When Falls the Coliseum

Baby teeth

Posted on June 28th, 2019 by Scott Warnock

At one point, my wife and I were young guns, a couple with small kids. We moved into our neighborhood 18 years ago, and it was full of children. Ours were among the youngest. When our “Lane gang” went to school those first few years, the group pic had 20+ kids. But each year, the number dwindled, until there were only three or four kids. The lane, for a few years, was quiet.

I look out my office window while I’m writing this, and I see kids again! Their parents are youthful, a bit tired, but full of the promise and mystery that accompanies new-to-the-world children.

In my community coaching life, that decade and a half, I also started as a young gun. But in the past few years, now that I’m down to coaching my youngest, I would look around the field or gym and comment to my wife that we might be the oldest parents in our teams/clubs.

All of this means that I’m hanging around a lot of people with small kids, people who are a whole step behind where I am in terms of the rapid generations of parenting. In our many discussions, I don’t want to be that annoying old sage who’s seen it all, but my advice is standard about most things: Don’t sweat it.

I listen to these friends describe their child’s classmate drama. Their tales of their kids not making “the team.” The bad grade. The detention.

I tell them don’t worry about it.

Everyone who has had more than one kid knows some of this anyway, but my advice is basically second kid syndrome writ large: I’m sometimes stunned to admit, but some of the most at-the-time hurtful and difficult, proud and poignant moments of my kids’ lives are–ready for it?–now unattributable to a particular Warnock child. That’s right: If I’m lucky enough to remember a particular event, I often do not even remember which one of my kids it happened to.

That is life giving you a humbling.

There is a touch of sadness to it, this fading of memory, unless you realize that your children are still creating all kinds of things as we all flow along. I don’t lord this wisdom over young parents. I tell them that it’s inevitable that they will feel things so deeply: It’s the nature of loving your children. Many of them, especially now, in the digital age, will want to memorialize these life events.

But the pressure to freeze these memories, to cling to them, is an attempt to fight the flow.

On a dusty shelf in our bedroom sits a wee pile of baby teeth. When they came out, especially the first few, it was a major moment. The Tooth Fairy! Losing a tooth is a tremendous milestone, perhaps because of the raw physicality of it. Things are changing in your child in a palpable way, and you can’t deny it when you have a bloody tooth in your hand.

The teeth keep falling out, though. For us, at some point, they ended up in an unsorted jumble.

There they sit. I don’t know one tooth from another. It doesn’t matter now, but the people once attached to those teeth–they matter more than ever. Because they are here in this moment, doing new things this very day. The fact that they are here doing those new, interesting things is testament to the relative unimportance of so many of the things along the path: Getting or not getting the perfect grade; winning or not winning the tournament; reading that great book or–horrors–fibbing about having read it.

Through all of it, I was quite imperfect in not just my emotional response but my weighing of importance, and I certainly wasn’t able to memorialize these events, but one of the things about parenting, about the steady march of your children’s lives, is that as you glide into the flow, allow it to take you, you realize the many things before, perhaps paradoxically, didn’t mean all that much.

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Scott Warnock

Scott Warnock is a writer and teacher who lives in South Jersey. He is a professor of English at Drexel University, where he is also the Associate Dean of Undergraduate Education in the College of Arts and Sciences. Father of three and husband of one, Scott is president of a local high school education foundation and spent many years coaching youth sports.