"Miss Smith? Sam's not writing anything on his paper!"
Second graders. Y'gotta love 'em.
"And is that any of your business, Ciara?" I asked our resident busybody.
"You said - ."
"I said that everyone needs to work on their own paper. Are you working on your own paper?"
"Yes, Miss Smith." She grumbled.
I made another circuit of the classroom. Sam Winchester sat to the far left of the room, in the second to last row. He hadn't looked up when Ciara made her announcement about him. He sat hunched over his desk and his paper and his pencil. He'd started school with all the other kids, six school days before, he was quiet and studious but had yet to make any real friends.
And his paper, which was supposed to be about 'What my Mom does best', was completely blank. There'd been a discussion in class about mothers and what they do and who does it best, so I thought this little exercise might be a good thing. Now I wondered if it hadn't all been a set-up at Sam's expense.
"Sam, why don't you come up to my desk, and we'll see what's going on?" I offered in my best, cheerfulest, 'no, Ciara, he's not in trouble' voice. I wanted to find out what was going on with him away from prying ears and eyes back here at 'gossip central'.
"…'kay…" He slumped out of his chair and slumped up past the other kids toward my desk. This was only our fourth full day of class, and while Sam had never been the ball of energy that a lot of my other kids were, he'd never been this slumpy.
I followed him up and pulled the extra chair around so that he could sit next to me.
"So, let me see what you have." I said when he held his paper close to his chest.
"I didn't write anything." He said quietly, down to his knees, from behind shaggy bangs.
"Why not?" I asked with interest and not accusation. He was never the first kid to finish a paper in my class, but that was always because he was so busy writing, writing, writing that he didn't want to finish. He'd never not started.
"I don't know."
"You don't know why you didn't write anything?"
He shook his head and I started running through options in my head. Maybe he was tired, or having a bad day, maybe that's why he didn't write anything, and why he said he didn't know why he didn't write anything. Maybe it wasn't really the niggling idea of 'set-up' that was growing bigger at the back of my mind.
But it was.
"I don't know what Moms do best."
Even though one part of me hoped that was because he had too many things to choose from, the rest of me knew what world I lived in.
"Do you live with your Mom?"
"She died." He whispered. "A long time ago."
"I'm sorry, Sam. I didn't know."
He shrugged one shoulder but didn't look up at me. I looked more closely at him. Every single day he came to school in clean clothes and good sneakers. His face was always washed, his hair was always combed, his lunch was always packed with good food. There was never a bruise or illogically explained mark on him. Someone loved him and took care of him. A mother's care.
"Do you live with your Dad?"
He nodded.
"My Dad and my brother."
"Your brother who comes to get you every day?" I asked. Every day, instead of storming into the hallway and the wide world beyond like the other boys, every single day Sam stood quietly at the classroom door, backpack in hand, until the bigger boy, his brother, came in, 'ready, Sammy?' and then together they'd walk to the outside door.
He nodded again.
"Dean."
"That's right; I remember you told me his name the first day." He didn't answer or move one twitch. "You can write your paper on what your Dad does best, if you want."
He nodded, just nodded, but nothing else.
"What's the best thing your Dad does?" I asked, hoping to get him rolling.
"Lotsa stuff."
"What does he do that you like the best?"
Sam finally looked up at me. I saw some of his usual enthusiasm sparking in his eyes.
"He can lift me up, really really REALLY high."
"Good. You want to write that down?"
He nodded and set his paper where I pointed and wrote 'Dad lifts me high up' in chunky print letters.
"What else?" I prompted.
"When I'm cold, he's really really REALLY warm."
"Good, you can write that down, too…what else?" I asked when 'Dad makes me warm' had been set to paper.
"When we're in the car, and when the music is on, when we're driving, my Dad knows all the words to all the songs that we listen to." He said it like it was the most amazing thing. "Can I write that down?"
"You sure can."
And 'Dad knows every song' got added to the list.
"You're doing a good job, Sam. You think you can take this back to your desk now and keep thinking of things that your Dad does best?"
"Uh hunh!" He agreed enthusiastically, grabbed up his paper and shot back to his desk where, for the next fifteen minutes, he wrote and wrote and wrote. He was still writing when I called a halt and told the students to put their papers in their desks and get ready for the end of the day. Desks were cleared, bags were packed, scuffling feet were stilled until that last bell sounded and a herd of clamoring children exploded out of my room into the hallway and freedom.
Every child but one.
"Miss Smith?" Sam slumped back up to my desk.
"Hey, Sam. What's up?"
It took many seconds, but finally he asked,
"What do Moms do best?"
"Your Mom's been gone a long time?" I asked.
"Yeah…"
"Well…" I was torn between feeling like I was bragging, and giving him an honest answer. "My Mom makes the best BLT's, and she would tell me stories every night before I went to bed. She helped me pick out my clothes for school and made my lunch for me every day. She made cookies for me to bring into school whenever I needed them. If I'm ever sad about something, my Mom listens to me and tells me how to not be sad anymore."
Sam's expression turned puzzled.
"Does she put bandages on when you get hurt and make sure when you take a bath that the water isn't too cold and tie your sneakers and make the mean kids stay away from you and always taste the nasty medicine before you have to take it too?"
"Yeah, Moms do all that. My Mom does all that. Does your Dad do all that for you, too?"
He gave me another puzzled expression. I wondered if he was trying to reconcile the differences and similarities between Moms and Dads in his apparently all male-world.
"My Dad does all the Dad stuff." He said. "He works really really REALLY hard and he pays for stuff and drives the car and checks the room first so that bad guys aren't ever get there first…" I smiled at his convoluted sentence, and his logic. My Mom might disagree with what Dad stuff meant, since she was known to do all that stuff too.
"So who does your Mom stuff then?" I had to ask. "Who makes your lunch and ties your shoes and puts bandages on you and helps you take a bath and all that?"
"Dean. Dean does all that stuff. He always does that stuff for me." I pictured his brother Dean in my mind. Ten or eleven, a young boy with an adult task on his shoulders. There must've been a less-than-happy look on my face, and Sam must've seen it.
"I didn't know that was Mom stuff. I just thought that was Dean stuff." He looked kind of embarrassed, like maybe he only just realized how out of step he was with the other kids. "I thought all big brothers did that."
I wasn't going to leave him thinking that I thought he was worse off for not having a Mom.
"No, Sam. I think just the really cool big brothers do all that. I think any other big brother must be pretty lame compared to Dean, hunh? I guess he must be the best big brother in the whole school."
And he smiled and nodded, and the smile turned to a grin when we heard the customary,
"Sammy – ready?"
And we both looked over to see Dean at the door. I saw a ten or eleven year old boy with what had to be a difficult weight on his shoulders. Sam only saw his hero.
"Dean? Guess what?" Sam happily skipped over to him. "Miss Smith thinks you're the best big brother in the whole whole school!"
"Yeah?" Dean reached a hand out and when Sam took it, Dean flashed a grin my way. "Well I think Miss Smith must be the smartest teacher in the whole school, too. Don't you?"
"Yeah!"
"Yeah!" Dean echoed. "C'mon, let's go home."
" 'Kay…" They walked towards the classroom door, hand in hand. "I think you're the best big brother in school, too, Dean."
Dean flashed me one more departing smile before they left and I realized – the best thing that any Mom can do is not let on how hard being a Mom can be.
"And you're the best little brother in the whole world, Sammy."
the end