“Why are there so many songs about rainbows
and what’s on the other side?
Rainbows are visions, but only illusions,
and rainbows have nothing to hide.
So we’ve been told and some choose to believe it.
I know they’re wrong, wait and see.
Someday we’ll find it, the rainbow connection.
The lovers, the dreamers and me.”
We went school supply shopping this morning. Backpacks, pencils, crayons, markers. D chose a sparkly folder with a picture of the Eiffel Tower. When Margeaux wakes up from her nap, we’re off to buy school shoes.
D starts kindergarten this year: 5 full days a week. We are practicing waking up early, and opening packaged snack foods and Ziplock bags so she’ll be ready to eat lunch at school. I have tried to explain the process of buying milk. She is so excited, and so ready, and I am so excited for her, when I’m not secretly crying in the lunch box aisle at Target.
It’s not as though the growing up came as a total surprise. In so many ways this summer, we have been realizing that unlike last year, when we had a preschooler, a toddler, and a baby, this year we have two girls and a baby. The big girls climb to the top of the tall slides, and push each other on the swings, and boogie board in red flag waves, and laugh hysterically at the Muppets. Of course they need backpacks and lunchboxes. Of course they need pencils and glue sticks. But standing there next to the enormous display of folders, I could remember being a kid and choosing my own folders and Trapper Keepers.
Some of the stories I think of as being definitive, revealing, about who I am, are stories my family tells about me, experiences I don’t remember because I was too small. I pushed my own stroller across the Mackinac Bridge. Those stories define a period of time in my life when my self, my identity was inextricable from my family. There are singular, definitive versions of those stories for me—unlike the later experiences I remember for myself, the secrets I remember keeping. I’m realizing now that this is the corner D and Lucy are turning: they will have their own memories of these days. The story won’t be mine to narrate. It’s beautiful and amazing and so, so scary for me.
The girls have become big fans of the Muppets this summer. (And if you haven’t seen the new Muppets movie with Amy Adams and Jason Segal, I cannot recommend it highly enough.) I bought a funky CD of covers of Muppets songs, with a version of Rainbow Connection done by Weezer and Hayley Williams of Paramore. We listen to it in the minivan all the time, and the girls know all the words. I remembered the chorus (in John Denver’s voice) from my own childhood, but not the lyrics:
Who said that every wish would be heard
and answered when wished on the morning star?
Somebody thought of that and someone believed it.
Look what it’s done so far.
What’s so amazing that keeps us star gazing
and what do we think we might see?
Have you been half asleep and have you heard voices?
I’ve heard them calling my name.
Is this the sweet sound that called the young sailors.
The voice might be one and the same.
I’ve heard it too many times to ignore it.
It’s something that I’m supposed to be.
Someday we’ll find it, the rainbow connection.
The lovers, the dreamers and me.
It’s a sweet, poignant song, about wishing and longing and dreaming and believing in something you haven’t quite found. It’s about questions, mystery, wondering, searching. It’s about having a sense of self, a calling, you can’t quite articulate. There’s no certainty, but there’s hope.
It’s August, and I’m trying to get my head around my own prep, the logistics of the schedule, whether I can afford the tap shoes this week or if I need to wait till the next paycheck. But in the backseat, little girl voices are singing Rainbow Connection, clutching new backpacks, imagining preschool and kindergarten. They have announced, with certainty, that they have style. (Dad, that shirt is not my style! Mom, yes! That dress is totally my style!) They might not know it yet, but this is the beginning of the life and self they will remember on their own terms. They are beginning to write their own stories. I hope that they’ll trust me enough to keep letting me hear them.
Nothing for sure yet. I know I’m a finalist for the position and the committee chair has been in constant contact with me about the steps in this process, but there’s still no job offer. Still, it’s interesting to be pursued like this: the chair clearly wants me to not take another job. She wants me to know that they badly want me to work for them. It’s disconcerting and flattering and wonderful. Such an antithesis from academic jobs, where you might not even get a letter acknowledging the status of your application. Where you know from the laundry list of application requirements that you’re competing with hundreds of people with similar or better qualifications. It’s just strange to realize that I might actually deserve a bit of wooing.
