted us a few weeks ago to tell us that they are selling our place, we felt the heat of that next approaching meteor. We felt it extra hard.
In this time and place of uncertainty, of a weakening sense of community and connection, we saw our whole world shake. Where would we live? Would Claire need to move schools? Should we even be here? Should we be somewhere else? This place was just starting to feel like home, how could we now be facing losing it all?
It feels unfair. It feels like some cosmic force is causing trouble just because…
So here we are. Almost another school year down, and trying to figure out what comes next. It’s some random Saturday, I’m making dinner, Rachel is feeling restless and she gets a feeling that she should take Claire to the playground, a pretty common pre-dinner mission for us.
They decide to go to the school playground, a favourite weekend stop; If Claire had her choice she’d go to school every day so she could be with her friends.
I send Rachel a text asking her to pickup some last minute odds and ends for dinner, I get a reply that’s just a picture. It’s a picture of Claire in a sandbox playing with some girl facing away from the camera. “Can’t talk, Little Friend”. Little Friend? “Correct”
…
I felt like I was punched in the gut. There’s that cosmic force again, causing it’s chaos.
Rachel got the story on what happened, our months of speculation, searching, and heart ache was over. It hadn’t been a happy time for Little Friend, but it ended up ok. There’s hope there. Things will be less uneven now, in a world where so much is out of our control or subject to the variance of those cosmic forces, the gap between Claire’s cosmic variance and Little Friends cosmic variance will be a little smaller. Little Friend is in a much better situation now, thanks to their community. And hey, now we’ve exchanged phone numbers.
You see, this story isn’t about cosmic forces, some unnamed god or looking to the stars for answers… it’s about community. It’s about the community you build, and living with and being present where and with who you find yourself. It’s about caring, and it’s about kindness. It’s about receiving and giving love.
Little Friend was so special to us because they made a mark on us. At first it was about having love for someone who made our daughter's transition into school life so much easier. Then it was about giving grace and kindness to a kid we knew needed some love, grace and kindness. And then when Little Friend left our lives, so we thought, it was about putting into context that the sadness we felt was because they had meant so much to us, in a short term she had meant the world to Claire and as a result to us.
And then ultimately it was about the kindness and love that we had sewn inevitably coming back to us. We didn’t need a cosmic force - we were confident that Little Friend would come back into our lives one day; if it wasn’t a playground on a random Saturday it was going to be some dance competition in the future, some cross school event in high school, or something else.
It was an inevitability built in love and kindness.
Because love and kindness are forces that build. They are the foundation, the building blocks of what community is. I don’t know where we’re going to live in a couple months, I hope we can figure it out so that Claire doesn’t have to move schools and upend her community too much, but in two years of school she’s made friends that will last a lifetime. As someone who has just taken her first steps as an individual human living their life, she’s started building her community, and I think she’s off to a very good start.
There's beauty in the mess. This is a story of love and kindness, and how if you start there, your community will be built on the most solid of foundations. Show up with love and kindness, the rest will sort itself out.