The Day I Pulled Him Out
For months before I sent the email, I asked myself every question there was to ask.
Can I actually do this? Am I qualified? What if I'm wrong? What if he falls behind? What if this is the worst decision I ever make for him and I don't find out until it's too late to fix it? I asked those questions in the car and in the shower and lying in bed at night after he was asleep. I asked them on the good days when he came home happy and I thought maybe things were fine, maybe I was overreacting.
I asked them even harder on the mornings he stood at the door and said:
"Mama, my legs don't work. I can't go."
I knew his legs worked. And I also knew something was wrong.
So I kept asking the questions. Long enough that the asking started to feel like the responsible thing — like if I just kept examining it from every angle, eventually I would arrive at the right answer with enough certainty to act. I was waiting to feel sure. I thought sure was something you could get to if you just thought hard enough and long enough.
And then one day, I sent the email. Short and simple. He wouldn't be coming back after Christmas break. Thank you for everything.
The moment I hit send, I felt instant relief.
Not fear. Not the second-guessing I had been bracing for. Relief. Clean and immediate, like something I had been holding for a very long time had just been set down. Like my body had known the answer for months and had simply been waiting for my brain to stop arguing with it.
In the middle of all that questioning, there was one question I was almost afraid to ask out loud. It sat underneath all the others: am I doing this for him, or am I doing this for me?
Because I had lost his father. I was a single mom. I missed my son when he was gone, and I wanted more time with him in a way that felt raw and not entirely rational. And I was scared that maybe that grief had something to do with why I was so drawn to pulling him out. That maybe I was making an educational decision from an emotional wound.
I tortured myself with that question too.
What I believe now, with the distance of years, is that the grief probably did make me more open. It lowered whatever resistance I might have had to doing something so unconventional. And I think that's okay. Hard things can open doors that wouldn't have opened otherwise. Walking through a door that grief helped open doesn't make what's on the other side any less right.
He needed to be pulled out. Not because I was grieving. Not because I wanted more time with him, though I did. But because something wasn't working for him in that building, and I was the person who could see it.
The relief I felt when I sent that email wasn't the relief of getting what I wanted.
It was the relief of finally doing what I had known for a long time needed to be done.
✦
A question I've been sitting with: When I look back at a hard decision I agonized over — was I still searching for the answer, or was I already there and just afraid to act on it?
Love,
Claire