I have a collection of photos that all look about the same, even though almost nothing about them actually is. Two brothers posed side-by-side, wearing backpacks that are slightly bigger each year, on slightly broader shoulders. But if you pay attention to the backdrops, what’s behind them has changed a few times. A house on Southmill Drive, where they first went off to kindergarten. A couple different houses of their mom’s after that. A couple of my own. Different doors, different siding, different porch lights, but always those two boys standing in front of whichever house they called home that September.
Their mom and I split up almost 10 years ago, but our first-day-of-school tradition carries on regardless. Our boys often spend that Sunday night beforehand at her place, so plenty of these photos show up on my phone by text instead of in person, but I don’t mind it. Not every dad gets that picture, and I do, even if I don’t always get the doorway. Then, I get to ask them how their first day was when they arrive at my house that night.
What gets me every time I flip through our photos isn’t just how much taller they’ve gotten, but how Charlie’s curls used to be a toddler’s and now they’re a teenager’s. How Sam went from a kid who needed his shoes tied to a kid who can now probably carry me up the stairs. What gets me is how calm they look. Every single year, in front of every single door. Not one photo where either one of them looks nervous about the day in front of them.
I wasn’t built that way at their age. I grew up and lived in one house with my little brother the whole time, and that still didn’t stop me from lying awake before the first day of school running through every way my outfit or haircut could end my social life by the first bell. At the end of every summer, my mom would take me to Foot Locker to pick out new shoes, and the week before middle school, I came home with a fresh pair of Reebok Classics. Everyone rocked Classics. What I didn’t know was that men’s and women’s Classics looked almost identical, except the men’s had a thin gray stripe around the sole. The pair I picked out didn’t have it. Some punk at school noticed immediately, and I heard about it for months. My mom was a single working mother taking classes in the evenings, so she couldn’t take me back to the mall to exchange them. Priorities, right? There was also the year I wore my wide-leg karate pants to school because she wouldn’t buy me JNCO jeans. I guess I didn’t make it easy on myself.
My boys don’t seem to have inherited that gene and don’t care about any of that. Maybe they’re just wired differently than I was, or maybe kids are just better humans these days. Whatever the reason, I’ll take it.
Nobody plans out how many doorways a childhood is going to span. It just adds up as we go, the way life tends to do. But I have the pictures that I’ve taken and the ones their mom has sent, and when I line them up, I don’t see a complicated co-parenting situation. I see two boys who — regardless of whatever door they were standing in front of that year — walked out of it every September looking like they already knew they’d be fine.
This year the photo will show a senior and an eighth grader, and I expect they’ll look every bit as unbothered as always. But there’s a new wrinkle now that Sam has his license, and he’ll often be the one driving Charlie to school. The picture will still get taken, because we’ll always want the shot before they head out, but the ride to school afterward is now something they can take care of on their own. It’ll look almost exactly like all the ones before it. Except that this year, for the first time, it won’t be the bus from mom’s house or dad driving them there. It’ll be Sam.
