Pearl dives into the Past

What I sometimes find truly remarkable about spending time with my children is how often they help me reconnect with my own long-forgotten experiences. Through their descriptions of their daily lives, feelings and impressions surface within me that I haven’t thought about even once in the past 40 years. Simon is eight years old. He told me the other day how sad he is that his current second-grade teacher will be teaching a different class next year. And that it feels “kind of weird.” As I thought about it, a feeling surfaced that I hadn’t felt since I moved from second to third grade. Watching Ms. Gröppmeier—she was my class teacher for my first two years of school—walk past me in the school building, into our old classroom where other children were now sitting, was something I experienced at the time as an unsettling, “kind of weird” feeling. As if a deep connection had been severed without my consent; as if I’d been rejected. Feeling rejected, of course, happened even more…