Beloved

Today I went from watching Emma do a first dance performance in high school to run over to the elementary school and bring Lilly’s bunnies in to show her class.

It is nice to be beloved. The kids all greet me because I have sometimes been their substitute, at least one time, to every single kid in the school. And I sometimes have candy.

And so I drop the bunnies into our little fourth grade class, lucky enough to be one of only 29 kids in the world who are in Ms Phillips’ class, and the kids are good kids, and the teacher and I show each other pictures of our kids’ Halloween costumes because that is coming, and it is nice to belong somewhere small.

My city is huge but my circle is small. I am a dusty farmgirl at heart, standing at an intersection between nothing and rural, and I am barefoot. This is what I’m looking out from, inside of me, at all times.

But in this big Los Angeles, where we are for now, I have only 3 perfect kids, and we have these schools, and the baseball coach says on the way out of the high school, ‘”You’re Nathan’s parents? I LIKE that kid. That is a good kid.”

And I get to Ms Phillips’ class and I know every crack in that school, we’ve been there now eleven years with the three kids making their way through and now working there and leaving the school Lilly has her bunny on the front lawn and she’s looking up and saying “These bunnies make a lot of kids happy.”

The way to be beloved is to belove.

We belove our school, and hold close our kids, and allow beauty and greatness and achievement and humor and grief to come, because they all have their turn.

But the beloving makes a nest, and the nest keeps us safe, and we sometimes get to be the star, like Emma in her dance today, and we sometimes get to be beloved (like when I bring candy) and we sometimes, quieter times, just get to belove those around us, and belong.