January 25th 2022

Chapter 25
We Jump Between Roles

For some years already, parent-teacher night had been a part of their lives. Of course, for the better part of those years, it had only ever been about Maya on the teacher side. They had first started stepping into the parent side when Ella had come to live with them, though this not quite so, as she'd first been something like their ward, but despite that, it would never feel as it had done, last year, once they had found themselves attending for Marianne. It hadn't really felt real with Ella because, well, they'd started out doing it because it made sense, because they wanted to look out for her… and it all took place at the high school, Maya's workplace, with her colleagues…

Now, instead, they were expected up at the elementary school, to meet with Marianne's teacher, who was most familiar to them through two channels. One was Marianne's stories of her days at school, as most often told at the dinner table, while the other was Zay's stories of his fellow teacher… To hear them both, it felt almost impossible to imagine that these would speak of one single person. Marianne clearly liked her teacher very much, while Zay painted a picture of someone that he found so odd. It was enough that, as the two of them walked into the school that night, Lucas had a good feeling that Maya was in dire need to smack their friend upside the head for introducing images into her head that would distract her through the whole appointment.

"Good?" Lucas asked, clasping his wife's hand. She blinked, then smiled.

"Super," she reported, with just enough of a twinge of sarcasm to know she was absolutely looking to 'punish' Zay.

"Good," Lucas resisted the urge to laugh. Anything he'd try to say right here would only be extra fodder for the inappropriate laugh machine in her.

"I'm just glad our two nights didn't get scheduled at the same time. I would've hated to miss this," Maya commented. After a beat, Lucas bowed his head enough for her to guess he was laughing and trying not to show. "Not like that. I can keep it together, alright? Professional courtesy and all that."

"That's not what you were saying earlier," Lucas challenged. Maya squinted, pointing at him to not say a word of it where ears could hear them. "I think you'll be fine. There's one thing much stronger than Zay's stories right now," he declared.

"Oh?" Maya asked, intrigued as to what Huckleberry comment she was about to receive.

"You, sitting in there with that big balloon of mom pride, expanding right here," he motioned at his own chest. Maya hummed, slowly nodding to herself. Yeah, there it is.

He wasn't wrong, of course. Oh, she would have been proud of her regardless of how she did in school, but, not until she'd started seeing Marianne's teachers and hearing them speak of her, did she realize she'd kind of needed this. She still had memories of her own elementary school days, of how she'd struggle, which only translated into her dreading when her mother would have to go and speak with her teachers. Looking back on it as she'd grown, Maya had realized how it had not so much been that her mother was disappointed in her, but rather that she was disappointed in herself, in what she hadn't been able to do for her baby girl.

She'd had those thoughts playing at the back of her mind that very first parent teacher night with Marianne much as she'd tried not to, but they hadn't lasted long. She got to hear, just as Lucas did, how well their young Miss Friar was doing, as a student as much as a classmate. More than once, they heard that she took her own gained knowledge and turned right back around to help some of the other kids where she could tell that they had struggled, even more so now, in the second grade, as they'd be told that night.

They would call her the little teacher because she had such a way about her all the time. How was Maya supposed to not feel overwhelmingly bright and full of pride when she heard that? The appointment was as straightforward as they came, with nothing bad to report on, so it went by a lot faster than they might have anticipated. It allowed for just enough meandering around, with Lucas sharing memories of his own days as a student at this school, years, and years in the past, in days when he and Maya had not even known that the other existed. The way he told it, this was roughly the kind of childhood she would have always pictured him having. It wasn't perfect, but it was about as close to it as childhood got, wasn't it? He hadn't worried so much about when his parents met his teachers. His grades weren't top of the class by any means, but he did well enough and, wherever he might have done less so, well, his mother had a way of talking him up that made all the wobbly steps fade into the background, didn't she?

After a bit of walking down memory lane – and a friendly tease of a visit on to Mr. Babineaux and his classroom – they had to head home. Aside from the fact that they knew all too well that they had an eight-year-old fighting a battle between sleep and curiosity back there, there was the fact that, the very next evening, Maya would be going through the other side of all this, and it would be the much more exhaustive version: parent teacher night at the high school.

She'd been at this long enough now at least that she knew what to expect, knew how best to proceed through the load of appointments without driving herself mad. It would remain unpredictable in some corners, that couldn't be helped, but navigation was more than doable. Not unlike the classes and the kids that went along with them, the groups of parents she'd encounter would tend to follow a vibe. The seniors' parents, as was to be expected, were a cocktail that started with nostalgia at the thought of this one chapter ending even as they added a splash of nervously and excitedly looking toward the next one. This did lead to the occasional turn of teacher-turned-therapist as Maya would 'jokingly' tell Lucas. Not all of those kids knew yet what they planned to make of their futures, what they would study in college or if they would attend one of those at all, and all it took was a willing ear, as she'd been known to be, and they would start and unload on her. It was uncertain whether some of those anxious parents that night were her own.

One class down, the juniors were known to Maya as 'end of the day oddballs,' and their parents weren't exactly that themselves, no, but they would start to feel the first creeping of what the senior parents were feeling, thinking of their kids' futures, which would be fine and normal, but then when they matched that to the sort of work that last period inspired out of the juniors some of the time, it would have them wondering. Though she'd never say this to any of those involved, on either side, it was kind of her least favorite batch of meetings. It wouldn't be all of them, no, but it would always be the group where she counted the most complaining parents. If she played her cards right, she'd have them singing a different tune by spring's parent night, but until then…

One down again, and she'd have the sophomore parents… and these tended to mirror their kids so far as what it did for them to no longer be freshmen. The students would tend to relax, to open up, because they weren't the newbies anymore. With the parents, it would instead be that they'd no longer be carrying the concerns that came with seeing how their children would be doing in a new school, in high school. Maya found this was where she'd really get to feel like she got to know the parents, even if most of them she'd only ever interact with through the occasional school function, like these nights. She'd lost count of the number of former students' parents she still ran into and spoke with in her day to day life, but she could be sure, more often than not, that a lot of what she remembered most vividly of them would come from one sophomore meeting or another.

And then there'd be only one more step down, and these… these would be her favorites, wouldn't they? The freshmen… New faces, new stories, new families… It would be one thing with the kids as she'd have been getting to know them for over two months already, day by day, week by week, but the parents – especially this year – unless they had unexpectedly run into one another in town, were whole new factors. One of her favorite parts would be to see one or another of these adults pop up in her classroom and recognize in them the teenager that belonged with them.

This was certainly easy with some of them this year. Agnes Killian's mother was so much like an aged up copy of the girl that there'd be no room for questioning who she came calling for. It made Maya chuckle in such a way that the woman laughed, too. She was used to these reactions. And then Austin Abbott, for his part, may not have been a carbon copy of his father, but he and the man shared enough of a similar structure that it really couldn't have taken too long before it clicked. With the former, it was not unlike the meeting that Maya and Lucas had the night before. She couldn't say much to Agnes' mother other than that her daughter was doing very well in class. She could say that to Mr. Abbott, too, she supposed, but with him it was difficult not to touch on those issues that hovered around him, as they had since that first day and the unfortunate encounter with a locker.

Others of the people she met that night needed more input for her to connect the dots, though in a couple of cases it could only be expected. Noor Kaur had been adopted into a family of people who could not have looked more different from her if they tried, but at the same time, there was something to them that reminded Maya of the girl, qualities they would all have allowed to rub off on one another. And then with Freddie Jacek, well… Could she expect to make some kind of lasting connection with the woman that came to meet her that night? For Freddie's sake, she hoped so, and she could do nothing except go on under the assumption that it would only be the start.

By the end of the night, all she'd be able to think about would be to get home again, to Lucas, to their sleeping girls… if they were all sleeping… With these nights behind them, they'd all be looking forward to everything that awaited them on the other side. Soon, that would mean the holidays, the new year, and all that would pass before the next of these nights. And what would they all be talking about by then, at the high school, at the elementary school? Good things, she hoped. Successes, personal victories… She saw those possibilities for her students as much as for her baby girl, and whether as teacher or mother, she would do all she could to make it happen.

TO BE CONTINUED

See you tomorrow! - mooners