First Day Photo: Kindergarten

Apple in hand, she poses.

Blonde braid, red bow,

twinkle-eyed smile: Cheese!

She is ready for “real school,”

though her shoes are still Velcro,

her teeth not yet loose.

I was ready, too,

until the flash of her leaving

backlit the negatives,

exposed the all-filled

cellophane album slots of

her baby book:

first tooth, first apple sauce,

picking milkweed in the meadow,

music class with scarves.

“I feel happy-sad,” she says

and I—her mother-world—

picture her as the blossom of

a Macintosh tree—

all balled up, bursting forth,

then drifting, drifting, drifting.

REFLECTION: Grieving an Era as “Ambiguous Loss”

My daughter started kindergarten in September. She was excited about this Big Girl step. So was I.

We had worked hard to build social, emotional, and academic skills to prepare her. Weeks before her first day, we talked about morning circle and meeting new friends. We bought her new shoes, a new backpack, and an apple-print dress. We practiced writing her name. As we built up to that first morning, we both felt happy. It was what, for five years, we had been working toward.

People asked if I felt sad and – perhaps because I was in the throes of caring for two other small children – their question didn’t resonate.

It was not until I took a photograph of her standing in front of our hydrangea, holding a FIRST DAY OF KINDERGARTEN sign shaped like an apple, that I felt the familiar pang of grief.  Not sudden, sharp-panged despair, but the bittersweet, almost slow-motion, hollow longing that I often feel in hindsight. A freeze frame moment with the energy of nostalgia.

As I stood with my cell phone camera pointed at my daughter’s big smile, my body tensed. The muscles in my stomach contracted as though to strangle the rising feelings.

“Mom!” My daughter stomped her rain boot. 

I blinked.

“Mom?”

I shook my head, readied myself to take the photo. “Say cheese.”

“Cheese!”

I looked at her smoothed-down braid, red bow, and excited expression. It was as though, for a split second, I saw her inside a bubble floating through the air, about to pop.

The enormity of the moment hit me:

she.was.leaving.

*

How do we grieve an era?

Even more so, how do we grieve an era when the person is still alive—thriving, even?

*

In the 1970s, Dr. Pauline Boss, a professor emerita at the University of Minnesota, coined the term ambiguous loss – a concept that someone or something can be both present and absent at the same time. She distinguished between two main types: physical absence with psychological presence and psychological presence with physical absence.   

At the time of Dr. Boss’s research, grief was documented and conceptualized mainly in relation to bereavement: losing a loved one, a pet, a place. A less documented phenomenon was experience of losing an element of something, especially when the person, or elements of the time, are still present.

Dr. Boss’ research was originally directed at families mourning an unresolved loss (soldiers missing in a war, for example), but in the last fifty years, the scope of ambiguous loss has expanded to include a variety of personal, communal or global losses. These studies range from grief over climate change, to inherited racial trauma, to an overworking spouse, to caretaking a parent with Alzheimer’s, to empty nest syndrome.

To, say, a stay-at-home-preschooler-turning-Kindergartener.

My daughter was not missing, or harmed, or even very different that September morning. She was very present. Her hair smelled of lavender, her skin shone, her heart was beating. I knew I would pick her up in seven hours. That she would run to my car, tell me about her day, and help me cook spaghetti that night. 

Yet, an old version of her, of our time together, was about to vanish. She was on the precipice of becoming a school-aged child, and thereby shedding her preschool self. And in so doing, shedding a version—an element – of us.

It was a bridge between eras.

*

Until that September day, my daughter and I quite literally did everything together. We were a joined-at-the-hip unit: grocery shopping, doctor’s appointments, dance class and story time and playgroups. I kept detailed track of her development, saved all her achievement certificates, clipped newspaper articles about her. At the end of each of our days, I uploaded pictures to a photo-journal-baby-book that documented every single one of her 1,978 days on earth.

Despite the *very normal* developmental step of going to school, about which nothing was actually wrong, I felt the familiar gut-punch of loss.

The Kindergarten photo represented a choice: I could either stay stuck as her mother-world, and therefore thwart her metamorphosis, or I could accept that that chapter had ended.

Implicit in Dr. Boss’s research was one main idea: we must mourn WHAT WAS –the old normal – without the certainty of what is. 

We must befriend ambiguity.

* 

But, how do we process loss —find acceptance — when there is ambiguity?  

*

When my mother died 17 years ago, it was unambiguous. At 5pm on May 23, 2006 her heart stopped beating. It was clear and defined. It was (devastatingly) certain.

The poet Charles Simic calls these moments “one-way gates.” We go through a threshold and things are different: my mother was alive and then she was dead. My daughter was a preschooler and then a Kindergartener. Before and after. They are moments when change becomes apparent.  

But with ambiguous loss, there is more of a gray-hued spectrum—more confusion about where something begins and ends.

Identifying the “one-way gate” moments, for me, helps enormously to process ambiguous loss – to prevent it from hardening into complicated and unresolved grief (a well-documented risk of ambiguous loss). It gives me a MOMENT IN TIME to focus on when so much is unclear.

The Kindergarten photo was just that for me. The threshold.

But even having identified the moment, I found myself yearning for something tangible to help me make peace with the new normal. A few days after she started school, I printed out the picture and hung it above my desk.  

Every day I looked at it: big smile, backpack, apple sign.

It reminded me things were different now. That I could not run away from what is. That the feelings my body wanted to squeeze down just as I was about to click the photo bore the message:

this is grief.

* 

Research has demonstrated that naming our experiences – the “name it to tame it” theory – can reduce internal tension and anxiety by up to 50%.

I was deeply relieved when I stumbled across Dr. Boss’s research and discovered that what I was experiencing had a name. If innocuous loss without closure was common enough to term it ambiguous loss, it meant I was not alone. And not alone meant that many (many) others had reconciled my exact situation.

Labeling this experience as a form of grief helped quiet my internal critic, too, who was working overtime to talk me out of my feelings.

“It’s not that big of a deal,” that judging voice kept saying. “It’s not like you’ve actually lost a child. She’s just going to school!”

Knowing this was grief-talk, I could identify it for what it was: bargaining. And if I was bargaining, I was working my way through the stages that come before acceptance. I had the validation I needed to treat my daughter going to Kindergarten with the same respect I would give any other form of grief:

I would have to feel my feelings. Share and process my experience with others to know I am not alone. Write. And, ritualize to let go.

*

And so, I did.

Over a cup of coffee, I looked back at the photo journal of my daughter as one, two, three, four-year-old: sitting in the circle at music class, waving a milkweed wand around the meadow to “make it fly,” laughing over a spilled apple sauce pouch at the beach, making fairy houses in the back yard. Watching animals in the clouds. Picnics. Watercolors. So much swinging.

Tears rolled down my cheeks. I let them.

After going through photos, I wrote my daughter a letter memorializing the time we had spent together inside the bubble of her baby, toddler and preschool years. I wrote about all the things we had done together, what privilege it had been to steward her through those years and how – of course – I would be there for all the new ages and stages. I told her that we would even make a Kindergarten chore chart together to foster independence and confidence.

“You will always be the apple of my eye,” I wrote to her. Signed it Love, Mom. 

I folded the letter into thirds and tucked the photograph inside. I dated it: November 30th, 2022. On the envelope, I pasted the poem at the beginning of this blog. I slipped the note inside the box of letters I am keeping for her.

And then, I trudged into the woods, as I often do when I need grace to transform my grief into acceptance. I knelt in front of my pine altar. I took the Kindergarten photo out of my pocket with a small, crisp apple. It was so…ripe. So, ready. It had just been a bud that spring, then a blossom, then a growing green, green-red, red-green, red fruit.

I placed it gently on the altar. Here, it would freeze, decompose, hopefully feed a hungry doe.

I said a prayer – to help me usher in the new despite the old not being gone in the definitive way we often think about loss. 

*

When I got back inside, I took a new apple from the refrigerator and set it on the counter.

That afternoon, after I picked my daughter up from Kindergarten, I would hand her the Big Girl (table) knife to slice it open for snack.